When News Isn’t

The formula for successful entertainment is short and sweet… conflict. Without conflict movies and television would have no viewers.

By Michael Caporale

When news programming learned this lesson, they introduced opposing pundits to create conflict under the guise of being “fair and balanced.” Whether it’s a police chief and an attorney for the mother of a slain Afro-American son, a hypocrite politician and an emotional constituent, a Republican and a Democrat, a conservative and a progressive, an idiot and a scholar, a scientist and a religious fanatic, all are designed to further conflict.

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It’s time we realized that Pundit news is unwittingly deepening the American divide and stimulating violent conflict on the streets, an expression of the divide, thus propagating real news that can be filmed and displayed. News without a defined editorial purpose has become an agent of chaos rather than clarity.

But there’s another problem. The news is diluted and whitewashed to be palatable to the lowest common denominator, thus rendering it something fit for children rather than adults.

Now I’m really talking about cable news which is not subject to the strict regulations under which broadcast news is licensed. Cable channels can safely use fowl language in the context of reportage of statements made by on camera interviews, yet it is constantly replaced by proxy language such as “the n-word,” the “F-bomb”, the “s-word,” the “c-word” and so on, thus it dulls the effect of hearing such bad language from the mouth of a person not worthy of our respect. It also limits the emotional outrage of the expression itself.

Another example of how news dumbs down content is the ever-present block digitization that obfuscates an image, usually that of children or violent acts. The practice began with legal advisors telling journalists not to show the faces of children when photographing the news. This practice was originally initiated to deny would-be kidnappers and sexual deviants from identifying children on the playground and taking action against them. Now the out-of-focus haze is applied to the faces of migrant Latino children crossing the border in large groups, and wounded children in Palestine and Ukraine and other conflict zones for what reason? To protect them? How does this practice protect them? It denies them the full empathy they deserve, the kind that motivates viewers to get involved and take action.

And let’s also get real about the depiction of violence. Granted it’s not something anyone wants to see, but to assume that an audience cannot withstand the shock of violent imagery is foolhardy in an age where extreme bloody violence is an every-day occurrence in mass entertainment. From video games to Wrestling, to movies like “Braveheart,” it’s not just the kids being conditioned to watch violence in its extremes. Blood is everywhere but news depicting face-ghosted children being carried to an ambulance in a war zone. It blunts the reality and horror of violence, especially that done on our behalf. Once it was brought home in the seventies, it ended a war in Viet Nam. News has the responsibility to deliver objective facts whether distasteful or otherwise.

To see the extreme depths that the practice of obfuscation has plummeted, just take a look at this screen grab from a recent CNN news story, showing the view of a police dashcam. It’s utterly useless and absurd. That should tell you a lot of how we are regarded, not as potential agents of change but as hapless, entranced viewers basking in the golden glow of pure drivel.