Just the other day I was chatting with my father, and he was contending that the world is so much worse than it used to be. More violent, angrier, etc. And my contention was that, no, that’s not the case; that the pervasiveness of the media and the incessant need to feed a twenty-four hour news cycle results in a constant requirement for more “food” for the beast, and our Internet/video age helps to supplement that need. Once upon a time, national TV news consisted of a half hour or one hour slot around dinner time, and that was it. Local news mostly reiterated national stories with a local edge, plus stories involving fires or physical danger, and that was pretty much that. Now potential media involvement and national attention is no further away than the latest video cam. Case in point:
A “news” story on television about a Florida father who, infuriated that his daughter had been ruthlessly bullied on a school bus, and that school authorities did nothing to intervene, stepped onto the school bus and threatened to kill anyone who dared assault her. (The day before they were pelting her with condoms. And she has Cerebral Palsey, no less. Nice kids.)
Did he actually attempt to kill anyone? No. Did he have a history of violence? Not that anyone’s said.
It’s obvious what happened. An angry father, caught up in the moment, turned the tables on some bullies by scaring the crap out of them and making threats he never really intended to carry through.
I’m not weighing in on the rightness or wrongness of his actions. My point is that this is a non-story. Thirty, forty years ago, this doesn’t even register on the local news. If by fluke chance it did, could you really see Walter Cronkite picking it up and making it a national item? An angry father machine-gunning a bus full of students is news. An angry father yelling at them isn’t. If every time a parent lost their temper publicly on behalf of their child was a news story, you’d need a 24-hour station just to cover that alone, and it wouldn’t scratch the surface.
But there was an onboard camera that videoed the entire incident, and next thing you know it’s on CNN and next thing after that it’s on the early morning news shows with “experts” commenting on it and next thing you know the father’s dragged on national TV and is apologizing for his actions. Meanwhile the bullied daughter must be utterly mortified; yeah, that’s helping her situation. Which is why I’m not mentioning any of the names involved, so it’s one less item for a google search on the subject.
It’s universally understood that the mere act of observing actions changes an experiment. The more the media observes, the more it needs to feed the beast, the more our perception of the world changes, and not for the better.
PAD
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And worst of all… the viewing/observing public is the one behind this trend. WE’RE the ones who demand such entertainment instead of news (I mean really, when’s the last time you saw actual news on your “news” program?)
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Political or moral slants color what we see, demands on the spectacular (or extra-gory, extra-tasteless, extra-extreme) all contribute to this. Honest to God, is the story of one wacko really so important to our country’s security? He wants to burn a book? It’s freedom of speech, but it’s not news that someone is exercising their first amendment rights.
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Well, it’s not news yet…
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I remain,
Sincerely,
Eric L. Sofer
x<]:o){
The Bad Clown…
I agree with PAD and Eric. There are too mamy opinions by “experts” and not enough facts by impartial reporters. It is all about keeping you glued to your TV for ratings and a lot of people comply. Many ate everything up and demand more. And of course the media is happy to oblige.
Word! They don’t just share the news anymore. Now they make it.
Agreed. It’s ridiculous how people always see their time as somehow the high water mark of everything, be it good or bad. At least your father has an excuse; the media blanket you mention certainly makes the world seem like an angrier place. Certainly, we are more aware of the anger that is out there.
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On the other hand, you have sheer idiocy like Jimmy carter stating, and I am not making any of this up, “President Obama suffers from the most polarized situation in Washington that we have ever seen – even maybe than the time of Abraham Lincoln and the initiation of the war between the states.”
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Wow, Just wow. And of course, every election we have is “the meanest, dirtiest on record” which is an easily disprovable lie to anyone who can read an old newspaper.
Yeah, well, Carter also famously said that anyone who has looked at a woman with lust in his heart has committed adultery. That is basically the same philosophy espoused by what’s-her-name which is being held up as example number one of what a loon she is, so…
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PAD
In fairness to carter–words I hate to type–that’s pretty much what Jesus said. And I cans see where there is a kind of validity to it–I have one female acquaintance who told me what ended her marriage was not the one night stands her husband confessed to but the fact that he had fallen hopelessly in love with another women, one who did not reciprocate his feelings.
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So with all the many many kooky things O’Donnel can be nailed on it’s too bad the two that are resonating are a teen flirtation with “witchcraft” (ie, “how can I pìšš øff my parents THIS week) and he desire to remain pure of mind. There are far worse things and she has several of them.
Actually, Jesus famously said that. The more recent JC who would be President did, however, remind folks.
In fairness to carter–words I hate to type–that’s pretty much what Jesus said.
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Yeah, I know that, but you were the one who brought up Carter, and Carter has publicly said that O’Donnell is wrongheaded.
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PAD
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Yeah, but I think the difference was that Carter was asked about the situation by Playboy and simply gave that answer. Dipsy-Doodle ran around telling people to stop… having sex with someone they care about.
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Repeatedly.
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And on MTV.
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With great detail.
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Just a wee bit of a difference in degree there. Plus it should be noted that Carter caught flack for his statement about lusting in his heart as well.
The actual Carter quote
PAD: Yeah, well, Carter also famously said that anyone who has looked at a woman with lust in his heart has committed adultery.
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The impression that representation may leave isn’t correct. The actual quote:
“Because I’m just human and I’m tempted and Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. The Bible says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Christ said, I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery. I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times…. This is something that God recognizes, that I will do and have done, and God forgives me for it.”
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It was actually something Christ said. Granted, Carter then accepted that view. But his take on it (Yeah, it’s adultery, and I’ve done it, but I’m human and it happens) I wouldn’t begin to equate with O’Donnell’s. There is a difference between a reasoning moderate and an extremist, despite their drawing from the same inspiration.
Hëll, Peter, under those conditions, I cheat on Clara all the dámņ time. When it comes to women, lust has built a five-story, fifty thousand square foot mansion with indoor and outdoor swimming pools and tennis courts, a detached twelve-car garage, guest house and chopper pad in my heart. I love women and fantasize about them all the time. It doesn’t mean I go out and pounce on everything in a tight skirt or jeans. I’m Miles Vorkosigan, not Jack Harkness. There’s a profound difference. Just because I have fantasies doesn’t mean I act on them. So much for committing adultery.
Bill, in the comment below, has a good point; there’s a lot worse that O’Donnell can get pinned on, and those are the things that need attention. Question is, who’s gonna dig all that up?
I couldn’t agree more. I was saying that earlier, about the stupid church guy with the book burning. There was no reason for that to be a story except for the fact that it was sensational. If no one had picked it up, he’d have not gotten the noteriety he was so obviously hoping for.
It would be nice if the news organizations learned some ethics.
I will say that, on the book burning, although I can’t completely disagree with you, I can’t object to it getting media attention. By pointing out that this guy was willing to burn a book to protest a group of people of the Islamic faith (who were trying to build a community center in New York as an apology for what people had done in the name of their religion, five or six blocks from ground zero), the media managed to make a LOT of people wake up and realize there was something wrong with that.
Given that there were a lot of politicians who were trying to bring the President down over his decision not to comment on the “Ground Zero” situation, it was on the verge of getting very ugly, very fast.
And then this guy showed up, proved to many people how idiotic the whole complaint was, and public opinion went towards… well, making it a local legal matter, like it always should have been.
PAD: I don’t think admitting to lust makes someone a loon. Carter was stating his beliefs, of which I agree. The ironic thing was he admitted it in Playboy magazine. There are far more beliefs from the Bible that are harder to swallow.
As for the oversatuation of media, I generally avoid local news stories on TV. Most of it doesn’t affect me directly and a majority of it is just depressing. I get my news from the major magazines and only a few headlines online.
I see where your father’s coming from. Some of my older relatives have what’s called “bad world syndrome”. They don’t get out as much and they get almost all their knowledge of the world from TV. It leaves them thinking there are crimes commited everywhere, all the time.
There’s a great book that covers this subject called the Science of Fear, by Daniel Gardner. Highly recommended.
Ed
Yeah, again: The point is that Carter repudiated O’Donnell on a philosophy that he espoused before she was born. Which, considering it was a philosophy first put forward two thousand years ago is, again, a non-story (he said in a valiant attempt to remain on point.)
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PAD
The point is that Imam Rauf repudiated Mohammed Atta on a philosophy that he espoused before he was born. What? You wouldn’t make a distinction between their positions?
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OK, that’s almost a Godwinian example. But I don’t see a problem with Carter noting that O’Donnell takes an extreme view even though he once voiced a similar but significantly more moderate one.
Carter did indeed quote two of four Gospels on the topic of lust. However, he did not then go on record as claiming that spanking the monkey is morally equivalent to porking the night manager down at the Stop’n’Gulp.
I agree with you 100 percent, PAD.
I had this similar argument with my grandfather often. He would say how much different things were back in the day, less violent, etc. I always contested that, no, those titilating stories just never made the news back then.
While I agree that the media’s constant attention does make our awareness of the violence and anger that used to not make the news but was still there more prevalent.
I also feel that the media’s constant attention has caused some increases in violence etc… because too many folks want to get the media’s attention.
It’s a vicious cycle.
Non-story it may be, but this scenario really gets to me. My kids both have developmental disabilities, and also knowing how hard it was to be treated as a social outcast myself doesn’t help. I’m always fearful of how they’re going to be treated, and how I might overreact. On the other hand, I know that most reactions by me would just make things worse for my kids.
So far, so good though. They’re in first grade, and the other kids have been supportive, not vicious, at least as far as I know.
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Yeah, but it was a local story at best and years ago would have been treated like a local story. Today it’s given time on the cable news channels and the story is plastered on the front page of MSN.com amongst others.
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And of course the commentary is about how this never happened in the old days and how could things have gotten this bad in our society.
People already suck pretty badly at assessing risk, especially when it comes to low probability events, and the news cycle both worsens that and takes advantage of it.
Consider if you will, a horrible sort of crime that might happen once every 20 years in a small city of 50,000 people. It’s the sort of thing that makes you sit up and take notice, not just due to its intrinsic nature, but because of its rarity. Even living in a city of a million people, you might only hear of one case a year, and that only if you pay pretty good attention to news sources.
Now assume a national news apparatus that is hungry for stories that make people sit up and take notice. That crime that happens once a generation for a city of 50,000 or once a year for a city of a million happens about once a DAY in a nation of 300+ million. And since any random event will tend to cluster (runs of heads or tails when flipping a coin), you’re going to see a week where it seems like there’s an explosion of that sort of crime in the nation…even if the actual yearly rate for that crime has been slowly declining lately, it’ll seem like OMGBBQ THINK OF THE CHILDREN to a lot of people. And then the owners of the news networks have their eyes turn into little dollar signs.
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I agree about the media and the stupidity of it. It goes well beyond the bit with the dad on the bus as well. It’s magnified by the fact that the vast majority of our television and radio “news” media isn’t news anymore. It’s all about opinion and ratings.
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It’s also not about telling the truth anymore.
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One of the talking points of the moment for several months back in the first half of the year was that Phoenix, Arizona was the Kidnapping Capitol of the world or at least the US. Wasn’t true. Wasn’t even close to true. The local law enforcement stats and the FBI’s stats on the issue show it to be untrue.
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But once it got started it became like the old urban legend that the kid who played Mikey died because his stomach exploded after he ate pop rocks and washed them down with soda pop. And in much the same way as that story spread this one spread because every basically assumed the person they heard it from knew what they were talking about.
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That’s not a guess on my part either. Butler County, Ohio Rep. Courtney Combs discussed working on immigration reform for Ohio and pointed out that “fact” in several discussions on the matter. When he was finally made aware of the false nature of the claim he stated, “I was quoting from what I thought were reliable sources. When I heard it from John McCain who is a US Senator from Arizona, I presumed he knew what he was talking about.”
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And most of the news media acted as he did. Only a very few actually went and looked up the state and federal stats in doing the story. Most just repeated the claim and then did segments of commentary and debate treating it as a cold, hard fact. And even now some in our “news” media are so married to their causes or their POV that they still push this “fact” even after having been shown the real facts.
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Hëll, we would probably still be hearing about the headless corpses strewn all about the Arizona landscape had Brewer not tried to push the issue in the debates and been made a fool of over it.
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But this garbage and garbage like it (even the garbage that is true but ultimately meaningless) makes for big debates and big ratings so we get it. And the overall effect is that it makes a nonstop noise machine of bad news that makes a lot of people think that things are worse than ever.
Well, the world certainly isn’t any more violent these days. But, as was mentioned in the previous thread about political correctness, I do think the Internet (and TV before it) has made the world a bit angrier.
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Oh, and that father apologizing? I’d like to hear whether the kids have been made to apologize to the daughter for being bullies in the first place. They certainly deserved to be scared witless, and I can’t help but wonder if their receiving an apology for the father’s behavior will only embolden them.
Yeah, I’d like to see the kids forced to apologize too. The problem is, is that going to cause more retribution toward the daughter?
Is the world a more violent place? Are things worse? You tell me. When I was growing up people didn’t worry about airliners being blown out of the sky. We didn’t feel the need for surveillance cameras everywhere. We didn’t have posters all over telling you what phone number to call to report ‘suspicious behaviour’ (not since WW II anyway.) We weren’t bending over to give the police new powers. We didn’t have laws forcing people to keep their cars locked. We didn’t have metal detectors in schools. We didn’t have teachers needing to be trained in ‘lockdown’ procedures in case of armed assault. Nor did we feel a need for ‘body scanners’ at airports. We didn’t have inter city bus companies adopting some airport-style security measures (Greyhound in Canada, honest!). Street gangs didn’t have semi-auto and auto weapons. We didn’t throw kids out of school under police escort because they pointed pointed a CHICKEN FINGER and went ‘bang!’.
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Tell me this doesn’t bespeak of a sick society. Question being, is it from extra violence? Or because they are scared [literally] witless?
We’re more scared. Everything you mention is security theater, designed to either make people feel more safe, or alternately feel more vulnerable, but in reality the world is not really that much more dangerous.
Sure, there were more incidents of school violence in 2000 then in 1950. There are also more schools and more students!
When was the last time an airplane was actually blown up due to an explosive device? Trust me, its not because we take our shoes off at the airport. And it will happen, possibly at greater frequency than in the 80s for the same reason. More flights each day!
But the actual risk of these things is very small as compared to perceived risk. More people will die in preventable vehicle accidents this year than have died in the past decade in the US due to terrorist acts.
We are at far more risk of death or injury due to an idiot speeding on I95 than by flying a plane. But I don’t see anyone clamoring for speed limiters on cars that prevent them from going over 65. This is because we don’t see the actual risk there.
The media attention paid to aberrant incidents greatly increases the perceived prominence of those risks, and in order to assuage the sheeple in the public, we come up with security theater. It’s useless, wasteful and in some cases counter productive, but our collective response is generally “BAAAA”
Those incidents do not bespeak violence, however – merely fear.
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Back in 1974, the rock group Rush recorded a song called “Beneath, Between & Behind”. It was a song about where the US came from – and where we seemed to be headed. 35 years later, it seems downright prophetic…
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Beneath the noble bird,
Between the proudest words,
Behind the beauty, cracks appear;
Once with heads held high
They sang out to the sky –
Why do their shadows bow in fear?
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(And let’s not even get started on 1977’s “A Farewell To Kings”…)
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>”When I was growing up people didn’t worry about airliners being blown out of the sky.”
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Pan Am Flight 103 was 1988. We also had several hijackings in the 70s and 80s where the people who took the planes hostage threatened to kill everyone on board and/or blow up the plane if they didn’t get what they want. From things you’ve said in the past you’re around my age so, yeah, people were worried about airliners being blown out of the sky when we were growing up.
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One of the reasons that “It was always better back then!” syndrome works so well is that most people are blissfully unaware of what’s going on in the world beyond their little piece of it when they’re children, they only get slightly more aware as young adults and really only start paying attention to everything when life saddles them with the kind of responsibilities that force them to start looking at all the things that are really going on around them.
I remember a joke Desi Arnaz told at a time when hijackers forcing a plane to go to Cuba was the big concern. He said, “I sat down and who should I see but Jack Benny. So I raised my hand and shouted, ‘Hi, Jack!’ And they threw me off the plane.”
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PAD
“When I was growing up”. I grew up (or got older, take your pick) in the 60s and early 70s. If I were to travel back in time and tell them how screwed up things have gotten, they’d probably lock me up in a looney bin.
“OK, Future Boy. Then who’s President in 1985?”
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“Ronald Reagan.”
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“Oh?! And who’s Vice-President? Jerry Lewis???!!”
We have laws forcing people to keep their cars locked?
Don’t recall if it was the police or the insurance companies who pushed for it, but some communities have by-laws whereby if a car is left unattended – and unlocked – the owner could be ticketed on the basis that he was aiding car theft or some such nonsense. Winnipeg has passed a by-law forcing people, who own certain cars considered popular by car thieves, to install anti-theft devices in their vehicles. Go on, try telling me Heinlein wasn’t right when he predicted these would be known as the Crazy Years.
My kids will live in a time where overtly using racism to win an election, sell products, or deprive people of their rights is rightly considered despicable rather than a standard tactic.
My daughter will live in a world where, if her husband assaults her, it will be considered a potential felony situation and not a private family matter. There will be resources available for her protection should she need them.
My kids stand a good chance of living in a world where, should their sexual preference be different than the majority, they can walk the streets without fear of violence or social ostracization.
Most notably, my kids live in a world where the threat of nuclear annihilation is neither imminent nor particularly likely. With any luck at all, they will not live in a perpetual state of cold war with the planet’s other super power.
Really, the world (and let’s be honest, we’re really talking about America here) has not gotten much worse in the past few decades. In fact, if you’re not a straight, white, Christian and arguably, male, it has almost certainly gotten less menacing. Much of it is still ugly and stupid, but that’s a fundamental part of the human experience, too. We do talk about our problems more, which is bad when it’s done in the hysterical shriek tones of the major news networks, but a really good thing for bringing about positive change.
Here in Michigan, if you turn on your car to warm it up and aren’t sitting in the car or right next to the car, it must be locked or you can be ticketed.
Here in Michigan, if you turn on your car to warm it up and aren’t sitting in the car or right next to the car, it must be locked or you can be ticketed.
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I’m not sure what that has to do with anything, but now I’m intrigued. Is that only if your car is parked on the street? What if it’s in your driveway? What if it’s the driveway behind your house? What if it’s a gated house and the gate is closed and locked but the car is warming up without anyone in it and a passing cop sees it?
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PAD
Andy – Sorry, not buying it. If anything the risk of nuclear devastation has increased. Time was, the US and USSR were the only kids with the big bangs. Then Red China joined in (uh-oh…) followed by Britain, France, India, and these latter are OK because they’re our friends. For now anyway. But then Pakistan joined the club and they could be overrun by fundamentalist nutjobs at any time. This isn’t a time to worry? Then how about North Korea which supposedly has nukes (not sure I believe that) and if it does, it showed no remorse about sending countless numbers of its citizens into the grinder in the Korean conflict. Why should today be any different, except with nukes? Oh and Iran is hard at work at getting the things. The more children are playing with matches in the tinderbox, the greater the chances of the whole thing going up in flames.
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Yes, it’s good that certain ‘human rights’ have been put forth. Same sex marriages and all that. But how does it balance out with Guantanamo Bay and government-sanctioned torture? I could go on about people losing faith in their institutions (up here the percentage of people turning out to vote is in free fall) and other things but it boils down to we have shiny new toys and a fresh coat of pain, but the undercarriage is rusting away and it boils down to how long before if falls apart.
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Of course I’m exaggerating. Or am I? A few years ago the Association of American Civil Engineers calculated that to maintain the country’s infrastructure (dams, bridges, little things such as that) at a minimum safe level would cost at least $2.2 TRILLION over the next five years. http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/ Some of this is being addressed, but not nearly enough.
StarWolf, are you too young to remember the bad old days when the US and the USSR had literally thousands of missiles pointed at each other, all laden with multi-megaton nuclear weapons? Not to mention the bombers on standby… (During the Reagan Administration, I used to work for the Air Force planning nuclear devastation – the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, designed to make sure all the weapons would reach their destinations and not hit each other on the way in. Yes, the SIOP did get that crowded during the first and second waves.)
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Today? Well, there is always the chance that a nuke or two might get involved in, say, Pakistan’s ongoing border dispute with India over the Kashmir region – but that’s less than a dozen weapons on each side, all in the single- to double-digit megatonnage range, and with no missiles capable of delivering them more than a few hundred miles away. Israel and South Africa are probably in the Club, but possess no ballistic missiles at all. North Korea’s ballistic missiles don’t seem to be able to go more than a couple hundred miles before crashing or blowing up, and seismic evidence suggests that if they have big bombs at all, they’re old-fashioned atomic fission weapons, rating maybe 20 or 30 kilotons, comparable to Fat Man and Little Boy – one Ohio-class boomer has more nuclear capability on each of its ten to twenty Trident D-5 missiles than the entirety of North Korea.
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While the danger of a war that involves nukes might have increased slightly, the chance that World War III might suddenly break out and rain nuclear fire upon the entire Northern Hemisphere has all but vanished. I like things a lot better that way.
Don’t know the details, but I know last winter it happened to a few people and made the news when they got ticketed for it. I think it was a mix of driveway and street, not sure if any were in gated yards…
Bladestar, that sounds like a mix of environmental & anti-theft.
Jonathan (The Other One) – North Korea’s missiles don’t have much range, but they do have enough to reach Japan. In fact, they’ve fired some on the equivalent of ‘across the country’s bow’ just to make the point. Now let’s say the lunatic running the place decides, for whatever reason, that posturing isn’t enough and he drops one on Tokyo. Two possibilities: one, people do nothing except go “tut-tut…” or, two, North Korea gets nuked in return. Only … what does ‘Red’ China do when fall-out starts to drift across it? Especially when it’s from the land of its ally? Can you say ‘escalation’? Why do you think that tin-pot dictator has been allowed to last as long as he has?
That tinpot dictator has lasted as long as he has because, generally speaking, the US doesn’t engage in pre-emptive warfare (the Bush administration being a horrible aberration in this regard, but I think the adults are back in charge now…).
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Should Kim get a wild hair up his kimchi and actually manage to hit Tokyo (questionable, at best – the missiles aren’t very good, and thanks to tech embargoes and Kim’s insistence on executing people smarter than him as counterrevolutionaries the guidance systems are worse), the proper, measured response would be to paste Pyongyang with a single warhead. The fallout would be minimal, and unlikely to cross Mainland China’s turf; should it do so, they’d most likely settle for a strongly-worded rebuke in the UN, because they’re no more interested in nuclear war than we are (can’t invade and conquer glowing glass, after all – can’t sell it anything, either).
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See, the great threat from North Korea doesn’t stem from the Korean people, who would be just as happy to join their Southern brethren in the modern era – it stems from the nutbag in charge, who remains in charge partly because the culture of the region values homogeneity and partly because he tends to have anyone who might question the status quo killed. We all know that he’s not immortal, and three of his four children have reason to dislike Kim Jong-Il and everything he stands for (mistress forced to divorce her husband to stay with Kim after Kim’s wife sent into exile, then died in exile in a Russian hospital; second mistress died of cancer, or at least that’s the official story, then Kim immediately started living with his third mistress). It seems likely that his successor will be more sane (he could hardly be less so, now could he?).
I had a friend who worked in a network newsroom for a while, and was often dismayed that many kinds of stories that were given airtime were chosen not because they were particularly important, but because there was available video footage. Meanwhile, complicated and important stories went under-reported, simply because there was (it was thought) no way to make them visually interesting to the audience.
All of which reminds me of a hazy memory of Paula Poundstone’s incredibly short lived variety show from the 1990s. I vaguely recall she had set up five or six economists of different philosophies set up in an amusement park spinner ride, and had them try to explain their beliefs as they whizzed past the camera. Didn’t particularly make me understand free trade or protectionism any better, but it was probably the most visually interesting attempt at economics I’d seen. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I can’t say…
I have little doubt of this. Several years ago, there were two plane crashes on the same day. One, where many if not most people survived, made the six o’clock news and had much air time. The other, where a larger aircraft saw everybody aboard be killed, did not. The former was in the U.S. and happened to be caught on film by some tourist. The latter was in some third world country and had no video footage.
Another word or two about the father yelling at the kids on the bus for their behavior towards his daughter:
In this country now, there are many schools who have “Zero Tolerance” policies on drugs, to the point where a child who brings ONE dose of asprin, cold medication, or Midol to school gets treated the same as one who has crack or marijuana on school grounds.
We also have many schools who have Zero Tolerance policies on weapons, to the point where a kid who brings a TOY gun to school…a hunk of solid plastic that couldn’t fire anything no matter how much you tried…or a plastic knife that’s part of an action figure’s accoutrements…gets treated the same as someone bringing a switchblade or a .44 Magnum to class.
But Zero Tolerance for bullies? Not so much. At least not that I’ve seen. And I doubt very much that anyone would have a problem with such Zero Tolerance policies.
So do a lot of people in our society have their priorities and thought processes completely FUBAR’d? Yeah, I’d say so.
I”m not so sure that it is the public’s need for sensationalism that is to blame. I know it isn’t a scientific study, but I know no more people today than when I was a teenager who watch the news. People who have a vested interest, like a friend of mine who has local political aspirations, or myself who was brought up in a politically observant home.
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But, my fiance, my co-workers, and about 90% of my friends, only know the news if someone else points it out to them.
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I think that the real drive behind sensationalism comes from the advertizers. They want news that people will watch. Or, the network wants news with ratings so that advertizers will buy commercial space.
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My solution would be to adjust how PSAs are scheduled. If the only people allowed to buy ad space during news programs (including entertainment programs who claim to be news) were political or governmental organizations, then maybe we would have news that informs rather than news that frightens.
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Theno
I never said there was a public need for sensationalism. I said there was an incessant need to feed the endless news cycle. There is no longer any discrimination between what is worthwhile and what is trivial; what the public needs to know as opposed to sensationalistic; what’s news and what isn’t. In newspapers, at least, the news would be up front followed by local news, entertainment, sports, etc. Because of the nature of cable news, everything is accorded equal time and equal space. There’s no way to differentiate anymore, nor do the news networks make any attempt to do so.
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PAD
Not unlike me I suspect you’re old enough to remember how a rock star overdosing would make a headline. For a day, maybe two. But these daily, if not hourly reports of some starlet’s detox or cocaine trial?
There’s no way to differentiate anymore,
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Sure there is. You use your brain and apply your own filters. I’m pretty sure you do this.
I try, but I don’t pretend to be perfect. And a lot of people don’t even try. It is very easy to get sucked into non-stories and accord too much emphasis to side issues and irrelevancies without asking the pertinent and important questions. Once upon a time, that was part of a reporter’s job. Now news “gathering” is oftentimes the equivalent of printing press releases.
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PAD
“Because of the nature of cable news, everything is accorded equal time and equal space. There’s no way to differentiate anymore, nor do the news networks make any attempt to do so.
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PAD, here I must disagree with you. I do believe that “cable news” channels DO differentiate. They are selling their product, and so they have to put the best product on the air – and when I say “best”, I mean most attractive to the consumer.
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The quality and veracity of the news do not matter one bit. The sensational, the hideous, the entertaining, the terrifying – THESE are what “cable news” shows display.
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I tell you, I’m sure I’d pay a lot for a standard news show that was not in the least concerned with entertainment. But that’s all TV – cable or network – is about anymore. It HAS to be, and that’s where it comes back to us, the consuming public – we don’t WANT news, we don’t WANT education. WE WANTS OUR MTV!!!
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I’m probably going to be struck down by lightning now. All that and MTV doesn’t even play music anymore… 🙁
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xoxoxo
x<]:o){
I see what you are saying. For some reason I considered “the beast” to be sensationalism, not news in and of itself.
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But, I do disagree on two points: one, that the need to fill a 24/hr news delivery cycle pushes non-news to the forefront; and two, that everything is accorded equal time.
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I think that if we were getting equal time, then we would have had daily updates on the Gulf War. Equal time would mean that everyone who knows about “The Ground Zero Mosque” would also know that the Senate voted down health care for 9/11 responders.
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I think that if all stories were getting equal time, then we would hear just as much about the man who stabbed a NYC cab driver for being Muslim as we did about Park 51. Or, we would have actually heard about Michael Moore’s internet movement to raise money to help actually build a Mosque at Ground Zero along with Donald Trump’s bid to buy Park 51 and cease construction. (Of course, I understand why Trump makes a better news story than Moore.)
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So, maybe the problem isn’t the need to feed the beast, or the need to fill the time. I submit that there are plenty of things that can, and probably should, be reported that are not. Maybe the problem isthat the executives filter the news to make sure it fits a desired slant. Why report something that doesn’t fit the company’s narrative when there is another news item that does? (Or, as some networks do, when you can alter the video clip to make it fit.)
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Theno
Another thing that story shows is how popular culture (television shows) actually teach how bullying and cruel behaviour disguised as “joking” is being encouraged.
Yeah, I know it sounds like I’m an old guy preaching the evils of television, but kids can’t discern that the behaviour on TV isn’t real. It’s for our entertainment. It’s not the way one actually talks to his/her fellows. And too many parents aren’t making the effort to teach that difference.
Thank you for your time. I will now go watch some oldfashioned super-8 pørņ.
PAD: The more the media observes, the more it needs to feed the beast, the more our perception of the world changes, and not for the better.
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I get what you’re saying, and agree. But I balk at the hint I infer of “better people know less”.
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The problem isn’t just that the news is on so continuously and needs to be fed. It isn’t that more and smaller stories are reported today. It’s that they’re reported in the most sensationalistic way possible.
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The focus of the story shouldn’t be the father’s yelling at the kids. It should be the school that, despite apparently having repeated incidents and tapes of the abuse, did nothing. The reporters shouldn’t be trying to book the father so they could get him to apologize on national TV. They should be trying to interview the bus driver, principal and school board to find out why the situation occurred in the first place. More news is OK, but it needs to be less Jerry Springer, more 60 Minutes.
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Would Cronkite pick up on the story you describe and make it a national news item? No. But if he did, he wouldn’t be wringing his hands about what it portends and advertising “Father out of control!! Film at 11”. MORE news can be a good thing, if only journalists would actually do their jobs corrrectly.
I also think that the really important aspect of this piece of news is “what are we doing to stop bullying?”
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I think it interesting that a lot of adults, when considering the issue, will just shrug and say that “kids will be kids.” As if the cruelty of bullying were somehow necessary for character building, or something.
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Being bullied won’t teach you to stand up for yourself or strike back or some such nonsense, or to give you some tough-but-true piece of wisdom that “you gotta be braver” because in most bullying situations there is a huge power imbalance that makes it impossible to be braver. If a lone adult were faced with a pack of many other adults, most of them physically stronger and more socially savvy, in an environment where the pack had free rein to do whatever they wanted to the lone victim, the results would not be pretty for the victim, no matter how the victim tried to be braver or whatever.
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And to expect a kid to go through such a situation? A thousand times worse, as kids don’t have developed many of the coping mechanisms adults have.
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Thankfully I didn’t suffer so much at school. I was kind of nerdy, but also kind of social, and I had the all-important skill of knowing how to mock people. But I still suffered hëll in the one year I was in the same class with a bunch of kids even more popular (and extremely more cruel) than I was.
Being bullied won’t teach you to stand up for yourself or strike back or some such nonsense,
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but it WILL give you a bunch of names that you can use over and over and over again. Like, say, you need a name for someone who just happens to die horribly–ripped into 6 pieces by a zombie, perfect example–and it just so happens that he is named Timmy McDonnald. What’s Jimmy gonna do, sue?.
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On the subject of news, it seems to me that one effect of how things are is that news that takes too long to come out gets lost. Nixon would have survived Watergate were he president now. people would have lost interest. Notice how they rveal bad news on Fridays so that by the time they have to go on the Sunday chatshows they can call it “old news”.
I don’t see an answer to this, except hire good bus drivers and work hard to support your children. Alternately, you can do what we do and home school. I always hated bullies; I would probably react like the dad did.
“What’s being done to stop bullying?” is not only an important question, but a disturbingly multi-faceted one. Whose job is it? What’s most effective at reducing bullying? How much does it cost?
What gets me, in this case, is that if the incident that precipitated the father’s reaction took place on the bus, why wasn’t there video of it like there was of his tirade?
Apparently there is footage of the actual bullying. Haven’t seen it.
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PAD
I’ve tried posting this link to Andrew Vachss’s antibullying project and it never shows up. Is there some rules about posting links that I need to know?
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For those interested, google “Andrew Vachss heart transplant”
I don’t watch the “Bad” news as we call it in my house. I see no purpose. In the last two years I’ve caught every major news story through other mediums that has later come up in conversations with my friends and family except one. That one story I missed is the one about the nut who killed the girl in another country and now might get off… which while sad really doesn’t impact my life directly.
I think the news has become a waste of time. In Atlanta, we actually have a segment called “The Tough Questions.” In this segment, a beleaguered person who has plenty of problems gets a microphone stuck in their face and asked questions which they aren’t going to answer. Most of the time the poor harassed interviewee just tells the reporter to go away while the reporter tries to stick their foot, their arm, or some other body part in the door. Believe it or not, this is the main advertising campaign for this news program. More amazing yet is that people watch it.
Is the increase in violence real? I have a degree in sociology with a focus in criminology and deviant behavior. (Not what I do to make money). Most of the surveys and stats are a croc. It takes a deep dive and a lot of analysis to interpret the data. This means that most people have to trust the experts. The experts are generally hired to show why we need to do something, for instance increase our police presence. Now a real expert can make that survey or statistic interpret to almost whatever they want it to say. Given all of this what do you think the survey will conclude?
The reality is most studies are generally inconclusive. But no conclusions mean no-next study. So you end up concluding that left handed welders from south-east Kentucky have seen a massive increase in crime in the last 10 years. But what gets reported in the media is South Kentucky has seen a massive increase in crime in the last 10 years.
But here is what I find interesting… What do we believe? More specifically what do you believe in your gut? I can tell you what I see. When I was a kid, mom kicked us out of the house for hours at a time and told us be back for supper. We roamed for miles around the house. I was a latch key kid (remember that term) at 7 years old. Now, parents I know barely let their kids out of the house unless it has in a fenced yard. They surely aren’t going to be going to the neighbors let alone miles away without them knowing. If you let a 7 year stay at home alone now, you risk losing the child to DFACs and you may go to jail. What do our actions say we all believe? Whatever brave words we put forth we believe the world is more hostile than it was when we were young.
Completely unrelated, but important: The RSS Feed died again this afternoon. 🙁
I’ve barely watched any news the last two years. I kind of got burned out around inauguration time. So I’ve probably missed some important stuff, but I know I’ve missed a lot of garbage as well. I do still read the Economist when I go to the library, and I always look at the Yahoo headlines and click on the interesting stories (which for me are not the sensationalistic ones).
I’ve gone through periods like this when I stop watching news for awhile, but I always start again at some point.
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Local news, on the other hand, I stopped watching back in the ’80s.
One good way to illustrate PAD’s first point is this short TED Talk video from a couple years ago that I often link whenever someone gets a little too carried on by news (and spanish newsfeeds are far less gruesome than american ones).
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
Wow, I never thought the day would come where I agreed with Peter David on something. I am circling this day on my calendar.
I think that father basically did the right thing. And like it or not, the reason it’s national news is is that the kid is disabled. When something happens to one of us, it tends to get more important.
Just now, on a Central Florida “news” station they ran a video about a woman who egged her daughter on in a fight. (Didn’t watch, just heard them setting it up.) Another non-story, but it ran because they had video.
I’ve been campaigning for a new state slogan:
“Florida. We don’t all suck, I swear.”
It’s funny you should post this today, Peter. Just this afternoon, my brother and I were lamenting the fact that it’s become increasingly difficult to talk to our father about current events or politics without getting dragged into a long, dreary monologue about how much worse the world is now than it was back in the dim past of his era. I think your idea about the media and the proliferation of non-stories has some merit, but there is also something to the age-old phenomenon of “old people” remembering the good old days in sepia tones.
At the same time, my mother is continually being drawn into the non-story of the moment, and will occasionally call me at work to update me on the latest developments in the “Missing Pretty Blonde Girl” case of the week.
So perhaps the one is feeding the other?
BTW- great job on the latest X-FACTOR.
I envy anyone who can believe the world was less violent and angry before. My relatives who came before me remember a far more violent and repressive world: church bombings, lynchings, cross burnings. Riding in the back of the bus was — as Chris Rock said — society being nice.
There is a phenomenon that can be very unfortunate: the more free a society is, the more information we have available, and the more attention people pay to society’s ills as a consequence, and that can lead many people to conclude that the freer the society, the more degenerate it is.
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It’s like concluding that we have an explosion of pedophilia, just because the Church’s scandals aren’t covered up anymore. WRONG. The child-abuse was always there, it’s just that we didn’t know it.
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A more personal example would be my parents. I don’t think their marriage was a happy one. Dad drank too much, and was emotionally abusive (though never physically). But strangers would never have suspected the jovial man that my father looked like to them. So, to larger society, their marriage was a “successful one”. Nowadays, my Mom would have probably divorced him very early, and would be counted as an unsucessful marriage.
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But it was always unsuccessful, it’s just that in the past people were more likely to remain married no matter what and hide their troubles from all.
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So the world looked happier.
I’d argue that we’ve gotten worse.
When the Blitz happened, 70 years ago, people stepped up and displayed excellent citizenship.
After 9/11, I really wanted to see the same thing happen. Granted, GW Bush was no Winston Churchill — not necessarily a slam on the man, who was probably the best president he could imagine being. However, I did not see my fellow Americans — either on TV or around me — improve one scrap. I was living in Bethesda MD at the time, and working at the NIH, so I like to think I was in a good position to notice any changes.
[And yes, I did try to pitch in at my end. I showed up to a blood drive to be told go away — apparently, eating meat in the UK in the mid-1980’s was enough to disqualify me, even though I insisted I had no more holes in my head than I ever did. I also sent a family friend in Iraq a box of unsalted pistachios at his request. (Apparently it’s a popular snack in the Middle East. Lots of protein.)]
My girlfriend already accused me of being unpatriotic, and certainly there are cats more patriotic than I am, but I can’t see modern Brits responding as well as their predecessors either.
Writing this, I can imagine Orwell and Vonnegut sipping tea in the afterlife and musing over whether either of them should have been surprised over how we developed.
I would add that, in general, throughout history there are examples of people pining for “the good old days” without the understanding that they were any better or any worse than things were before.
Sure, 24 hour news cycles and population density and the like contribute to our perception of things, sure. And, in most cases, skew them. We hear about the failings of medical treatment, and yet we cure and treat more diseases than before. We hear about more and more homicides and crime, and yet crime rates in most cities have steadily gone down. We focus on negative in general, and forget that in “those good old days” we were young and didn’t have a habit of seeking out bad news.
I think PAD is right (although this rare occurrence may cause him to rethink his OP, I suppose).
…right in his OP, I should say.
I am no fan of Jimmy Carter – probably much less so than is PAD – but he is by no means the JC who came up with that adultery of the eyes claim. This particular gem came from the fellow who declared “Let the dead bury the dead” and other such wisdom. If we are to start pointing out fanatics, it’s nothing new.