Where Have All the Fair and Balanced News People Gone? from Schmeg.com

   

If things have gotten so bad that we are lied to on a constant basis until we can no longer distinguish fact from fiction, what is the answer?
--What is the most likely thing people can do to change their current fate of being distracted and pickpocketed?
--We can bitch about the ill effects of TV and the mass media until our face turn blue but is it really realistic to tell people to turn off their TV's and expect them to do so?

There are no "fair and balanced people" and there never have been in the mainstream. Not Cronkite. Not Murray. In fact, no journalist should EVER be "fair and balanced;" they should be one thing and one thing only: unfailingly suspicious of all things all the time. That is what makes a great journalist and that is what has been bought and paid for in order to make it stop.

You can't distinguish fact from fiction. You don't have that ability. No one has that ability except those of us who are on the other side of your screen, so consider it all fiction, all the time. That way, you'll always be right.

Marshall McLuhan was trying to tell everybody a very important thing; the medium is the message. What does that mean? It means that, even if you were being told the absolute Truth from one pundit in one fifteen second sound bite, it would be entirely irrelevant to the daily tsunami of lies, manipulations and misrepresentations not just from the content, but from the manner in which the technology is set up.

Televisions are made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny light projectors that are projecting various colors of light upside down onto the back of your eyeballs at a strobe rate of thirty frames per second. That is how the technology works; it is your brain that corrects for all of that and makes the image appear as if it is "out there" on a screen, but it is not the case.

Knowing that, as you do now, I dare you to stare into a steady light source for more than a minute and remain consciously aware and intellectually challenged by your surroundings. It can't be done. So what makes you think you can be actively processing any information in any relevant manner when you're staring at hundreds of thousands of varying light sources blinking on and off so many times per second that you don't even know it's happening?

TV induces passivity which stops critical analysis as a function of the medium itself. That's why you can watch eight hours of TV without moving and absorb almost nothing but the most salacious or viscerally extreme. You literally have no way to filter that onslaught (short of closing your eyes or turning off the TV); you can only accept the input as it happens in realtime. Worse, your brain is too busy re-interpreting the IMAGE to deal with the CONTENT, so it's a moot point, regardless.

Do you understand what it is I'm telling you? It isn't the programmers, necessarily; it's the nature of the technology itself. We know it, and we use that to make you do what we want you to do. Which is, by and large, nothing. Absolutely nothing. Don't think, just respond. Respond to the pictures and the sounds and the colors; orange to make you hungry; red to make you angry; blue to make you calm; etc, etc, etc.

It's visceral, not academic, which is why you can watch 'Dateline' after 'Dateline' and a hundred '60 Minutes' pieces and think that you're being "fully informed," when the fact is, all you're being is programmed to buy shit. That's why it's called "spin."

Read Jerry Mander's "The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" and get back to me with what you misperceive to be my pessimistic attitude. I am not a pessimist or doomsayer in the slightest. I am a realist and here I speak only the truth. Why? Because the truth can only be heard by the fringe.

Insanity is repeating the same bad behavior and expecting a different result.