Why TV holds us hostage
The tendency for the electronic media to confuse rather than enlighten is exacerbated by the fact that TV talk shows have more and more fused with news so that assertions now regularly masquerade as fact. The same is true of blogging. Opinion congeals miraculously into conviction when audiences follow segmented media that reinforce what they already believe. Public discourse thus veers toward oversimplification and hype as network news-gathering declines and foreign bureaus close.
The public, obviously, is ill-served by all this, but so are our leaders. In an increasingly partisan nation, a leader can convince one half, but not the other, leaving us without a democratic consensus, vulnerable to divisive actions by our enemies. What's to be done? Recognizing the problem is a start. Government might well have to imagine media scenarios and plan for them, just as they plan for battlefield options.
Television executives and on-air talent, too, should pause to consider their role in all this. This is not to suggest censorship so much as self-discipline and respect for complexity: Journalism with context is vastly more valuable than journalism without. It is a service neither to journalism nor to the public to romanticize gore and violence and corrupt our public discourse by the distortion of language. Murders of innocent hostages are not "executions," with the false implication of due process. They are murders. The terrorist is not a commando or a guerrilla, and the spiritual leader who incites or condones killings is no such thing. The term is a disgraceful oxymoron.
The media have practiced self-discipline in relation to pornography without violating the canons of good journalism. It is no violation of either journalism or good judgment to remember that there is no moral neutrality between terrorists and the people and societies they attack.
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