Fact or Fiction? The State of the Nation’s
News
Published in Marietta Daily Journal June 11, 2017
Television news has almost reached
the point of fabrication. Daily it gives
the lie to race relations, religion, and national unity. Unlike print journalism which allows slow
thought and consideration, television news centers on fast moving images that
do little more than stir emotions.
Television news is sheer snapshot.
Every week of my life I see good
race relations at the gas pump, at church, at work, in the grocery store
checkout line, and in the neighborhood where I live. Nowhere
have I seen better race relations than in a state prison where I have taught
for the last five years. There the
warden is black, guards and office employees are of different races, and
inmates are of every extraction that exists.
Friendliness prevails, even among inmates. Makes you wonder if Al Sharpton and Jesse
Jackson ever leave the cameras and get out among real people.
Television news portrays us as a
nation aflame. It delights in showing us
at our worst. I’m talking about the USA,
not the globe. We all know there is war
and carnage around the world, but racial strife in the United States is not
widespread. There are occasional
brushfires but it’s not as though the woods are on fire.
Goodwill
just doesn’t make good television.
Spoiled college kids do, as do filthy-mouth comedians, all of whom need
a good spanking. I’m thinking one
problem nowadays is that too many people under 40 never got a good spanking.
The internet has not been good for
dictators, liars, the formerly mainstream media, or Al Gore who says he
invented it. Social media may be sillier
than it is serious, but it has given voice to the voiceless. Most television
news is as much about the news givers as it is the newsmakers. The news givers are celebrities and view
themselves as such.
It hasn’t always been this way. ABC’s Howard K. Smith was steady at the helm. Like Walter Cronkite, Smith was trusted. Their coverage of the civil rights revolution
and of race generally was balanced.
As for religion, television news
likes to portray Westboro Baptist Church and the KKK as the standard bearers of
Christianity. Claiming that faith is
faltering in America, the network anchors apparently have never flown over the
parking lots of megachurches on any given Sunday. Do they even know of the heavy sprinkling of
start-up churches that thickly dot the nation and are drawing in millennials? These 20, 30, and 40-something-filled
churches may have weird – sometimes even disrespectful – names (Not Your
Grandmother’s Church? The Together Church?
Church in the Now? Good grief!),
but most of them espouse orthodox Christianity.
This figure is at least four years
old, but each weekend, 41% of Americans attend worship. Not a majority, but perhaps a surprisingly
high minority. In England, a former
cradle of the Christian Gospel, the figure is 6%. We can be sure that the 41% don’t subscribe
to the moral slime the networks slop out at prime time, programming that does
not portray the values of close to half of the nation.
As for national unity, television
news tells us we’re more divided than ever.
Not so, but you would think so from all the televised hollering, college
kid window-bashing and protesting that only non-working Americans have time to
engage in.
When Mississippi native Turner
Catledge became executive editor of the New York Times, the Times was not at
all the fake news spout it is today. In
Catledge’s obituary, The NYT wrote, “He believed New York sophisticates could
learn a thing or two about life in the rest of America.”
Ah, “the rest of America,” those
whose axis is not New York / D.C. / L.A.
Those regular working people ignored by television news, considered
deplorable by some, even though they are the backbone of the nation. People who don’t live in a media bubble.
Recently in New Republic magazine,
Michael Tomasky claimed that elitism is liberalism’s biggest problem. Advising Democrats to “tone down the
looking-down,” Tomasky urged them to understand that middle Americans “go to
church,” and that “they don’t feel self-conscious about saluting the
flag.” Lord, Lord. One hopes CNN and MSNBC got that message.
Maybe it’s because print journalists
don’t have to be “made up” for television.
Maybe it’s because they can rely completely on their printed words and
not on being pretty guys or gals for the camera.
Whatever,
I’ll take the cooler pages of a newspaper over the frantic, pow-pow-pow pace of
television any day of the week.
Roger
Hines
6/7/17
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