Saturday, November 22, 2008
Consciously Seeking Mindlessness
NPR is underrated. It's soothing to have a nice voice telling you about what's going on in the world. And there's nothing you have to say, really no obligation from you at all. Turn it on, turn it off. Radio can fulfill the same desire as does TV - you gain insight about the wide world outside of your life in a way that is undemanding of you. However, many people would agree that TV nowadays is mindless, and you can argue that NPR is certainly not. But does this mean that people are actually consciously seeking mindlessness? Why not just stare at the ceiling for an hour? You’d get the same result, and it’d probably be more relaxing.
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2 comments:
Some of the problem is due to the fact that most news can be categorically called "for-profit" industry, and thus managed at some level by businesspeople concerned with profit margins and shareprice. Case in point: Foxnews vs. MSNBC. Different target audiences = different news.
What would be helpful is some sort of index to indicate the particular biases (within a broad sociopolitical spectrum) of whichever "news" programs you prefer.
As the previous quotation marks imply, what exactly constitutes "news" today is in itself a troubling difficulty.
I personally believe that NPR, Public Broadcasting, News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and Fareed Zakaria GPS are a good starting point for defining "news" because they offer substantive dialogue with a bias more towards educating audiences than the sale of talking points.
As far as consciously seeking mindlessness, the scary part is that in some respects, this phrase is right on the money. We are so acclimated to political spin doctoring and rhetorical posturing that we get tired of it. We are jaded to the intellectual manipulation so prevalent in news.
It's exhausting, trying sort out what's really going on.
Thank you for this added insight! More more!
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