The news site of Santa Barbara City College.

The Channels

The news site of Santa Barbara City College.

The Channels

The news site of Santa Barbara City College.

The Channels

Column – TV programming targets consumers, not viewers

Snowy static doesn’t only come in on old TV sets with a UHF channel knob and rabbit ears. Even flat-screen plasmas with digital cable pick up haze.

Reality shows and network sit-coms play on insecurities. Hour-long dramas supposedly tackle today’s issues, but give us deliberately unsatisfying-if edgy-resolutions.

Digestible news bites are regurgitated ad-nauseam from a carnival shooting gallery of shouting heads.

All of it is static, which is fine for entertainment. However, when the incessant banal tones are coming from the news, then something is terribly wrong.

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We watch too much television. We tell ourselves it’s important to stay informed.

Yet the agent that is informing us is a part of the subject we need the most reliable impartial information about: the corporate-political world.

Granted, some outlets exist for opposing views. But, the discourse-if it can be called that-is a mockery of critical analysis. Too many pundits pass themselves off as authorities, and too many authorities are nothing more than public relations tools for greater corporate interests.

We aren’t spoken to as citizens, but as consumers. Our dollars are being vied for, not our minds.

In this country our hearts sometimes bleed too easily, regardless if they pump red or blue. They are being drained by pudgy hands, dirtied by greed and power.

What’s a viewer to do?

Admittedly, venting feels good. It works out all kinds of frustrations-something our everyday lives are full of.

If conflicts and crises are handled, if they can be at least managed, then there’s less of a need to vent negatively. There’s even less of a need to do it vicariously through the boob tube.

Some people shout at others. Some shout at their screens. I’ve been guilty of both. But there comes that moment of sudden self-realization-so rare in most TV viewing-when one actually hears one’s own voice doing it.

The press doesn’t always fare much better. The argument goes that reading is better for you. It’s more intellectual.

But people don’t read as much as they watch, which can’t bode well for our mental health and development. Not for individuals, and not as a nation.

Many choose the Internet as an alternative, but even there bias dwells.

Despite the best intentions of well-meaning journalists, news will be tainted.

Each of us must decide for ourselves what to watch. Each of us has to take hold of our internal rabbit ears-or twisted coat hanger in the case of the less fortunate-and focus on what it is we wish to find.

What we find will have its own agenda, just as we have our own in searching for it.

Be open to tune in to the other side, and stay vigilant for the as-yet-unheard voice. That is something the Internet and small press still have the power to offer.

Unless we trust the conglomerate of media corporations to give us access to all those different voices, we must decide to deny, omit or ignore them.

That incessant ‘shoosh’ sound in the Great American Zeitgeist of ideas is static. For a better picture of yourself, turn it off.

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