A mindless media, an uninformed public

By Richard E. Schaaf

In keeping with one of Mark Twain’s famous quotes, “If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed,” I opine as follows.

We assume that the media should tell us, “what when, where, how and why.” It’s the how and the why that I feel is sadly lacking. In many cases, one has to dig deep to find out what’s really going on in the world — not just the usual stories of crashes, murders, riots and corruption, but what is behind the stories that are shaping local, national and world events.

A case in point: I heard there was going to be a debate among Republication presidential candidates, but I couldn’t tell where or when. I had to call Direct TV programming in New York to find out. (It was not even in the San Francisco Chronicle’s weekly program guide and certainly not mentioned in the Register.) Was this an assumption that few, if any, care about who our next president might be? On Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show,” he asked the audience if they had seen either a Democratic or Republican debate, and not a single person raised their hand! I asked at least two dozen friends if they had seen the debates and no one knew they were happening! To me, that is pitiful! Yes, they had seen the critiques afterward.

As a further illustration, I read an article about how uninformed we are when it comes to voting. The accompanying cartoon showed a box with a large number of human brains parked in it on the way to a voting booth. Therefore, prejudice and emotion take over and logic disappears. For example, can anyone remember that Thomas Dewey presumably lost his bid for the presidency in 1944 because he had a mustache? (In those days, TV villains generally had a mustache.) Do we know or care about Darfur, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Somalia, Nigeria and Gaza, to name a few places where conflicts are taking place, not to mention problems in North Korea, Iraq and Iran? Who are the good guys and the bad guys in these places? I’ll bet few readers even know the current leaders in Britain, France and Italy.

My point is simply that we hear about world and national events which are of great importance, but we know or care little about what is really happening. The media has determined what they think we want rather than what we should have.

The world is shrinking, and events anywhere can have a profound effect on our society. Perhaps, we are just too busy working or with our daily chores to read print media anymore, and we take the easy way out for often twisted information from TV and the Internet.

(Schaaf lives in Napa.)

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