Cable News-National Gossip
American Society
Traditionally gossip has been characterized as a neighborhood thing that takes place between neighbors over the backyard fence. A story and its personal interpretation starts with one neighbor who spreads it to another over the backyard fence. This neighbor then transmits it to their other neighbors over their adjoining fences, and in short order the entire neighborhood, and eventually the entire community, has heard the gossip about this event, including many interpretations of the event. It is a little like the old game called “telephone” in which a line of people transmit a message by whispering it into the ear of whoever is next to them. It is then transmitted to the next and so on until the last person, who then repeats the message out loud. As we all know, by this time the message is garbled and hardly resembles the original message. This is the fate of a message transmitted by gossip.
We have become a nation of gossip. Cable news has become our national backyard fence, and the gossip goes on 24-7 on our screens and in our ears. We endlessly hear, not only the “new event”, but with each iteration another level of analysis telling us what the event really means and what we should make of it. The next hour the next talking head continues the process, ad infinitum, until we have been inundated with more information and interpretation then we can ever handle. And each network has its own version of that process. By the end we have, often competing, versions of the same event each flavored to meet the tastes of some group of viewers/listeners in the nation. (Example: the endless interpretation of the legal issues of Donald Trump.)
We are hardly ever allowed to try to make sense of the unfiltered event on our own. In fact, we begin to believe that we would not be able to make sense of it on our own, needing the cable news gurus to make sense of the world for us. This ends up being about the media defining the news, not only what events mean, but also which events require attention. And the networks are all run by corporations more concerned with profit than public service, and controversy bring in profits.
The need for an informed citizenry has been overridden by the desire for profit and thus democracy is undermined by something more resembling propaganda than hard news. We have become a nation addicted to the latest rumors which are quickly replacing and defining our reality. This is a sad and unhealthy turn of events which probably does more to divide us than to unite us.
Are we capable of breaking the cable news addiction which is alluringly available and streaming 24-7 on our screens and in our ears? We shall see.
