With dramatic things happening every day in the economy, the presidential election, and the war on terror, it’s pretty easy for me to get sucked into the bottomless vortex of the newsmedia. There’s always one more headline to read on my homepage, one more pundit to watch on cable, and one more blog post to click on my RSS feeds.
That’s why this post by Joe Carter was a much-needed slap in the face:
Why do so many people buy into the ridiculous notion that a daily diet of current events is anything other than a mindless (though perhaps harmless) form of amusement? Even ardent news-hounds will admit that the bulk of daily “news” is nothing more than trivia or gossip. How much of what happens every day truly is all that important? How many of us have ever even stopped to ask why we have daily news?
As University of Florida history professor C. John Sommerville notes in his excellent book, How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Age:
The product of the news business is change, not wisdom. Wisdom has to do with seeing things in their largest context, whereas news is structured in a way that destroys the larger context. You have to do certain things to information if you want to sell it on a daily basis. You have to make each day’s report seem important. And you do that by reducing the importance of its context.