Recently, I've noticed that whenever I go to my gym--where exercise in front of a wall of flat-panel TVs--I'm absolutely inundated with nonstop broadcasts of Sarah Palin. The worst offender is CNN, who seem to have suspended most other news or information in favor of repeating endless video loops of this woman's handful of speeches and public appearances since she was nominated for this slot by John McCain a few weeks ago.
Sarah Palin is the Britney Spears of 2008, and her function is probably to serve as a distractor from real issues. CNN is not much different than FOX News, after all. Which is why I don't normally watch TV. I can find out what they're showing and saying easily enough, without letting it stream into my brain without resistance.
However, as some of us know already, the more you watch TV, the less you know. Increasingly so in the past few years. Why? One theory, which I find plausible, was put forth about four years ago by Robert Kennedy Jr. in this video, which I'm unable to post directly on this blog.
He talks about the overturning of the Fairness Doctrine under President Reagan in 1988. Until then, television and radio programmers had an obligation under the Fairness Doctrine to report the daily news at a certain time and act in the public interest. So instead of the Fairness Doctrine, we got FOX "Fair and Balanced" News.
After this legislation was dismantled, it released some of the oversight on the media owners: corporations and a new group of extremists who began to consolidate the number of media outlets and gave birth to extreme radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who use the public airwaves to vent their personal prejudices in the name of news.
The problem became exacerbated in the years that followed: not just under Reagan and Bush Sr., but under Clinton, who basically disarmed the FCC, and allowed the media ownership to consolidate to the point where we now have just five owners that run thousands of outlets (newspapers, radio, TV, and Internet providers).
None of this is new information to many of you, but 20 years later, some Americans don't have a clue about what they don't know, and some of them might not care. This is why they vote against their own best interests: they receive their information from only five corporations and religious groups. Nothing else gets in, and they're either not curious enough or they don't know where to look for an alternative news source.
As Kennedy points out, the changes in legislation and ownership basically got rid of a generation of investigative reporters, and in previous eras, it was the investigative reporters who "connected the dots" to trace the origins of situation--exactly the kind of information we've sorely needed in these past few years, and especially now, with the stock market crashing and a pivotal presidential election ahead.
Now what we have is a riot of useless video loops (Sarah Palin, celebrity gossip, bloopers, and so forth) interspersed with guests on talk shows who represent a particular ideology--usually the one that the network's owners favor.
It's easy to see the results on Internet bulletin boards: anonymous web posters who blame people like Democratic Senator Nancy Pelosi for the Wall Street meltdown or who claim that Barack Obama is an Arab and a Muslim. And then, quite possibly, settle in front of their 50" flat TV screen for another evening of "infotainment."
Sarah Palin is the Britney Spears of 2008, and her function is probably to serve as a distractor from real issues. CNN is not much different than FOX News, after all. Which is why I don't normally watch TV. I can find out what they're showing and saying easily enough, without letting it stream into my brain without resistance.
However, as some of us know already, the more you watch TV, the less you know. Increasingly so in the past few years. Why? One theory, which I find plausible, was put forth about four years ago by Robert Kennedy Jr. in this video, which I'm unable to post directly on this blog.
He talks about the overturning of the Fairness Doctrine under President Reagan in 1988. Until then, television and radio programmers had an obligation under the Fairness Doctrine to report the daily news at a certain time and act in the public interest. So instead of the Fairness Doctrine, we got FOX "Fair and Balanced" News.
After this legislation was dismantled, it released some of the oversight on the media owners: corporations and a new group of extremists who began to consolidate the number of media outlets and gave birth to extreme radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who use the public airwaves to vent their personal prejudices in the name of news.
The problem became exacerbated in the years that followed: not just under Reagan and Bush Sr., but under Clinton, who basically disarmed the FCC, and allowed the media ownership to consolidate to the point where we now have just five owners that run thousands of outlets (newspapers, radio, TV, and Internet providers).
None of this is new information to many of you, but 20 years later, some Americans don't have a clue about what they don't know, and some of them might not care. This is why they vote against their own best interests: they receive their information from only five corporations and religious groups. Nothing else gets in, and they're either not curious enough or they don't know where to look for an alternative news source.
As Kennedy points out, the changes in legislation and ownership basically got rid of a generation of investigative reporters, and in previous eras, it was the investigative reporters who "connected the dots" to trace the origins of situation--exactly the kind of information we've sorely needed in these past few years, and especially now, with the stock market crashing and a pivotal presidential election ahead.
Now what we have is a riot of useless video loops (Sarah Palin, celebrity gossip, bloopers, and so forth) interspersed with guests on talk shows who represent a particular ideology--usually the one that the network's owners favor.
It's easy to see the results on Internet bulletin boards: anonymous web posters who blame people like Democratic Senator Nancy Pelosi for the Wall Street meltdown or who claim that Barack Obama is an Arab and a Muslim. And then, quite possibly, settle in front of their 50" flat TV screen for another evening of "infotainment."
