Second Hand News

On a brisk fall morning, car pooling with a certain influential individual, the usual quiet of the shared space hung heavy in the air, when I made the declaration that the most powerful man in America was not then President Bush, but the king of prime time television, Bill Cosby. As was her nature, she jumped all over me and called me on the outrageousness of my statement.

My point was not to provoke the wrath of my car pooling partner. I would be the first to admit politicians set the agenda, they make the laws and determine what topics are to be addressed. Since they also determine where money is to be spent, they do hold power that many people don't examine. But people these days hold so much cynicism towards the system and believe that there exists in the political arenas so much corruption, that they believe solutions are inevitably tainted and nothing important actually gets done. People thus tend to tune all this out and discount it, but every night they do go home and watch lots and lots of television. Our current discussions don't deal so much with the incredible historical changes Congress is proposing for the welfare system, but rather the latest episode of Friends. Television creates for its viewers surrogate feelings they no longer get from their day to day lives. What can possibly be more powerful than that?

I was wrong in my declaration however. I wasn't mistaken in identifying the forum of where true power exists, I was wrong in picking the proper area of the entertainment world. Prime time television sends undeniable political messages, but the real filter in which people's thoughts and feelings are formed is born in the newsrooms across America.

Back in the days when I was studying journalism as a possible profession, I used to go out to cover a story and inevitably a feeling of fear would well up inside. I would go and witness an event, interview some people, jot down some notes and head back to my typewriter where I would try to come up with a story. And a story it felt like- I always felt like I was fakin' it and what I was putting down on paper wasn't exactly what really happened, or my own personal bias colored the true important message of the story. I was trying to make sense out of what made no sense. And when I would read the end result the next day in a publication, I always wondered if others believed what I wrote to be the truth.

The amazing thing to me is people either have no idea, or don't care that all the news they get is being influenced by the ears and eyes of the reporter. We tend not to question what we read or hear if it comes from a credible news source simply because that's what news is and has always been in this country. One reporter may go to a city council meeting, listen to all the agenda items and lead with a small bit of information that came about at the very end of a minor discussion. Another reporter may attend the same meeting and pick something entirely different for the lead and the emphasis of the story. Both reporters may or may not have been oblivious to what the council members, or the attending public thought was the most important thing that happened that evening.

Covering a news story is not easy because life's events most of the time don't exactly qualify as stories. We don't often enjoy the luxury of knowing when there is a beginning, when the climax of the story occurs or when the actual end happens so we can gleam the meaning of the entire episode. Chaos is more often the norm, and bits and pieces of common and diverse elements make up our lives. It is too easy to fall into the trap of looking for greater meanings that often don't exist. Things don't always happen for a reason, sometimes they just happen. There is a danger in attaching all encompassing lessons to what we read and hear about through the news without thinking for ourselves what biases may or may not exist. There are far too many who think they know what's going on because they heard it on the news.

The most disturbing lesson on display from this past week was not so much that our country's justice system does not work; or that the abuse of power is as frightening as the abuse of money; or that there are deepening rifts existing between races; nope the overwhelming message emphasized was that in our current culture, the way people assimilate information is through a filter of second hand knowledge learned through the incredible influence of the media.