0 comment Saturday, November 15, 2014 | admin
In response to a recent blog entry of mine, on pop culture and politics, the subject of television and the role it has played in the dumbing down of our culture, including our politics, was brought up.
I had been thinking of the huge role that the advent of television had in the social revolution that we mostly associate with the Sixties, and with my generation, the baby-boomers. While I acknowledge the foolishness of my generation and the responsibility we bore for some of the social destruction which was in full swing in the 60s and thereafter, I have argued that the changes we all recognize were in fact already well under way when my peers and I were children in the 50s, and even before.
Television, which began regular national broadcasting in the late 1940s, was a huge factor.
Television became an incredibly influential medium, which truly revolutionized the world.
This piece by Hereward Lindsay, called On the Decline of Our People, deals with the changes wrought by television, and the deleterious effects on our culture.
A friend recently sent me an email that concluded:
The cathode ray tube was the most powerful invention of the 20th century. I defy anybody to prove that wrong.
He didn't get any defiance from me. The malevolent impact of television is a subject I have thought about a lot. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that my hyper-Calvinist ancestors were right in their suspicion of drama and actors. (Socrates, by the way, had somewhat similar ideas. Read Plato's dialogue the Ion and you will be astonished at how timely it is with its warnings about actors trying to influence government policy and their inherent bad character as people who are professionals at creating illusions and fantasies, i.e. trained deceivers and people whose minds are not grounded in the concrete and real.)
All of us American dissidents (or "thought criminals", as might be more appropriate) have lain awake at night throughout our adult lives trying to figure out how our race and civilization have collapsed. There is no subject more important and more entitled to consideration.''
[Emphasis mine]
Lindsay goes on to tie together certain trends in our society, factors such as decline in the number of self-employed individuals, and the concomitant decline in the thinking skills and independence of mind of Americans. I am not clear, actually, how he correlates the advent of television with, say, the dwindling number of small independent farmers, but I agree with his argument that television has wielded enormous power in spreading a uniform set of ideas, which have become a stultifying orthodoxy. Received opinion dominates the national discussion, such as it is, thanks to the ubiquity of television, and the monolithic party line which is handed down mostly by that medium.
Newspapers are less and less influential; subscribers are fewer with each passing year, and many newspapers have disappeared because of dwindling readership. But cable news (and to some extent, the internet) are taking over the role once played by newspapers.
Lindsay writes about how the domination by the means of images rather than the printed word has made for more passive, less engaged, less imaginative citizens. It used to be said that radio, in its heyday, was the 'theatre of the mind', requiring considerable powers of active imagination and concentration on the part of its listeners. The visual media like TV, movies and videos, relying on pictures rather than words on a page, tend to 'dumb down' the populace, and literacy declines, along with the attention span.
Lindsay also mentions how political debates have become more simple-minded and devoid of serious content. This is obvious, however it may be less apparent to those who don't remember any other state of affairs. In the past, after some of the early ''debates'' in our present campaign, I drew my readers' attention to a website which contains transcripts of past presidential debates and of course there are now video clips of such debates.
The debates, even as recently as the 1960s, were true debates, and not merely 'panel discussions' and staged, scripted events which our recent debates are. However, the first series of televised presidential debates, in 1960, was the beginning of the trend of focusing on appearance, as Richard Nixon appeared nervous and sweaty on camera, while Kennedy appeared composed and confident.
I've blogged before, too, about our present society's obsession with 'image' and style, and the apparent preference for the telegenic and media-savvy candidate, no matter how inconsequential his ideas or his message. There are limitations to this analysis; if looks were all, John Edwards would be the Democrat candidate (even though some Republicans like to ridicule his looks or hairstyle, he is a telegenic, attractive man). And surely McCain would not be a frontrunner ,as he appears to be, if looks were all. But the truth is, being telegenic and glib, and facile with sound bites and one-liners counts for more these days than it did back in the days of Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, or Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.
One of the criticisms most frequently made of Tom Tancredo, who has now dropped out of the Presidential race, was that he was a 'poor speaker', too hesitant, not confident enough. On the other hand, we hear that Barack Hussein Obama's voice is supposedly a great asset. Personally, I think his voice is reminiscent of actor Ted Cassidy's.
Again, critics (most of whom, I would say, are already against Ron Paul) criticize and ridicule his 'nerdy' demeanor and his less-than-commanding voice. I say this is a shallow criticism. It is said that Thomas Jefferson had a very weak speaking style, despite his great facility with language in the written form.
Of his first Inaugural Address, it was said that
The speech was delivered in so low a tone that few heard it. Mr. Jefferson had given your Brother [Samuel Harrison Smith, editor of the National Intelligencer] a copy early in the morning, so that on coming out of the house, the paper was distributed immediately.
The second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805, like the first one, "was only partly audible."
Jefferson was by all accounts a shy and retiring man, hardly one of those back-slapping, smarmy politicians who are considered the ideal today. If today's superficial standards had applied in his day, we would have been deprived of his great genius in shaping our country.
The emphasis on looks, style, and image over substance and character are in some part a legacy of television.
Mitt Romney is considered by most to be the most 'attractive' Republican candidate (which is not saying much, considering the pickings). However I find him rather artificial and false, and I usually have a very good nose for insincerity. I was warning people about Bill Clinton from the git-go, and few were willing to be wary then; he seemed so friendly and warm, and people are so easily gulled these days.
But this is the result of looking only at the surface of people and things.
The way the primary season is shaping up, it looks as though Americans are gearing up to elect themselves another silver-tongued deceiver of whichever party, and to give a cold shoulder to principle and character.
The political campaign is just one manifestation of how television has deeply affected our society. The overall picture is that television has ensured that a single set of very liberal beliefs dominates our society, and this set of beliefs was in reality revolutionary, overturning the mores and habits of old America. The pernicious system we call 'political correctness,' which paralyzes us when it comes to protecting our territory and our people and culture, would not be possible without the role played by television in establishing 'respectable' opinion. One need not watch the cable ''news'' channels to be indoctrinated by the pundits and political hacks; one can get the party line via the favorite sitcoms, crime shows, reality shows, MTV, and even Country Music Television. And even if you manage to avoid all those, the commercials also carry the required memes. There is literally no escaping the 'message', the agenda.
And if you don't recognize that there IS an agenda and a message that is relentlessly pushed by television (and movies, and the music industry, etc.) then you are merely so used to it that you no longer see it. It is so ingrained in most Americans (and all Western peoples) these days that no one even notices it, or thinks it to be propaganda. It just 'is.' And for the younger generations, it's all they've known. So it becomes invisible, and second nature to most of us.
Lindsay correctly describes the entertainment industry in general as being about deception. And yes, some entertainment is innocuous, but few today have the discernment to sift the wheat from the chaff.
So we are easy prey for 'whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.'
It's facile to blame the 'liberals' or the baby-boomers for all that is amiss in our world, but the fact is, the process has been under way for some time, and it is not merely 'the liberals' or 'the hippies' who created the monster. It has been a process of collusion, unwitting or witting, between the ideologues who have set out to remake the world, and the people who are out to make a buck via the bread and circuses of television and the entertainment industry. The latter are happy to present subversive material if there is profit in it, and if revolution and transformation of Western society are good for their bottom line, they will happily collude. I don't know who is using whom in this strange alliance of leftists and corporate interests; I think they are both manipulating us.
As I've said, we have to free ourselves from the paralyzing effect of the prevailing orthodoxies and opinions, and as long as we are glued to the mass media, whether it's 'entertainment' or junk news on the cable news channels, we cannot extricate ourselves from the snares laid for us.
Fortunately we do have a choice; we can become aware of these destructive influences, and we can walk away, and we can create alternatives. It will be a long-term effort, and distressingly, we have a short time frame in which to try to reverse course, but we really have no choice but to try. The present course is taking us perilously close to a point of no return.
Forum comments here.
I had been thinking of the huge role that the advent of television had in the social revolution that we mostly associate with the Sixties, and with my generation, the baby-boomers. While I acknowledge the foolishness of my generation and the responsibility we bore for some of the social destruction which was in full swing in the 60s and thereafter, I have argued that the changes we all recognize were in fact already well under way when my peers and I were children in the 50s, and even before.
Television, which began regular national broadcasting in the late 1940s, was a huge factor.
Television became an incredibly influential medium, which truly revolutionized the world.
This piece by Hereward Lindsay, called On the Decline of Our People, deals with the changes wrought by television, and the deleterious effects on our culture.
A friend recently sent me an email that concluded:
The cathode ray tube was the most powerful invention of the 20th century. I defy anybody to prove that wrong.
He didn't get any defiance from me. The malevolent impact of television is a subject I have thought about a lot. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that my hyper-Calvinist ancestors were right in their suspicion of drama and actors. (Socrates, by the way, had somewhat similar ideas. Read Plato's dialogue the Ion and you will be astonished at how timely it is with its warnings about actors trying to influence government policy and their inherent bad character as people who are professionals at creating illusions and fantasies, i.e. trained deceivers and people whose minds are not grounded in the concrete and real.)
All of us American dissidents (or "thought criminals", as might be more appropriate) have lain awake at night throughout our adult lives trying to figure out how our race and civilization have collapsed. There is no subject more important and more entitled to consideration.''
[Emphasis mine]
Lindsay goes on to tie together certain trends in our society, factors such as decline in the number of self-employed individuals, and the concomitant decline in the thinking skills and independence of mind of Americans. I am not clear, actually, how he correlates the advent of television with, say, the dwindling number of small independent farmers, but I agree with his argument that television has wielded enormous power in spreading a uniform set of ideas, which have become a stultifying orthodoxy. Received opinion dominates the national discussion, such as it is, thanks to the ubiquity of television, and the monolithic party line which is handed down mostly by that medium.
Newspapers are less and less influential; subscribers are fewer with each passing year, and many newspapers have disappeared because of dwindling readership. But cable news (and to some extent, the internet) are taking over the role once played by newspapers.
Lindsay writes about how the domination by the means of images rather than the printed word has made for more passive, less engaged, less imaginative citizens. It used to be said that radio, in its heyday, was the 'theatre of the mind', requiring considerable powers of active imagination and concentration on the part of its listeners. The visual media like TV, movies and videos, relying on pictures rather than words on a page, tend to 'dumb down' the populace, and literacy declines, along with the attention span.
Lindsay also mentions how political debates have become more simple-minded and devoid of serious content. This is obvious, however it may be less apparent to those who don't remember any other state of affairs. In the past, after some of the early ''debates'' in our present campaign, I drew my readers' attention to a website which contains transcripts of past presidential debates and of course there are now video clips of such debates.
The debates, even as recently as the 1960s, were true debates, and not merely 'panel discussions' and staged, scripted events which our recent debates are. However, the first series of televised presidential debates, in 1960, was the beginning of the trend of focusing on appearance, as Richard Nixon appeared nervous and sweaty on camera, while Kennedy appeared composed and confident.
I've blogged before, too, about our present society's obsession with 'image' and style, and the apparent preference for the telegenic and media-savvy candidate, no matter how inconsequential his ideas or his message. There are limitations to this analysis; if looks were all, John Edwards would be the Democrat candidate (even though some Republicans like to ridicule his looks or hairstyle, he is a telegenic, attractive man). And surely McCain would not be a frontrunner ,as he appears to be, if looks were all. But the truth is, being telegenic and glib, and facile with sound bites and one-liners counts for more these days than it did back in the days of Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, or Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.
One of the criticisms most frequently made of Tom Tancredo, who has now dropped out of the Presidential race, was that he was a 'poor speaker', too hesitant, not confident enough. On the other hand, we hear that Barack Hussein Obama's voice is supposedly a great asset. Personally, I think his voice is reminiscent of actor Ted Cassidy's.
Again, critics (most of whom, I would say, are already against Ron Paul) criticize and ridicule his 'nerdy' demeanor and his less-than-commanding voice. I say this is a shallow criticism. It is said that Thomas Jefferson had a very weak speaking style, despite his great facility with language in the written form.
Of his first Inaugural Address, it was said that
The speech was delivered in so low a tone that few heard it. Mr. Jefferson had given your Brother [Samuel Harrison Smith, editor of the National Intelligencer] a copy early in the morning, so that on coming out of the house, the paper was distributed immediately.
The second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805, like the first one, "was only partly audible."
Jefferson was by all accounts a shy and retiring man, hardly one of those back-slapping, smarmy politicians who are considered the ideal today. If today's superficial standards had applied in his day, we would have been deprived of his great genius in shaping our country.
The emphasis on looks, style, and image over substance and character are in some part a legacy of television.
Mitt Romney is considered by most to be the most 'attractive' Republican candidate (which is not saying much, considering the pickings). However I find him rather artificial and false, and I usually have a very good nose for insincerity. I was warning people about Bill Clinton from the git-go, and few were willing to be wary then; he seemed so friendly and warm, and people are so easily gulled these days.
But this is the result of looking only at the surface of people and things.
The way the primary season is shaping up, it looks as though Americans are gearing up to elect themselves another silver-tongued deceiver of whichever party, and to give a cold shoulder to principle and character.
The political campaign is just one manifestation of how television has deeply affected our society. The overall picture is that television has ensured that a single set of very liberal beliefs dominates our society, and this set of beliefs was in reality revolutionary, overturning the mores and habits of old America. The pernicious system we call 'political correctness,' which paralyzes us when it comes to protecting our territory and our people and culture, would not be possible without the role played by television in establishing 'respectable' opinion. One need not watch the cable ''news'' channels to be indoctrinated by the pundits and political hacks; one can get the party line via the favorite sitcoms, crime shows, reality shows, MTV, and even Country Music Television. And even if you manage to avoid all those, the commercials also carry the required memes. There is literally no escaping the 'message', the agenda.
And if you don't recognize that there IS an agenda and a message that is relentlessly pushed by television (and movies, and the music industry, etc.) then you are merely so used to it that you no longer see it. It is so ingrained in most Americans (and all Western peoples) these days that no one even notices it, or thinks it to be propaganda. It just 'is.' And for the younger generations, it's all they've known. So it becomes invisible, and second nature to most of us.
Lindsay correctly describes the entertainment industry in general as being about deception. And yes, some entertainment is innocuous, but few today have the discernment to sift the wheat from the chaff.
So we are easy prey for 'whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.'
It's facile to blame the 'liberals' or the baby-boomers for all that is amiss in our world, but the fact is, the process has been under way for some time, and it is not merely 'the liberals' or 'the hippies' who created the monster. It has been a process of collusion, unwitting or witting, between the ideologues who have set out to remake the world, and the people who are out to make a buck via the bread and circuses of television and the entertainment industry. The latter are happy to present subversive material if there is profit in it, and if revolution and transformation of Western society are good for their bottom line, they will happily collude. I don't know who is using whom in this strange alliance of leftists and corporate interests; I think they are both manipulating us.
As I've said, we have to free ourselves from the paralyzing effect of the prevailing orthodoxies and opinions, and as long as we are glued to the mass media, whether it's 'entertainment' or junk news on the cable news channels, we cannot extricate ourselves from the snares laid for us.
Fortunately we do have a choice; we can become aware of these destructive influences, and we can walk away, and we can create alternatives. It will be a long-term effort, and distressingly, we have a short time frame in which to try to reverse course, but we really have no choice but to try. The present course is taking us perilously close to a point of no return.
Forum comments here.
Labels: Corportate Media, Entertainment Media, Identity Politics, Junk News, Propaganda, Societal Decay, Television, Western Decline
0 comment Monday, June 16, 2014 | admin
Our cotton-candy-fluffy-bunny news
...To confirm the permanence of our society's deterioration, news of Lindsay Lohan, as well as the meltdown of Britney Spears, spread across TV screens Thursday and Friday like a bad virus on your computer. Yet these are these stories Americans want. We clamor for news about our favorite celebrities. Does she trim her nails herself? Did he have a weekend fling on the beach? Will they get married, or just continue living together for the next 12 years?
Why are we so shallow?''
Are we so shallow?
I've blogged about the issue addressed in this article before: our junk-food news, or as Jonathan Krive calls it, our cotton candy news.
I question whether we are fed this stuff because of public demand, or because for whatever reason, our media elites want to feed us this non-nourishing, empty-calories substitute for real news of importance.
There are elements of both aspects: if people are demanding this non-nutritive filler as their 'news'-- and I suspect a certain segment of the public does prefer it -- it is because of decades of dumbing-down, in our media and in our school system and our popular culture generally.
Still, I encounter plenty of people, not overly educated or highbrow people, high-school educated, not hard news junkies, who express disgust at the surfeit of the 'bimbo' stories. Outside of Lohan's fanboys and fangirlies, I think many people wonder why the news channels waste so much airtime on Lohan's misbehavior. It is not just overeducated, ultra-serious people who are disgusted with the cotton-candy, bimbo-oriented 'news' on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. It is average people too who are sick of the fluff and nonsense that fills our news channels and those supermarket magazines.
However it is probably true that the younger generations in particular, having grown up in a trivia-driven, celebrity-fawning culture, are more accepting of it. And these younger generations have, not coincidentally, grown up with an educational system that neglects the basics and focuses on making kids 'feel good about themselves'. There is also an overemphasis on Politically Correct ideology at the expense of teaching young people about their own heritage and culture. I've heard from some of them that they spent more time in school learning about (probably apocryphal) African kingdoms than about the founding of our country, or about the English traditions from which our unique American system derives.
How can young people take an interest in the actual news of what is going on around the world, and hope to decipher it, without a grounding in history and political science and geography?
Krive, in the linked article, quotes from Joseph Farah's piece on 'The dumbing down of America.'
In that piece, Farah quotes questions from an eighth grade exam from the year 1895.
For example, these questions on American History:
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?''
Now I, despite having had a good solid education back in the olden days, might have to struggle a little on some of those questions, but I wonder how many could answer more than one or two nowadays?
Back in the era in which that test was written, an eighth-grade education was all that many Americans would have; they had a graduation ceremony at the end of the eighth grade school year, and received certificates, following which many of them would proceed to some kind of apprenticeship in a trade or livelihood of some sort; only the more academically talented would go on to high school, and even fewer of those on to college. That was perhaps a better system. It's often been said that an eighth-grade education then was better than today's high school education. Nowadays, even the high school education has been woefully dumbed down, so as to allow as many as possible to 'graduate', and then go on to college, where they are really out of their depth -- despite the fact that college, too, is watered down and geared to the lowest common denominator.
Even when I attended college in the 70s, my counselor, in helping me put together my class schedule, commented that few students were choosing a classical education, with basic courses like World History, English literature, and so on; most seemed to be choosing psychology and sociology and 'relevant' courses like Minority History and Women's History. Once the old core requirements were dropped and dumbed down and the politically correct pabulum offered, most students opted out of the basics and chose the fluff. Nowadays we read of classes having to do with the 'gay experience' and pornography, as well as the frivolous courses on popular culture, which is, after all, ephemeral.
The goal these days seems to be to grind out as many 'graduates' as possible, rather than to truly educate and enlighten the majority of students, or to fully develop the talents of the more able. And the goal is also to make students 'feel good about themselves' by forcing some kind of pretended 'equality' among people, with the mediocre student and the laggard not made to feel inferior by some inconsiderate prodigy.
So whose interest does it serve to make people more shallow and ignorant, or to focus their attention on the antics of drug-addled 'celebrities'? Are we fed this stuff because the media elites truly think it is newsworthy? Is it simply eye-candy, because people want to look at 'beautiful people' like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan? Or is it meant to distract us from the real, behind-the-scenes, world-changing events? Is it just a sideshow to keep us occupied and to further dumb us down?
Or is it merely another side-effect of the feminizing of our society? It does seem that many women are more focused on the doings of other women, the clothes they wear, the hairstyles, the plastic surgery, their private lives, who they sleep with and/or marry, and so on? I'm a female and I know that not all women are into this gossip as news thing, but a good percentage of them are.
Just look at the TV channels which are 'women's channels': the Lifetime Movie channel, which specializes in soap-operaesque movies about domestic abuse, troubled romances, and so on, and the Oxygen network, which takes a relentlessly PC, 'you-go-girl' look at the world, with focus on 'women's problems': relationships, fashion, sex, body image.
Back in the 1970s, in the era in which feminism was commanding so much attention, Irish writer Desmond Fennell
wrote a piece which asked an interesting question. I cannot locate anything of the piece online, and I no longer have it, but his question was essentially 'why do feminists act as if woman has no soul?' The question was in response to the new 'feminist' talk shows which were all the rage then: there were many such talk shows, hosted by some earnest feminist, interviewing other women of course, on subjects of interest to women. Fennell, if I am recalling correctly, pointed out that the women never discussed deep spiritual or philosophical questions, but only things like women's health, relationships, body image, and feminist politics and letters. They seldom seemed to deal with the wider, more inclusive world. The same gynocentric concerns are served up by Oprah and her ilk today. Fennell pointed out that the feminists criticized the 'misogynistic' prejudices of early theologians who questioned whether 'women had no souls' -- and yet the feminists themselves seemed to corroborate that opinion by dwelling only on parochial female concerns, mostly of a fleshly nature. That same observation can be made today.
But I stop short of blaming only my fellow females for this phenomenon of junk news. Maybe the reasons for this trend include a little of all of the above.
So what, if anything, can we do about it, if we don't like it? The usual answer is 'just turn the TV off', which may not be bad advice, but even those of us who turn off, tune out, and drop into the real world instead of the TV world, still have to deal with the reality which is fed and fostered by the trashy content of the media. And if we have children, those children are affected by the unfortunate trends, unless we truly do drop out and homeschool them and isolate them from the worst excesses of junk culture.
But my concern is the dire state of our country, and of the West in general, and the fact that the cotton candy news is acting to dull people's awareness, to merely keep them entertained and distracted. The junk news is empty calories, taking the place of necessary mental nourishment.
Ultimately this junk news diet will be deadly to our Republic, producing, as it does, dulled and disconnected citizens who lack information or critical thinking skills to make responsible decisions about our future.
Does it help to write to the networks or other news media and make your concerns known? Or will they respond once they lose sufficent viewers and readers? We read every day about how the dead-tree media, the old print newspapers, are losing readers at an alarming rate. Has this changed how they do business? I see no evidence of that yet. And with cable TV, news channels are not subject to the same pressures as newspapers, considering that cable channels are carried as part of a package, so that the channels with a tiny viewership are not eliminated from the lineup.
The only hopeful sign I can point to is that people are slowly getting disenchanted and downright fed up with their TV news and newspapers, and many are looking elsewhere, as on the internet. And now the blogosphere is an alternate source for news and especially opinion and analysis not allowed by the narrow standards of the controlled media.
I can only hope that the TV news media and the dead tree media will become increasingly irrelevant and obsolete, and that people will turn to sources which treat them as sentient, thinking human beings and not as dull-witted units of consumption.
...To confirm the permanence of our society's deterioration, news of Lindsay Lohan, as well as the meltdown of Britney Spears, spread across TV screens Thursday and Friday like a bad virus on your computer. Yet these are these stories Americans want. We clamor for news about our favorite celebrities. Does she trim her nails herself? Did he have a weekend fling on the beach? Will they get married, or just continue living together for the next 12 years?
Why are we so shallow?''
Are we so shallow?
I've blogged about the issue addressed in this article before: our junk-food news, or as Jonathan Krive calls it, our cotton candy news.
I question whether we are fed this stuff because of public demand, or because for whatever reason, our media elites want to feed us this non-nourishing, empty-calories substitute for real news of importance.
There are elements of both aspects: if people are demanding this non-nutritive filler as their 'news'-- and I suspect a certain segment of the public does prefer it -- it is because of decades of dumbing-down, in our media and in our school system and our popular culture generally.
Still, I encounter plenty of people, not overly educated or highbrow people, high-school educated, not hard news junkies, who express disgust at the surfeit of the 'bimbo' stories. Outside of Lohan's fanboys and fangirlies, I think many people wonder why the news channels waste so much airtime on Lohan's misbehavior. It is not just overeducated, ultra-serious people who are disgusted with the cotton-candy, bimbo-oriented 'news' on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. It is average people too who are sick of the fluff and nonsense that fills our news channels and those supermarket magazines.
However it is probably true that the younger generations in particular, having grown up in a trivia-driven, celebrity-fawning culture, are more accepting of it. And these younger generations have, not coincidentally, grown up with an educational system that neglects the basics and focuses on making kids 'feel good about themselves'. There is also an overemphasis on Politically Correct ideology at the expense of teaching young people about their own heritage and culture. I've heard from some of them that they spent more time in school learning about (probably apocryphal) African kingdoms than about the founding of our country, or about the English traditions from which our unique American system derives.
How can young people take an interest in the actual news of what is going on around the world, and hope to decipher it, without a grounding in history and political science and geography?
Krive, in the linked article, quotes from Joseph Farah's piece on 'The dumbing down of America.'
In that piece, Farah quotes questions from an eighth grade exam from the year 1895.
For example, these questions on American History:
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?''
Now I, despite having had a good solid education back in the olden days, might have to struggle a little on some of those questions, but I wonder how many could answer more than one or two nowadays?
Back in the era in which that test was written, an eighth-grade education was all that many Americans would have; they had a graduation ceremony at the end of the eighth grade school year, and received certificates, following which many of them would proceed to some kind of apprenticeship in a trade or livelihood of some sort; only the more academically talented would go on to high school, and even fewer of those on to college. That was perhaps a better system. It's often been said that an eighth-grade education then was better than today's high school education. Nowadays, even the high school education has been woefully dumbed down, so as to allow as many as possible to 'graduate', and then go on to college, where they are really out of their depth -- despite the fact that college, too, is watered down and geared to the lowest common denominator.
Even when I attended college in the 70s, my counselor, in helping me put together my class schedule, commented that few students were choosing a classical education, with basic courses like World History, English literature, and so on; most seemed to be choosing psychology and sociology and 'relevant' courses like Minority History and Women's History. Once the old core requirements were dropped and dumbed down and the politically correct pabulum offered, most students opted out of the basics and chose the fluff. Nowadays we read of classes having to do with the 'gay experience' and pornography, as well as the frivolous courses on popular culture, which is, after all, ephemeral.
The goal these days seems to be to grind out as many 'graduates' as possible, rather than to truly educate and enlighten the majority of students, or to fully develop the talents of the more able. And the goal is also to make students 'feel good about themselves' by forcing some kind of pretended 'equality' among people, with the mediocre student and the laggard not made to feel inferior by some inconsiderate prodigy.
So whose interest does it serve to make people more shallow and ignorant, or to focus their attention on the antics of drug-addled 'celebrities'? Are we fed this stuff because the media elites truly think it is newsworthy? Is it simply eye-candy, because people want to look at 'beautiful people' like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan? Or is it meant to distract us from the real, behind-the-scenes, world-changing events? Is it just a sideshow to keep us occupied and to further dumb us down?
Or is it merely another side-effect of the feminizing of our society? It does seem that many women are more focused on the doings of other women, the clothes they wear, the hairstyles, the plastic surgery, their private lives, who they sleep with and/or marry, and so on? I'm a female and I know that not all women are into this gossip as news thing, but a good percentage of them are.
Just look at the TV channels which are 'women's channels': the Lifetime Movie channel, which specializes in soap-operaesque movies about domestic abuse, troubled romances, and so on, and the Oxygen network, which takes a relentlessly PC, 'you-go-girl' look at the world, with focus on 'women's problems': relationships, fashion, sex, body image.
Back in the 1970s, in the era in which feminism was commanding so much attention, Irish writer Desmond Fennell
wrote a piece which asked an interesting question. I cannot locate anything of the piece online, and I no longer have it, but his question was essentially 'why do feminists act as if woman has no soul?' The question was in response to the new 'feminist' talk shows which were all the rage then: there were many such talk shows, hosted by some earnest feminist, interviewing other women of course, on subjects of interest to women. Fennell, if I am recalling correctly, pointed out that the women never discussed deep spiritual or philosophical questions, but only things like women's health, relationships, body image, and feminist politics and letters. They seldom seemed to deal with the wider, more inclusive world. The same gynocentric concerns are served up by Oprah and her ilk today. Fennell pointed out that the feminists criticized the 'misogynistic' prejudices of early theologians who questioned whether 'women had no souls' -- and yet the feminists themselves seemed to corroborate that opinion by dwelling only on parochial female concerns, mostly of a fleshly nature. That same observation can be made today.
But I stop short of blaming only my fellow females for this phenomenon of junk news. Maybe the reasons for this trend include a little of all of the above.
So what, if anything, can we do about it, if we don't like it? The usual answer is 'just turn the TV off', which may not be bad advice, but even those of us who turn off, tune out, and drop into the real world instead of the TV world, still have to deal with the reality which is fed and fostered by the trashy content of the media. And if we have children, those children are affected by the unfortunate trends, unless we truly do drop out and homeschool them and isolate them from the worst excesses of junk culture.
But my concern is the dire state of our country, and of the West in general, and the fact that the cotton candy news is acting to dull people's awareness, to merely keep them entertained and distracted. The junk news is empty calories, taking the place of necessary mental nourishment.
Ultimately this junk news diet will be deadly to our Republic, producing, as it does, dulled and disconnected citizens who lack information or critical thinking skills to make responsible decisions about our future.
Does it help to write to the networks or other news media and make your concerns known? Or will they respond once they lose sufficent viewers and readers? We read every day about how the dead-tree media, the old print newspapers, are losing readers at an alarming rate. Has this changed how they do business? I see no evidence of that yet. And with cable TV, news channels are not subject to the same pressures as newspapers, considering that cable channels are carried as part of a package, so that the channels with a tiny viewership are not eliminated from the lineup.
The only hopeful sign I can point to is that people are slowly getting disenchanted and downright fed up with their TV news and newspapers, and many are looking elsewhere, as on the internet. And now the blogosphere is an alternate source for news and especially opinion and analysis not allowed by the narrow standards of the controlled media.
I can only hope that the TV news media and the dead tree media will become increasingly irrelevant and obsolete, and that people will turn to sources which treat them as sentient, thinking human beings and not as dull-witted units of consumption.
Labels: Celebrity Culture, Education, Feminism, Junk News, Media, News, Trivia