North Star Writers Group

Americans are news addicts. It may actually be our favorite form of entertainment. This is Neil Postman’s premise for his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he echoes Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, describing how our culture will be unwittingly consumed and destroyed by its obsession with entertainment. Although it may be possible to read it without proceeding to count down the days until the end of the world and marking it on our calendars with red Sharpies, it is difficult to read it without coming away with the following question.

How much does the news actually matter?

One of Postman’s primary concerns is that the news is presented as a form of entertainment. It is a collection of emotionally-stimulating images and 45-second news segments, complimented by carefully-wrought music that affords us the luxury of not having to think very hard in order to discover how we ought to feel. But in order to make a point, let us imagine that the news industry did not, in any way, encourage us to feel a certain way. Imagine that instead of saying, “A, B, and C happened, so you should X, Y, and Z,” the news merely stated, “A, B, and C happened.” Imagine that the news industry was actually pregnant with integrity, reporting only the most important events – wars, famines, corruption, evolving countries, evolving international conflict, local droughts, local jailbreaks, the weather, etc. – as they actually were. Imagine that the news industry had never even heard of television ratings, and in addition, was wholly unaffected by opinion.

How much would the news actually matter? It seems the only reasonable barometer would measure the extent to which the lives of news-watchers were actually altered by watching the news.

Try to remember the last time you discussed the news with anyone. Perhaps it was more of an argument than a discussion, but either way, was the general nature of the dialogue a debate about what was actually happening and why, or how one ought to respond to what generally seemed to be happening? Most of the time, it seems as though we are more concerned with the argument itself and appearing more correct than the other person, than we are with the steps one might actually take in response to the news.

Can you remember the last time one of your actions was affected by something you read or saw in the news? Did you resist buying a Hummer because of the threat of global warning? Did you buy a house in Canada just in case the United States found itself in a full-scale war? Did you lock yourself in your house with a loaded shotgun because a serial killer was loose in the area?

In the weeks following September 11^th, 2001, the church I attended at the time, whose 8 a.m. service usually accommodated around 15 people, witnessed aisles overflowing with people. One month later, the size of the congregation was back to normal.

Judging by our actions, I can think of two areas in our lives that are consistently altered by the news. The first one is voting. Hopefully, if one watches enough news and listens only to the most accurate sources, every second year, that one will assert an educated opinion among millions of others in order to elect the best individual among a handful of candidates. And this is what we spend most of our time arguing about.

There is one other aspect of the news that ought to change our lives, and it usually does. It affects decisions to go to work, school, how we wear our hair and how we dress. Indeed, the weather is the only sort of news that affects the decisions we make on a daily basis, and ironically, it provokes virtually no discussions or arguments. Aside from children who, denying chilly November air, tend to argue with their parents because they want to wear shorts, no one actually discusses the weather unless they are utterly famished for topics of conversation.

As it turns out, the one, most news-affected aspect of our culture is our dialogue. We are entertained by the news, obsessed with it, and consequently, we love to talk about it. In the meantime, our lives are not improved, and our country is utterly divided by nearly irrelevant conflict and impossible confusion about what is going on in places we can neither see, hear, taste, smell or feel.

Consider watching the news less often. Next, consider talking to people about their lives and your own instead of the people whose lives yours will never intersect. After you’ve tried this for a while, my guess is that you’ll discover that life is more affected by the weather than you ever gave it credit for.

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This is Column # NS18. Request permission to publish here.