By Owen Phelps, Ph.D.
Director
I was sitting in a bar talking with a friend – as I am wont to do – when his cell phone rang. It was his wife. He took the call and put it on speaker. But he didn’t wait for her to speak.
“Honey, I’m with Owen having a beer,” he pre-empted. “We can talk later.”
But she wasn’t about to be put off. “Okay, but there’s something I have to tell you. Michelle Obama is really a man.” Then to provide credibility, she added: “It’s all over the media.”
My friend smiled a condescending smile. “Well, she looks like a woman to me,” he said.
I interjected softly: “Ask her about Michelle having two daughters. How could a man do that?”
But my friend didn’t go there. Instead, he went to closure. “We can talk more about this later. I have to go. Goodbye. I love you,” he said, and then hung up his phone.
We traded quick one-liners about how preposterous the whole idea was and then went back to our earlier conversation.
Back home an hour later I was curious to see if the story was, indeed, “all over the media.” I spent most of my professional life as a journalist, and so I take more than a passing interest in what events – or non-events in the case of folks like Paris Hilton, Perez Hilton or the Kardashians – are being covered where and by whom. So I went looking for this shocking story that was supposedly “all over the media.”
Beware the fringe
No surprise, it was not all over the media – not even by any stretch of the meaning of that word. But glory be, thanks to the internet, I did find a reference to the story. As a former journalist and academician, I value credible sources. And the reference, as if you didn’t know, was clearly not from any credible source. Moreover, the “document” offered in support of the allegation was revealed as a fabrication by the government agency alleged to be its source.
End of story? Not quite.
I look around and I see a whole host of people believing the most incendiary, malicious and preposterous things. Why? Because someone told them so. And nearly always that someone is “in the media” who shows up either directly or through a grapevine of friends, relatives and fellow travelers.
It’s sadly ironic that as the cable and satellite TV and, even more, the internet bring us more fanatical, fringe, fruitcake and fallacious versions of reality, it is our mainstream media (Sarah Palin called it “lamestream” media) that come in for ever more criticism. I have my own serious criticism of mainstream – that is to say, commercial – media, but it usually has some regard for the facts at hand when fringe media often do not.
Love affair not a good thing
Nonetheless, our love affair with various so-called “news media” is not a good thing either for us or our republic. If we let it, it makes us addicts to sensation and fear – fear that affirms us in our suspicion that we have ever more reasons to be ever more fearful.
Back when I was growing up, the three major networks on the fledgling medium of television provided viewers with 15 minutes of news daily. It wasn’t a lot. But truth be told, on some days – those “slow news days” -- it was more than enough. Conversely, when serious news occurred, say Pearl Harbor, a television network could interrupt regular programming and bring viewers more details.
Back then TV news was regarded by the networks as “public service programming.” But over the years as media matured and became more competitive, media executives learned that under the right circumstances news programming could be profitable – the very reason TV networks came into existence and the very thing that kept their doors open. The “right circumstances” generally referred to “entertainment values,” things that would attract large audiences, ideally larger than the competition.
News is not the norm
News itself always had one thing going for it even before the invention of television: it dealt with the unusual, the unexpected, things that had the capacity to attract eyeballs. Traffic reporters call it “gaper’s block:” the ability of an accident to attract so much attention from other drivers that it slows all traffic to a funeral procession. Some years ago, when someone was criticizing news media for being too negative, a network executive stepped up and succinctly explained the reality: “When we go to the airport, we cover crashes, not landings.”
Why, you may wonder. It’s simple. Crashes are rare and often pregnant with the stuff of human drama: destruction, dismemberment, death. That’s news! News is not the norm – by definition. We are drawn to a legitimate news story in a way that we are not by routine plane landings or safe passages on interstates.
Another editor long before TV, planes or interstates were invented explained it to a rookie reporter: “When a dog bites a man, that’s not news; but when a man bites a dog, that’s news.” We could add a whole host of modifiers: When a dog bites the president, that’s news too. But you get the point. News does not provide us with a whole, balanced account of life. It’s not supposed to. Instead, it brings us the exceptional, the unusual, the unexpected, the anomaly.
Drawn to the dark side
Digest so much news that you start to think it provides an accurate picture of life and you have gone over to the dark side of addiction. You are mistaking a small part for the whole. It will make you more fearful than you reasonably should be. Keep it up and you could get to be downright terrified.
That’s not good. But bear in mind that there are some people who would like to see you both addicted and terrified. They come in two flavors: media executives who want to own your eyeballs and pick your pockets, and political propagandists who want to win your troubled hearts and votes.
One of my brothers came to me a couple of years ago and asked me what I did to stay so calm and optimistic – in a word, sane – with all the terrible things going on in the world. He explained that after watching hours of TV news every night, he was becoming pretty sure that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. And yet …
And yet, he had the upbringing and education – a solid foundation – that told him, if only in a whisper, that where he was heading was, in fact, a dreadful fantasy world. He reached out a hand.
Change the channel
“Change the channel,” I told him. “Watch some procedural drama or even a cooking show.” (I hate cooking shows as much as I hate cooking, and I’m fairly convinced that “celebrity chef” is – or at least should be – an oxymoron.) I continued: “Try some biographies, nature programs, whatever. And get a hobby that takes you away from the tube. You are absolutely overdosing on the news and you are obviously not doing a damn bit of good for yourself.” He agreed to try.
The TV news networks are desperate to get you and hold you hostage. They do it with a mix of highly-paid entertainers (true news correspondents are rare on TV) designed to become habits in your life, and they drive the whole dynamic by feeding you a diet of fear, the most powerful emotion in the human repertoire.
Granted, we all should be aware of what’s going on in the world. How do I do that? As a matter of course, I get newsfeeds on my phone from traditional, credible news sources: Associated Press and major print media. (The mainstream print media actually do a very good job of reporting the facts and, thanks be to God, they publicly correct their errors, even minor ones.) I also tape the half hour BBC broadcast on PBS, which features news of the world, compelling on-site video, and almost no politicians or so-called experts. I end up actually watching three or four of those episodes per week.
If from that mix it becomes clear that something truly newsworthy is happening, then I take more time to get more details on one or usually more of the 24/7 news channels. My mantra in all of this is: “Watch the news when there’s news worth watching.”
Don’t be drawn in and become addicted to overpaid entertainers who are willing to say almost anything to attract your eyeballs and keep you watching, even if it means using fear today to feed and reinforce the fear they fed you yesterday.
A journalist said that. And he meant it – because, dear sisters and brothers in Christ, he loves you.
God bless.