HALF OF WHAT YOU SEE

I'm in a strange place right now. I don't mean that I've woken up in somebody else's apartment or an alleyway or anything of that sort. This has to do with my feelings over the manner in which we as citizens of the US absorb the collective output known as "the news."

I've been thinking a great deal lately about the idea of news being both a business (meaning profit is the bottom line) and a tool that can be used to subtly but effectively control the outlooks of a country's citizens.

A few events have put the gears in my head in motion regarding this idea. Firstly, the people of our country have taken, in my opinion, a step forward in electing Barack Obama to be the next president. I, like many others, felt nervous up until the very last moment about the prospect of having an administration in office that could have been more ideological in its approach than the current one. I let out a great sigh a relief when the victor was announced.

About a week ago I borrowed a documentary on DVD from my father that deals with the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy in November of 1963. Without going into great detail here, I'll say that the evidence put forth that a conspiracy was hatched and carried out by numerous groups of people with influence is staggering. The fact that the general media still upholds the story that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for the assassination is disheartening AND illogical.

With these ideas in my head, that money, fear mongering, and misinformation are all at the heart of the news media, I received the news that an employee at a Wal-Mart in New York State had been trampled to death by an angry mob of bargain-hunting shoppers on Black Friday.

I'm not going to spew invective in the manner that I did on one of my other blogs. I, like so many others, am extremely angry that people in this country are capable of this sort of savagery and disregard. What I'm feeling now is this strange sort of hesitation to trust in the information my brain is absorbing. After all, the news media is very much in the business of sensationalizing just about anything. I know in my mind that carelessness, disregard, and a "me-first" attitude on the part of those Wal-Mart shoppers brought about the death of that poor man, but I wonder to what extent the media could have bent the facts and shaped the story to make it as dramatic and disturbing as possible.

If you're not following me, think about the anthrax scare a few years back. As the great comedian Lewis Black has pointed out, FOUR people died during that whole ordeal. Yet the whole country was in a terrified uproar for weeks. That was a perfect example of how recycled news (and if you need to see for yourself, just leave CNN on in the background while you're cleaning your living room one day) can invoke fear, distrust, and even hatred on the part of viewers and listeners.

What scares me is that the path we could be treading down as a nation if this type of relationship between news anchor and citizen continues to thrive could be divisive and cannibalistic. As I mentioned before, I believe we took a step forward in electing Obama. The question now is can we stand behind him as a country united?