Censorship by Negative Selection?
Censorship, Current Affairs, Misinformation June 29th, 2007Newscaster’s on-air Paris protest
“US newsreader Mika Brzezinski has attempted to burn her script live on television in protest at being made to lead her bulletin on Paris Hilton.” BBC
(The point of interest of this is the reason she burn the script. AC1)
June 30th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
I was pleasantly amused at this, mind you I would be I detest all non-news news items.
The cult of celebrity (a much overused phrase) is depressingly abundant. It is sadly a vicious circle.
The media percieves itself to belong to the cultural and intellectual elite, it therefore believes it can dictate cultural values. Any organisation that perceives itself to be an ‘elite’ will naturally become elitist. The media as a result percieves the majority of the populace to be mindless vacuous celebrity obsessed idiots. Consequently the media ‘elite’ then provides the masses with what they want, hours upon hours of mind numbing trash, and they potray it, not as it is, but as they think we should see it. Not as trash but as contemporary quick-fix and mentally unchallenging entertainment. The more the susceptible watch this ’stuff’, the less likely they are to read, to speculate, to write on philosophical/political blogs, in other words to challenge themselves. The less stimulated they find themselves needing to be the less likely they are to need or to seek that form of stimulation.
To re-phrase a well known political cliche, the people get the television they deserve!
I must now point out that I am a complete hypocrite for I confess to enjoying the latest Big Brother series. But fear not I am ill, and do not have the will of the flesh to change channels. I do not usually watch the programme and I derive no pleasure from the non-entities who populate it. In order to derive some socio-psychological insights from the programme it would first require the participants to be neither socio- or psycho- pathic.
So why do I enjoy it, and yet detest celeb culture… because it is thoroughly unchallenging. It doesn’t challenge the way I think about the world, or the way the world thinks about me. It doesn’t effect my income or the taxes that I pay. But most of all after a hard days graft it is the mental equivalent of sitting starting into emptiness.
Still, bravo Mika Brzezinski for her stand.