It's Showtime

Two days after the January 2006 federal election the two CTV and CBC bought full-page advertisements in major newspapers across the land Each network claimed to have beaten the other in attracting viewers for its election originates coverage. "Our show was better than your show" each was saying as granting they were comparing sitcoms or police dramas.

Today, the overwhelming majority of nation get their news and information from television. It is packaged as entertainment. There is the theme music, the glitzy places the anchors selected more for gazes than journalistic ability, interruptions for commercials, eye-catching visuals.

Neil Postman saw this coming lengthy ago. In 1985, he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death (ISBN: 0140094385) in which he described by what means television has eroded the foundations of democracy. in what manner so? By dumbing down debate and issues.

Television doesn't do the patient exploration of ideas well. It docs drama, confrontation, and fast-paced imagery. It requires almost no intellectual involvement from its viewers who purely have to sit and absorb what tend hitherwards at them. The printed word, however, requires that the reader concentrate and engage.

Mr Postman argued that print agriculture produces readers who are literate, trained in critical thinking, and seeking to be informed. upon the other hand, he said, television bring into views viewers who are passive, uncritical, and seeking sole to be entertained.

Our democratic institutions have quickly learned to speak the language of television. mixed issues are reduced to the ten-second unmutilated bite or the simplicity of a brimming beaker sticker.

Candidates for office are valeted and packaged as celebrides. Political announcements are made in the connection of a photo-op.

Let's permit Neil Postman sum up: "Television...is transforming our agriculture into one vast arena for display business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the extreme point we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine."

FORERUNNER

Neil Postman was the first to acknowledge the liability he owed to an earlier writer. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave novel World in 1932, before commercial television was available in anybody's abode He described a fictional world in which the population is stripped of its ability to think critically and is distracted by means of endless entertainment and diversion. The clan are drugged into apathy and totally unaware of the stage to which they are being socially, economically, and politically manipulated.

Copyright Canada and The World Mar 2006

Provided by means of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved