SLIGHTLY ASKEW
The way we stay informed
Although we have more sources of information about world and local events than at any previous time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of and understand what is actually going on. It's not a paucity of information that's causing the trouble; it's the sheer volume that comes at us through an ever-widening variety of media.
That sounds like a sentence I would have written to impress some professor who was impossible to impress because he'd seen everything there is to see.
Anyway, back to the subject. Television news, in an effort to be interesting, provides us with visual stimuli that compete for our attention. Are we supposed to pay attention to the guy who's talking, or to that totally unrelated bit of script that scrolls across the bottom? Sort of reminds me of a girl I met at college, long, long ago.
And while I'm thinking about this, they switch to the weather. Now I know that today's weather commentators are much more knowledgeable than those a few decades ago. I also know that the maps they're seen in front of aren't really there. They're actually standing in front of a light blue wall and through the marvels of technology, somebody in the control room is electronically dropping them in. They manage to act as if there were really maps on the wall. As a result, I keep watching to see them make mistakes and miss the important part. That's why I end up going to work in sneakers when I should be wearing mukluks. A little knowledge, as people are fond of misquoting, is a dangerous thing. If I knew less, I'd pay more attention; if I knew more, I'd accept the fact that these folks don't make mistakes and I'd pay more attention.
Then, there's the news, proper. Somebody reads this stuff and we listen to information about things happening on the other side of the world. (Unless it's CNN, in which case we listen to what's happening in the USA.) The folks who write the TV news assume that people know where Kosovo and Bhutan are. If they don't, they can always look them up on a map, except that the maps are all being used by weather folks.
And speaking of maps, I can't help wondering why they don't show us more of them. Way back during World War II, there was a map on the front page of the newspaper almost every day. It allowed you to follow the shifting battle lines, if you were smart enough to figure out all the signs and symbols. They could do the same thing on TV. That way, you'd be able to see where the action is while you'd listening to the guy who's reading the news and mispronouncing the names of the places on the map and read the scrolling text at the same time. In fact, just to make it all more entertaining, we could have maps that don't relate to either the spoken or written news before us. That way, they'd be certain that people who watch the news are as uninformed as the ones who don't. Now, let's take a really fine example of what I'm talking about.
On the TV screen there's this talking head that's informing me that a typhoon is about to slam into Indonesia and the thing going across the bottom is telling me that Hillary has taken California by a narrow margin and I come away wondering how that typhoon is going to affect the price of California wines. Send two messages at the same time and there's bound to be some cross-pollination.
So, now I understand what's going wrong in the world. National leaders are watching TV.
Ask George W. You can be sure he's watching. If he wasn't, how could he keep track of what he's doing.
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