You're Damn Right I'm Mad...At You!

There were two questions I had after watching the clip from The Network. The first was why should we watch the news? The answer to this should be simple. We watch the news to raise our consciousness about what goes on around us. It allows us to steer our culture in the direction that we want it to go instead of waking up one day suddenly asking ourselves, “Where have all the flowers gone?” Unfortunately, the news ultimately depends on our ambitions to care about it, and if we choose not to then it just becomes another sound that no one hears. There is a dichotomy between culture and news, but it’s up to us to determine which one we want to lead the charge. If we let culture do all the talking, then we never progress as a society, and ultimately fall to the superior thinking of other people.

Many of us say that the problem with the news today is the way it’s presented. Too much of the news is written (or spoken) with a predetermined bias that skews the facts right from the beginning. It isn’t about telling us the facts we ought to know but the facts we want to hear. This brings me to the second question I had which is: Should a news anchor or writer be trying to make you mad? In my opinion, the news should be another branch of the scientific community. Scientists all around the world attempt to figure out what is really going on in the universe while the rest of us quarrel about how we think the universe came to be or what the proper way is to live your life. The news should always be presented in a form that makes it look the same no matter who is absorbing it. Allowing someone to “spin” the news is like putting a gun in the hands of a child. A child couldn’t possibly comprehend the consequences of accidently pulling the trigger, just like a news anchor couldn’t possibly imagine how wrong he is because he lives in his own world where his fundamentally flawed ideas are what govern his reality.

If there is one thing that history teaches us it’s that no one ever has all the right answers. Yet here we are, thinking that 2009 is the year that we discover absolute truth. Every scar on the face of humanity can be tracked down to a particular group of people who thought they had all the answers. In any argument, it helps if someone plays the role of observer; a third party that has no reason for bias in any of the available directions; that is what the news anchorman should be. This is basic knowledge people; stuff that even Plato knew about, but yet we still think that we know everything to the point where objective facts only footnote our extremely flawed ideas about how the world should be. Science works by examining reality through one collective pair of eyes. We need a pair of eyes to examine our culture so that we can better understand where our society stands and what we can do to make it better.