Good News You Can Use

What kind of information do you regularly receive from your favorite media sources? What type of picture do they paint about American society? Chris Michaud in a New York Post feature writes, "A surprising 94 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with their lives -- although far fewer in New York and other Eastern states think they're better off than they were five years ago, according to a new survey."

"The Harris Poll of more than 1,000 people reported the overall 'satisfaction' level, defined as people who said they were either very or somewhat satisfied with their lot, was up 4 percentage points, from 90 percent two years ago. But only 42 percent of people in the Eastern U.S. said things had improved since 2002. By contrast, 60 percent of Southerners and 62 percent of Westerners said their lives had improved."

Why is this poll surprising? Perhaps certain media powers are pushing an agenda. So, perhaps, ignore the New York Times and the other eastern media elite, and you have a better chance of grasping current reality

The Peek-a-Boo World

Professor Neil Postman in his 1985 landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death offers a brilliant portrait of how television consistently offers us a false view of reality. Here is an excerpt from the start of Chapter 5, "The Peek-a-Boo World":

"Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange."

"There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane."

"It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms."

"Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago."