Turn Off Your TV--Part VIII

Here Now the News....

by L. Wolfe

Now we are ready to talk about the news programming itself,
to show you how it is designed to brainwash you.
Remember that we said the average American now watches one to
two hours of news programming each night. That programming breaks
down into three categories, and a supplemental category.
@sb|Each network has its main nightly news broadcast, in prime
time, usually around dinner hour, for approximately 30 minutes:
NBC's nightly news with Tom Brokaw, ABC's with Peter Jennings,
and CBS's with Dan Rather. These news shows are supplemented
by local news, which runs one to two hours over the course of
an evening, usually divided between a dinner time broadcast
and a late evening ``wrap up'' show. Such shows may repeat items
from the network nightly news, but also include local stories
and features, as well as sports and weather.
@sb|In addition, there are news feature and interview shows
broadcast at various times during the week. We should include
in this category shows such as {Meet the Press}, ABC's {Nightline},
{Face the Nation} and similar shows in a basic interview format.
The {McNeil/Lehrer Newshour} on PBS falls into this category,
even though each show has a five to eight minute news summary;
the basic format of the show is interview and feature.
@sb|A third category of show is the ``news magazine,'' which
features sensationalist stories of the kinds found in supermarket
tabloids, with a healthy dose of titilation and bizarre subject
matter. CBS's {60 Minutes} falls into this category, despite
the fact that it sticks mostly to ``hard news.'' All the other
news magazine shows, such as ABC's {Prime Time Live}, more accurately
fit the previous description.
@sb|Finally, this programming is supplemented by network news
features and coverage of ``news events,'' such as the political
party conventions.
In all, approximately 10-15 percent of all network television
broadcasting is occupied with the ``news,'' as we have described
it. That percentage has grown over the last 40 years.
However, while some of the news magazine shows, including {60
Minutes}, may grab large viewerships with their muckraking stories,
studies show that Americans don't consider them a {reliable}
source of news. That is because the shows appear to be {advocating}
something, or as your neighbor might put it, ``they have an
axe to grind.'' Such shows are judged as {entertainment}. Therefore,
it should be no surprise that {60 Minutes} was once the top-rated
show on all television.

The Bland `Truth'

It is the network and local news shows that Americans turn to,
to find out the ``way it is,'' as longtime CBS anchorman, Walter
Cronkite used to say.  Such shows, for the most part, display
little in open advocacy of any {apparent} point of view.
According to nearly every study done on the subject in the last
20 years, Americans in overwhelming numbers believe that they
are being told ``the truth'' by Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings,
and local anchors around the country. In fact, they believe
this so strongly, that they rarely question the content of news
shows, rarely think that the news is distorted or slanted, and
believe that they can distinguish between editorial content
and news reporting easily enough so as to not feel that they
are being ``secretly'' preached to.
These survey results reflect the success of the news format
as brainwashing. As with other television programming we have
discussed, the design of the format, which includes both the
organization of material and the {language} used to describe
that material, is the product of years of study of techniques
of {mass persuasion} through the use of communications media.
Let's try to make some general observations about your nightly
news telecasts. Think for a moment about what they have in common.
Well, they each have what is called an {anchor person} who reads
most of the news, and introduces the other reporters and stories.
Those stories, both the ones he reads and the others he introduces,
are all short, with most being under a minute and many under
30 seconds. A clip of a newsmaker speaking, for example, is
never more than a few seconds long. Even when interviewed by
a news reporter, what is shown is always a few short sentences.
Now what about the {language} in the newscasts? Other than the
names of individuals or places that might at first seem unfamiliar,
do you ever have any trouble understanding what is being said,
as you might for example, in a classroom lecture or even when
reading a newspaper article? Not really: The language is extremely
simple and direct.
And finally, consider the editing of the show: Is it ever apparent
to you that someone is controlling what you are seeing and hearing,
that it is being edited, scripted, and directed, as if it were
a movie, or another television show? The newscast, despite its
disjointed content, appears to you to be {seamless}, a natural
flow of information.
Now, we'll show each of these features of format--the anchor
person, the short content and simple language, and the seamless
editing--comes from the study of {your profiled weaknesses}
and are designed to play into them.
Back during World War II, a group of Tavistock-linked brainwashers,
called the Committee for National Morale, worked on profiling
the American population. Among the things they analyzed was
the War Bond sales drive, trying to discover what persuaded
people to buy bonds.
Although the bonds were pushed by well-known celebrities, they
found that celebrity alone was not sufficient motivation to
persuade people to buy.  Their polls showed that people had
to sense that they were {not being preached to}, that the person
asking them to buy bonds had to have {no apparent or obvious
motive} other than his or her desire to do something good for
the country.
This principle of {dispassionate, but sincere persuasion} was
studied more extensively after the war. Irving Janis, who had
worked on a study overseen by Tavistock's Brig. Gen. John Rawlings
Rees that profiled the responses of the Japanese and German
populations to allied strategic bombing, the so-called Strategic
Bombing Survey, helped produce a book, {Commmunication and Persuasion},
published in 1953, as television news broadcasting was getting
underway.  Examining survey data from before and after the war,
the book concludes that the presentation of a message, to be
effective, must be done by {a person whose prestige cannot be
challenged}.  The {Communicator} of opinion must give the appearance
of {expertness} and {confidence}.
Most important, said Janis and his fellow editors, the {Communicator}
must never give the impression that it is his intention to persuade
others to his point of view. Quoting other brainwashers, he
wrote that the best delivery of opinion is in a {casual} and
{nonpurposive} manner. This lowers the resistance of a listener
or viewer, who would otherwise put up mental defenses once he
knows a person is trying to ``convince him'' of something.
To effectively communicate {opinion}, says Janis, the audience
must be predisposed to accept those {opinions} as cohering with
their {expectations}. Such effective communication does not
challenge someone to think, as much as it {persuades} one to
accept the viewpoint of the {Communicator} as {his own}.
He further found that people were more apt to accept a message
if it were presented in an atmosphere of heightened tension,
in which the tension level was both {raised} and then {lowered}
by the communication--if the message presented conclusions that
appeared to lower the levels of anxiety associated with what
was being reported. In that way the Communicator becomes the
person who ``makes what is confusing clear, who gives order
to chaos.''
Even the communication of {negative} news or opinions will not
harm the relationship between the Communicator and his audience.
If there is a positive bond between the two, Janis says that
the audience will tend {to dissociate} the source from the bad
news he reports.
These observations have their foundation in {Freudian mass psychology}.
The relationship established between the {Communicator} and
his audience is an infantile emotional bond, in much the same
way that a child relies on its parents for its judgment of what
is correct in the outside world. As long as the realtionship
is kept on this infantile level, a Freudian or a neo-Freudian
would observe, it will not involve a challenge to what is being
presented.
What Janis discussed, as well as what was discovered in the
earlier World War II studies, was incorporated into the formats
of early television news broadcasts.
The {Communicator} became the {news anchor}, a person whose
delivery of the news was to be reassuring and dispassionate,
and who was, at least in those early broadcasts, someone who
never offered his own viewpoint.  Surveys of viewers of those
early news shows most often used the word ``trustworthy'' to
describe the {news anchor}. Others found the male anchor to
be a ``fatherlike'' figure, or even a ``grandfatherlike'' figure;
that latter term was frequently associated with CBS's Walter
Cronkite in his later years.
In recent years there have been some attempts to vary this style.
Local news, for example, tends now to feature multiple anchors,
who chat with each other, and tell jokes. But even this has
precedent, in the popular {Huntley-Brinkley Report} on NBC in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, which became the first highly
rated nightly news broadcast.
Dan Rather, CBS-TV's replacement
for ``Grandfather'' Walter, almost lost his job when surveys
showed that audiences found him too hysterical and ``preachy.''
He came across as {too intense,} with people saying that they
didn't trust him. Network officials told him to ``ease up,''
or he would lose his multimillion dollar contract, at which
point he started wearing sweaters under his suit jacket.

The Origin of `News Speak'

``We try to keep it real simple,'' said a local news producer
of the language used in newscasts. ``They want the news, not
Shakespeare.''
News scriptwriters are told to load their sentences with nouns,
to limit themselves to simple verbs, and to stay away from ``florid''
modifiers.  The standard sentence form is the simple declarative
statement.
``Dog bites man,'' says the producer, ``Details at Six.''
Although the words used in the news broadcast have some {nominal}
resemblance to the English language, what you hear on the nightly
news is certainly not the beautiful English of Shakespeare,
Shelley, or Milton, nor even the English of our Founding Fathers
or Lincoln. It is a simplified language, which conveys greatly
simplified messages.
It is through language that man communicates the ideas and principles
of his culture from one generation to the next. In many respects,
man himself is defined by the {quality of his language}, for
it is the means by which the product of his creative reason,
that which distiguishes him from the animal, is communicated
and translated into effective action, on both an individual
and societal level. It is through the proper use of language
that man transforms his universe, coming to know what is Truth
and then acting on that Truth according to man's free will.
In that way man willfully changes his world, in accordance with
laws of his Creator.
Man requires a complex language, which can convey all the aspects
of the Creation, all of man's understanding of universal law.
To have anything less, is to make man less than man, limiting
his capacity {to know} and {to understand}.
The language of television news is a degraded language. It is
{nominalist}, stressing the naming of things, because it seeks
to render one passive, a {receptor}, the mechanical term Emery
and the other brainwashers use to refer to the television viewer.
There is no creative thought going on, no attempt to engage
the mind, merely to {imprint an image in a person's brain}.
Language, properly used, can give man an understanding of thought-objects
which reflect human knowledge of reality. Television news, using
its simplified language, {names} things, and tells you that
such {things}, are in fact all there is to reality. There is
no ordering principle, no concept beyond the images and words.
This simplified language of television news has its roots in
linguistic work during World War
II.   Prior to the war, British linguist C.K. Ogden had created
an artficial language from the English language. He called it
``Basic English,'' and many British intellectuals, including
many writers, found it to be nonsensical.
Ogden proposed that classic literature, such as Shakespeare,
Keats, and Shelley, could be ``translated'' into the new language,
stating that the majority of people could not comprehend them
in their present, complicated form. His opponents argued correctly
that such an effort would trivialize the greatest expression
of English language culture.
While this debate raged in intellectual circles, people at the
highest levels of the British oligarchy saw the potential brainwashing
value in what Ogden had done. He had collapsed the entire English
language into a total of 850 words. By using ``Basic,'' coupled
with the mass media, a large number of people could be given
a {simple message} without {complicated thoughts} or thought-objects,
getting in the way. Basic, its enthusiasts proclaimed, could
therefore create a simplified reality: It was like placing a
mental straightjacket on human creative potential.
When the war began, Tavistock-linked people involved with the
Ministry of Information, which controlled all broadcasting and
news dissemination, decided to try some experiments on the effectiveness
of the simplified language. The BBC was asked on an experimental
basis to produce some newscasts in Basic, mostly for overseas
consumption. The results of this experiment were to be carefully
monitored.
Those involved quickly discovered, that, with some modification,
the language was ideal to present a censored, edited version
of the news.  Since it lent itself to simple, declarative statements,
those statements seemed to have the character of {fact}, even
though the information being reported was heavily censored or
even ``propaganda.'' Those involved with the experiments and
reports requested only that Basic vocabulary be expanded to
include certain ``news terms'' that were required to provide
context for a story: ``wire service reports,'' ``according to
reliable sources,'' ``a close source,'' etc., as well as various
``news names and places.''
These experiments were run in a number of foreign sections of
the BBC, including the Indian Section, which included among
its operatives {1984} author George Orwell and his close friend,
Guy Burgess, who was later to be involved in Britain's biggest
postwar Soviet spy scandal.
In September 1943, the ``Basic experiment'' was placed on the
highest priority in the war cabinet by Prime Minister Winston
Churchill. In a speech at Harvard, Churchill publicly announced
his total conversion to the language, stating that it should
become the {lingua franc} for the Allied war effort.
``Such plans (as for the use and introduction of Basic) offer
far better prizes than taking away other people's provinces
or lands, or in grinding them down in exploitation,'' Churchill
told his Harvard audience. ``The empires of the future will
be the Empires of the Mind.''
Churchill ordered that a War Cabinet Committee be set up to
monitor ongoing experiments and to discuss ways to force the
new language on an unwilling population. The War Cabinet Committee's
report stressed the importance of the use of {mass communications
media}, in particular the BBC and BBC news. Among the recommendations
in the report was that a substantial portion of BBC overseas
output be translated into Basic and that regular lessons should
be given over the air.
In the end, those involved directly with the Basic project found
it impossible to strictly adhere to the 850 word vocabulary.
They maintained that it had to be updated with words and expressions
that reflected current usage. Memoranda from the Ministry of
Information discuss the need to keep language ``fresh,'' to
make people listening to reports connect. Above all, it must
not sound too stilted.
Although Churchill never abandoned his public advocacy of Basic,
studies of the British population revealed that people resented
being {told} how they should speak. It is, they found, far more
effective to alter people's use of language by example, or,
even more important, to continue to use the concept of a {reduced
vocabulary language} in mass media, such as radio, without making
a fuss about it.
The Basic craze tended to die out, at least publicly, quickly
after the war. It appears, however, that those involved in control
of mass media news dissemination took to heart the studies that
found that one could sell the concept of a greatly reduced vocabulary
without the rigid and sometimes stilted form of Basic. Radio
newscasts, which had been made up of long descriptive commentaries
before the war, took on the shorter formats that are featured
today. The long sentences, with literary overtones, gave way
to shorter, more direct sentences and simple vocabulary.

Keep It Real Simple

>From the very beginning, television news adopted this linguistic
style: simple direct sentences, with a very, very limited vocabulary.
This fit the new medium perfectly, since it had something that
radio didn't--actual visual images. Its producers demanded that
news reporters and ultimately anchor people let the visual images
tell the stories. ``We don't want to overwhelm those images,
do we?'' said one of the producers. ``We have to let them grab
people.''
The simplistic {verbal} language of television is mirrored in
the newspapers. To the extent that people still read, the average
person can comprehend at no more than a sixth to eighth grade
level. Excepting papers like the {The New York Times} or even
{The Washington Post}, which still try to pitch to the ruling
elites, the average newspaper contains the same simplistic vocabulary
and sentence structure as the television newscast. If you don't
believe me, grab a copy of {USA Today} and look for yourself.
This then is {News speak}. It's become so pervasive that when
someone seems to break out of the mould, when they speak about
newsworthy matters in a manner befitting their importance, using
a more literate language and sentence structure, the majority
of you out there tend to ``turn off.''
``We're trying to make sure that people who watch the {Simpsons}
understand what we are saying, while people who watch {Masterpiece
Theater} (on PBS--ed.) are not too horribly offended,'' said
a news producer. ``We strike a middle ground, but we err on
the side of the {Simpsons}.''
Let's turn our attention to the {format} of your nightly news
show. It starts with a graphic and theme introduction, much
like any television series.
That might not seem like an important point, but it is. The
news program is treated like any regular {recurring} television
program. It is as if you are being presented with a {serial}
installment of the way the world is each day. There are recurring
characters, such as the President or other ``newsmakers,'' there
are ``good guys'' and ``bad guys,'' and there are recurring
subplots--what's the latest with that sensational murder trial?
What are the new developments from the civil war in the former
Yugoslavia?  What about the economy?
In other words, you are conditioned to watch the news, just
like you watch any television series.  You look for the same
kind of psychological {cues}--familiar characters, recurring
subplots--to tell what is happening. In the end, it all blurs
into a {picture in your head} of ``the way the world is.'' It
isn't the whole picture or even close: A few generalized comments
and images, of lead stories, and little else.
This concept of showing the news as serialization dates back
to the early movie newsreels. If one wants to look for the real
antecedent of the television news program, it is those newsreels,
with their short items, with voiceovers. Starting in the late
1930s, the same brainwashers who were to work on the design
of television programming started profiling audience responses
to newsreel showings. They found that audiences remembered little
about the stories if they lacked a highly emotionally charged
visual image, no matter how many words were spent describing
them.
Other studies were done of the {credibility} of a story. Not
surprisingly, they showed that associating a person like President
Roosevelt with a story tended to make that story more credible.
What was surprising was that the {added credibility} could be
achieved by merely showing a picture of Roosevelt with a given
story, without either citing a quote from him or even making
passing reference to him in the context of the story. This concept
became known as {visual validation}: An audience could be {led}
to believe something based on their preconceived notions of
what is a credible source and the visual image carried more
weight than the verbal message.
In the previously cited study of {mass persuasion} techniques
edited by the Tavistock-linked brainwasher Irving Janis, Janis
found that an opinion should, whenever possible, be presented
as quotation or citation from authoritative sources, such as
the government or other agencies which the public holds in high
esteem or regards as unimpeachable. Janis also discussed the
effect of {negation} of contrary opinion; this is done by {omission}--i.e.,
simply ignoring other viewpoints--or by using sources that have
a high degree of {negative} association with the public. The
use of descriptive adjectives that are negatives, if done in
a {matter of fact} way, can achieve the same effect.
Another way to accomplish the same end is to place a story about
a person whom you want associated with a psychological message
near another story that conveys that psychological message.
Studies found that a news item about a politician placed near
a story about a murder, {cued} the audience to have {negative
associations} about the politician, regardless of the content
of the story about him.
All of these concepts have been incorporated into the {format}
of television news reporting. It is designed to place certain
images in your head about the world that may have absolutely
nothing to do with how that world really is.

Finding an Audience

But before you could be brainwashed by television news, they
had to get you to watch it and watch it every evening. That
last point is important. Studies show that people who watch
the news every night, tend to think of themselves as less confused
than those who don't. They seem to feel that they have a ``grip''
on the world; This leads, the studies indicate, to a {passivity},
to a willingness to accept the world ``as it is,'' with all
its problems.
People who don't watch the news, or who tend to get their news
from other sources, tend to question more about what they are
being told. In part, that is a function of the television medium
itself: As we have said, television, in general, and the television
news in particular, tends to cause one to {suspend judgment}.
Since there is little specific, detailed memory of what you
are being shown and told, it is hard to question it, or even
reflect on it, at a later point.
So the first job was to get an audience. That wasn't all that
easy.  The vast majority of Americans read newspapers and listened
to the radio for their news. The new medium seemed only to replicate
existing sources of news.
Most of all, the early newscasts were {boring}. They were approximately
15 minutes long. They mixed reportage of international, national,
and local events with weather and sports, and human interest
stories.
The profilers probed the minds of those who did watch for an
idea of what ``worked'' and what didn't. They found that the
weather and sports were items about which viewers had the highest
{expectation} that they were being told the truth. The human
interest story, meanwhile, was viewed as entertainment, in which
the question of truth was not important. Those items created
a {predisposition} to accept the other news items without question--if
only they could get and hold an audience.
In those early years, the news show was mostly a ``talking head,''
a news anchor with a few graphic backdrops, usually the picture
of a newsmaker being referred to in a story.  Occasionally,
there was some filmed information, with voiceover and an even
more occasional remote. As such, the shows resembled a radio
news broadcast with pictures.
Had television news stayed at this level of technology the nightly
news might never have caught on. But, using poll information,
the news producers discovered that they {did} have something
over the other media. They could, through remote live coverage,
bring people almost instantaneous coverage of an event, as it
was happening. This created a sense of excitement, especially
if the event covered involved famous people.
The national party conventions in 1952 were the first such events
that gave television a chance to show off.  More than 50 million
viewers saw the events unfold before their eyes, with network
news commentators explaining what was happening. The events
were handled as {serialized} spectacle--it wasn't that the audience
really learned anything about what was happening as much as
they participated in a ``television'' experience. News was shown
to be {entertaining}. As a result, a new audience was created
for network and local news.
With its audience expanding, the controllers of network news
saw a new power: they could {create almost instant controversy}
and then cover it as ``news.''
Both the live news event coverage and the confrontational ``camera
in your face'' style, initially popularized in newsreels of
sensational trials, created a bond between the audience and
the new medium.
All the power of this early television ``attack'' journalism
was deployed in 1954 against a set-up target, the red-baiting
Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. The news programmers
brought the final assault on this wretched fellow, the ``Army-McCarthy
hearings,'' {live}, to a large national audience, glued to the
soap operalike drama, in their living rooms or in the local
bar. But the television was not a passive spectator:  It jumped
in on the winning side, with interview and other shows aimed
at castigating McCarthy. Leading the charge was CBS ``star''
reporter, Edward R. Murrow, the most famous of early television
journalists and a direct product of the Frankfurt School networks.
Television, through its news broadcasts and commentators like
Murrow, boasted of its triumph and the service done the nation.
They ignored the fact that the new medium, like all other mass
communications media, had earlier helped to boost McCarthy's
career, since, at that point, the powers that controlled the
networks found him a useful tool. They helped create the {public
opinion} that McCarthy was the leader of a glorious ``anti-Communist
crusade.'' Now, having outlived his usefulness, he became television
news' first national ``scalp.'' In the space of less than half
a decade, the new medium had been the most important factor
in altering the national image of a major political personage,
and making television news a {national power}.
During this same period, other stylistic tricks were used to
lock in the news audience. One was the so-called ``man-in-the-street
interview.'' Here, someone just like yourself was being asked
to respond to a poll-type question about an event of the day.
That person's opinion was used as a yardstick for {validating}
your own opinions. But even more important, such interviews
helped reduce the apparent distance between the viewer and the
news, by bringing the viewer, as it were, ``into the story.''
These stylistic tricks changed the boring newscasts into something
more immediate, more exciting. Polls in the mid and late 1950s
started showing a preference for television news over any other
form of news reportage.
As the audience expanded, the news coverage started having a
major impact on politics. If you weren't {seen} on the news,
if you were politically {invisible}, you didn't exist. In addition,
if you {looked a certain way}, regardless of what you said or
even what was said about you, your career was affected: People
now expected their leaders to {look} a certain way and if they
didn't, their prestige dropped and so did their vote totals.
By the beginning of the 1960s, the news shows had increased
to half-hours, while there were more and more ``live'' remotes
of breaking news. The national news shows dropped weather and
sports, except for breaking stories in those areas, leaving
such coverage to local news. Other than that, the format stayed
basically the same.
Most Americans were now watching at least one of the three major
network nightly news broadcasts, as well as one or more versions
of local news. Contemporary studies showed that people who were
asked questions about current events now more frequently answered
that they had ``heard about something'' on television. Few could
answer questions about what it was they heard, but {they knew
that they had seen it on the television news}. Most Americans
could name one or more of the network anchors, who had by then
become celebrities. In fact, more people could identify Walter
Cronkite, Howard K.  Smith, and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley
than they could their congressman or senator!

News Junkies

The pollsters profiling audience response to news broadcasts
no longer even bothered to ask whether the viewer thought that
what they were watching was true or not. The issue of truth
was in fact no issue at all. Television news was creating {reality},
whether those images were {true or not mattered little, because
people believed them to be real and immediate.}
As the brainwasher Emery and others indicated, the more a person
watches, the less he really understands, the more he {accepts,}
the more he becomes {dissociated from his own thought processes}.
By the mid 1960s, viewers never questioned the validity of what
they were watching. To do otherwise would force them to {confront}
the news, to think about what they were viewing; they accepted
what they saw as coherent with {popular opinion} and therefore
self-validating. But Emery and the other brainwashers {know}
that the ``reality'' conveyed by television news is {myth}.
``Television is much more magical than any other consumer product
because it makes things normal,'' writes Emery of news and similar
telecasts, ``it packages and homogenizes fragmentary aspects
of reality. It constructs an acceptable reality (the myth) out
of largely unacceptable ingedients. To confront the myth would
be to admit that one was ineffective, isolated and incapable....
It (the television image) {becomes} and {is} the truth.''
Emery and others say that we have now become {information junkies}.
We are hooked on the images and sounds that we're told represent
the reality outside our living rooms. We drink it like alcohol,
he says, comparing it to drug-taking. We operate, he writes,
from the basic assumption ``that all we need is information....''
The news broadcasts {inform} but by the nature of television
viewing they can't educate or make people understand.  Instead,
the medium {misinforms}, manipulating perceptions, to the point
where people are {incapable of reasoning about the world they
live in}.
Looking at this through the brainwashers' prism of ``information
theory,'' people like Emery describe two kinds of information
being presented: {the messages}, or what are called the {true
information} and the {noise}, the mental equivalent of static
in radio broadcasts which tends to obscure or mask the messages.
>From a brainwasher's standpoint, the idea in presenting a news
show is to provide enough {noise} to prevent the viewer from
thinking about the {messages}.
Look at the {news entertainment shows}, the news magazines,
as {noise} in this context. Their sensationalist character and
banal stories, presented with movielike graphics, provide a
sharp contrast to the more staid news programs. The studies
show that few people believe most or even any of the stories
on these shows, or believe that they are important to their
lives. They watch them for {excitement}, a degrading form of
entertainment similar to pornography.
Compared to the {noise}, the news programs are thought to be
authoritative. Their {message}, their presentation of a ``daily
slice of reality,'' is eagerly {consumed} by the audience. It
is never questioned.
Emery and others predicted this development in the 1970s, stating
that the nightly news could not afford to lower its image, to
present advocacy or sensationalist reportage, without lowering
its general credibility. Under no circumstances, would the powers
that control the networks risk such a development. They were
right.
But even the {noise} carries a message. Think about any one
of those tabloid shows. The stories all revolve around sex and
violence. Do the stories presented challenge any image of society
that you have from watching other shows, or the news? The answer
is no. Thus, they {reinforce} your opinion of what the world
looks like outside your living room. It is the same image that
you see on television. This fact, in part explains why when
asked by pollsters, people say that they have not been told
anything that they didn't already know by such shows as {Hard
Copy} or {A Current Affair}.
Let's pull back a moment. The television news {shows} you that
your fellow man is nothing but a violent and degraded beast,
murdering, raping, and destructive. These images are intended
to negate any higher moral sense of man, that man is created
in the image of God and that all life is sacred.
The violence in the news is not new. The early news shows always
had a certain section of crime reports. But starting in the
1960s, the violence became more graphic and more shocking.
Millions watched as Jack Ruby murdered the assassin of John
F.  Kennedy in November, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald. Although he
had no trial, and now evidence indicates that he may have been
framed, at the time polls showed overwhelming numbers of Americans
felt relieved by Oswald's murder.
Later that decade, we watched in color as blood poured from
the head of Robert Kennedy as he lay mortally wounded on a hotel
kitchen floor in Los Angeles. Again, polls taken immediately
after event on June 6, 1968, showed Americans wanted vengeance
against the man soon arrested for the crime, Sirhan Sirhan.
Meanwhile, television news was bringing the bloody images of
the slaughter in Vietnam into the living rooms. Again, it wasn't
the first time that Americans had seen such images in the news.
They had witnessed them before in newsreels during World War
II.   But it was the first time that you sat down and ate with
your family, while watching young soldiers and civilians die
before your eyes.
Now, we'll jump ahead to 1992 in New York City, one of the most
violent cities in the country. The local news shows it in all
its gory details. In the case of the local news, especially,
there is little {emotional} distinction from the content of
the most sleazy tabloids.
The news producers must ``keep people happy,'' they say. They
expect the violence, sex, and sleaze, because {that is the world}.
Behind the push for such stories is a desire to keep them short
and snappy, the kind that can hold the attention of people weened
on 40 years of television or kids who are part of the ``MTV
generation.'' Make the stories simple: violence and crime are
simple. ``It is the murder du jour,'' says a former news producer.
Every day, the fourth network, Fox, long thought to be the leader
in this ``sleaze journalism,'' has a half hour of news at 7
p.m., with 25 stories and three commercial breaks. The top story,
the closing of Alexander's Department store, throwing 5,200
onto the unemployment lines, is long: it runs 2 minutes and
15 seconds. A drug bust in Newark runs 13 seconds. A feature
on models over 40 years old received about the same time as
a report on an organized crime trial.  Sixteen pieces clocked
in at under one minute. Then, came the weather.
A Fox executive says that the newscast is trying to present
``a comprehensive view of what happened in the world.'' He approved
an {11 second} item on whether Boris Yeltsin might be an alcoholic.
It's also important to have a ``good news'' story, to keep people
happy, he says. He adds a story about a boy receiving a heart
transplant; it runs for 41 seconds.
That's Fox. What about another network, say NBC? The 6 o'clock
news on WNBC-TV was advertised with a four-second lead in: ``Waterguns
lead to a shooting in New York.'' The news began with a report
on the actor Ben Vereen, being hit by a truck in Malibu, followed
by a short piece on the number of children killed with guns.
An update on a bus strike in Queens. Another update on the soap
operalike saga of Amy Fisher, a Long Island teenager who is
charged with the murder of her boyfriend's wife. The program
closes with a piece on a Long Island pet cemetery and a {live}
report about bear attacks in New Jersey.
Can anyone make any sense of such reporting? Does anyone even
try?
``We run a ton of garbage,'' said senior WNBC-TV reporter Gabe
Pressman.  ``The whole thing is can we be more outrageous and
sensationalist than the next guy? Can we tease people into the
10 o'clock news?''
Is it really all that different on the nightly news? The blood
and gore shifts to foreign settings for a while.  A minute with
pictures on the murderous civil war in Yugoslavia. A half-minute
on a terrorist bombing in Italy. A bank holdup kills four. A
fire in Baltimore kills five children....
The stories are all short, presented in a matter of fact way.
The world has gone insane, but that is ``the way it is,'' as
``Grandfather'' Walter used to tell us every night. Now Dan
Rather says the same. So does Brokaw. So does Jennings.
The muddle of so-called information explains nothing, teaches
us nothing. The more ``staid'' news networks, such as CNN, merely
report more of this muddle.
I want you to remember something that we discussed earlier.
Recall the description of the deranged society in the novel
{A Clockwork Orange}. There is unspeakable violence and perversion.
{Nobody ever explains how things got that way; no one ever asks
why}. People turn on their television set each night and watch
who has been killed or raped on the news, and express thanks
that it is not them or a loved one. They imagine that it is
not {their} kids who are doing all these horrible things.
It is a way of life, this {Clockwork Orange} world. {``That's
just the way it is,''} says one of the violent young punks in
the novel.

Man, the Enemy

Now, concentrate on this for a moment. In every war, there is
an image of the enemy, what the Germans call {Das Feindbild.}
In World War II, it was Hitler and Japan's Tojo; they were the
vile enemy that had to be defeated.  In the Cold War, it was
the Soviets and Stalin. In Vietnam, to the extent that an image
was created it was Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong.
For the last 30 years, you got those images of the enemy from
watching the television news. They were pictures painted in
your head, the popular opinion of what is to be dispised, feared,
or hated. Look at the news today. Who is the enemy? It is your
fellow man. It is the {image of man} himself that television
news is making into {das Feindbild}, the source of destruction
of our society.
When you see the latest murder on the news, do you feel compassion
for the murderer, do you see him as a fellow human who has gone
wrong and committed an awful and sinful act? Or, do you merely
associate with the image of the violence, and as a result, feel
rage and hate towards your fellow man, especially if he is black
or hispanic, because such people are what is {shown to be} ``murderers?''
The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who believed man to be a beast,
had said that the terror of everyday life would ultimately force
man to give up the values of his religion and to see them as
the cause of his neurosis. The television news images, especially
the violence, help create the terror that the followers of Freud
and others believe will drive man to this end. Think for a moment:
Where is your sense of Christian love and charity as you watch
the news? It is driven farther and farther from your {conscious}
thoughts, as your rage and hatred of your fellow man is brought
to the surface. We are losing the battle for man's soul to an
evil worse than Hitler, the television set.


--
        John Covici
         [email protected]

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