"Every time one of these (non-) stories comes up ... when it’s finally over I think, what a relief, now we can get back to real news. But we never do. When one of these big league nonstories ends, they just call up a new one from the minors... and off they go with another round of breathless reporting. Anything to not have to actually report actual news. ...You know how you occasionally see something labelled a damning indictment?
When defending these choices, news execs inevitably fall back on the old "we're just giving the people what they want." But are they? Fox News averages around two and a quarter million viewers in primetime; CNN hovers just under a million; MSNBC pulls in a quarter million. We have 280 million people in the country. That means that tens of millions of people actually don't want what they're being given -- and that there are huge slices of audience a real news operation could go after.
The mainstream media regularly confuse interesting with important. What's more, they don't even do the former very well, and they largely ignore the latter."
"Researchers at the University of Chicago figured out a way to correlate people’s activities with their moods throughout an average week. What they found was that their subjects got more pleasure from almost anything (talking to their sister on the phone, playing volleyball at the Y) than they did from the tube. Does anyone get up from a night of viewing feeling refreshed, looking forward to the next night so they can do it all again?
So why do we watch? Why do we submerge ourselves in a material culture that brings us little pleasure and less fulfillment? Because, probably, it’s the first risk-free environment humans have yet conjured. We can use it to control our emotions like we can use the thermostat on the wall to control the climate in our houses. Any time we want to balance our mood we know how to do it, which shows to watch.
How might this nearly perfect feedback loop be broken? Not by telling people it’s bad for the environment, that they’ve enmeshed themselves in a matrix that inevitably leads to overconsumption and more carbon dioxide and general horror. Generally speaking, people are less responsive to general horror than to General Motors. The only way to subvert people any more is to have more fun than they do. To walk in the woods, to brew beer, to volunteer in a homeless shelter, to act in a play, to do anything real that escapes the stifling, cynical world of TV and the mall. The world feels threatened by such folk -- by people doing what the rest of the population dimly knows somewhere deep down they would like to do too.
... at least you can learn to live differently. The world may not be saved, but your life will. And that’s something, anyway."
On the television show American Idol --
"... the viewers are invited to roar while young people who in many cases appear to be poor, of low intelligence or even mildly disturbed, sing enthusiastically and then stand gape-mouthed with shock while their heroes insult them on national television.
One of the points of any reality show is to allow the audience to watch as contestants humiliate themselves ... But there is a very wide gap between demonstrating that life is full of hard knocks and embarrassment, and glorying in the abasement of the utterly defenseless."
... I have been wrestling with a difficult mystery. ... the strange disappearance of social capital and civic engagement in America. By "social capital," I mean features of social life -- networks, norms, and trust -- that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives. (Whether or not their shared goals are praiseworthy is, of course, entirely another matter.) I use the term "civic engagement" to refer to people's connections with the life of their communities, not only with politics. ...Emphasis and links are mine -- ed.
Education is by far the strongest correlate that I have discovered of civic engagement in all its forms, including social trust and membership in many different types of groups. In fact, the effects of education become greater and greater as we move up the educational ladder. The four years of education between 14 and 18 total years have ten times more impact on trust and membership than the first four years of formal education. This curvilinear pattern applies to both men and women, and to all races and generations. ... well-educated people are much more likely to be joiners and trusters, partly because they are better off economically, but mostly because of the skills, resources, and inclinations that were imparted to them at home and in school. ...
In all our statistical analyses, however, one factor, second only to education, stands out as a predictor of all forms of civic engagement and trust. That factor is age. Older people belong to more organizations than young people, and they are less misanthropic. Older Americans also vote more often and read newspapers more frequently, two other forms of civic engagement closely correlated with joining and trusting. ...
The central paradox posed by these patterns is this: Older people are consistently more engaged and trusting than younger people, yet we do not become more engaged and trusting as we age. What's going on here?
... each generation that reached adulthood since the 1940s has been less engaged in community affairs than its immediate predecessor.
... the most parsimonious interpretation of the age-related differences in civic engagement is that they represent a powerful reduction in civic engagement among Americans who came of age in the decades after World War II, as well as some modest additional disengagement that affected all cohorts during the 1980s. ...
I have discovered only one prominent suspect against whom circumstantial evidence can be mounted, and in this case, it turns out, some directly incriminating evidence has also turned up. This is not the occasion to lay out the full case for the prosecution, nor to review rebuttal evidence for the defense, but I want to present evidence that justifies indictment.
The culprit is television. ...
Most studies estimate that the average American now watches roughly four hours per day (excluding periods in which television is merely playing in the background). Even a more conservative estimate of three hours means that television absorbs 40 percent of the average American's free time, an increase of about one-third since 1965. ... This massive change in the way Americans spend their days and nights occurred precisely during the years of generational civic disengagement. ...
Controlling for education, income, age, race, place of residence, work status, and gender, TV viewing is strongly and negatively related to social trust and group membership, whereas the same correlations with newspaper reading are positive. Within every educational category, heavy readers are avid joiners, whereas heavy viewers are more likely to be loners."