Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Major Media as Reality Television

Let me see if I get the attribution straight: An Instapundit post refers to something on Roger Simon's blog which resulted, ultimately, in an essay on The American Thinker.

Read that essay.

The lead:

How do we account for the continued strength of President Bush in the polls, relative to his presumptive Democratic opponent, despite the stream of bad news from Iraq? Much of the journalistic and intellectual establishment is plainly baffled …and dismayed. The answer is not that complex: the public, unlike the class which defines itself as living the life of the mind, understands that we are at war, a war in which our very survival is at stake. This is a gut-level cognition.

Those who pride themselves on their ability to spin chains of logical reasoning, and sometimes arrive at a counter-intuitive conclusion, instinctively recoil from the obvious lesson, especially when it validates the positions of their political opponents. For them, the battle against the hated Bush is more important than the battle against Islamicist terror. Theories which blame the West as the source of all evil take precedence over actual evil, stariung them in the face.

My tangental epiphany:

Major news media are the same as reality television.

Face it, they're not just people who point cameras and shoot stuff. They're content providers who need to sell a story. They don't just dish out facts and events. They start with a story, and then they cut the video and stage it as needed to have a narrative arc, complete with villians who are just people trying to do the best they can, but whose actions the "narrators" cast in unflattering lights and out of context--but within the narrative arc.

Major news media are nothing but entertainment, folks, and the pictures they paint and the artistry they employ might be actually, you know, entertaining or compelling. If they weren't talking about something vitally important, and if they weren't trying to base it as a true story. Perhaps "Inspired by Actual Events" would better describe it.

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:10 PM