Mosaic Life

Trivial vs. News

So I’m taking a Survey of Broadcast Media, and of course, I hear a lot about how Americans only want to hear about entertainment news. We’d rather hear about Britney Spears flashing her nether regions than the people dying in the war in Iraq. And when it comes to “real news,” anything that isn’t sensational gets pushed back to the end of the news segment.

Of course, all of that is true. The news gives us what we want. But why do we want that? Why don’t we want to hear about the important issues rather than the superficial? I’d argue that it’s part of self-preservation, at least psychologically. No one wants to think about things that are tragic and unfair in the world when there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s mentally taxing. Plus, if we want to see gore and hear about atrocities, we can always watch a violent movie and then brush it off because it isn’t real. With the news, not so much.

For instance. The other night in class we learned about this story that got pushed to the back of the nightly news so that most people were asleep when it came on. The story was about how some of the hospitals that America has built in Iraq aren’t finished; the sewage is all messed up, they can’t afford to power the hospitals, they only have one oxygen machine for the NICU so that babies have to share–that’s right–take turns getting oxygen. Oh! And this nice truck that America donated to them, which has an American flag and “from the American people” written on the side, and has new wheels and a new coat of paint (they were told it was new), is actually over 60 years old. They had to crank the thing up. So the claim that we’re over there spreading democracy and trying to help seems all the more like an unconvincing facade; we only want to look like we’re over there for a noble cause. But here’s the thing. There’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t have the money or the equipment to help finish the hospitals. And all it does is make me sad and annoyed. Yeah, I can “do my part” by voting, and I will, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

So yeah, I do prefer to hear about trivial things. I haven’t gotten to a point where I don’t watch or read the news (I have CNN, BBC, and Yahoo news on my RSS feed), but I’m getting close.