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Network newscasts are a holding effort. They are a rearguard action. They are prisoners of demography and cultural shifts that are as irreversible as the physical laws of the universe. Namely: fewer Americans have the time or inclination to watch a half-hour TV newscast at 6:30 in the evening; those who do will ultimately die; those who do not presently are not—unlike the generations before them—developing the habit as they get older. (James Poniewozik, “Life After Katie“)

When you can get more information in 5 minutes scanning CNN.com, why sit in front of a TV for 30 minutes at a specific time? Why scan the channels for weather when you can have all the weather you want in 10 seconds on your cell phone or computer? It’s a dying model.

The modern totalitarian state … mobilized the masses. The people themselves were swept up in the enthusiasm, becoming a tyrannical force in their own right. This was made possible by the invention of broadcast media, which, when combined with modern propaganda techniques, allowed the state to cultivate and reproduce the kind of fanaticism and conformity that we see in small groups but on the scale of an entire society. Thus mass society was born: the bastard child of broadcast media and groupthink.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 25

We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information—all in short (and loud) doses of “easy listening.”….

We are a profoundly nonintellectual culture, but we are not committed to this attitude; in fact, we are scarcely committed to anything. We may be the most labile culture in all of history, capable of rapid and massive shifts of prevailing opinions, all imposed from above by concerted media effort. Passivity and nonintellectual judgment are the greater spurs to such lability. Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity—the most precious trait of any adequate analysis—is erased. He wins who looks best or shouts loudest. We are so fearful of making judgments about ourselves that we must wait until the TV commentators have spoken before deciding whether Bush or Dukakis won the debate.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “The Dinosaur Rip-off” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 100-101

The world of USA Today is a realm of instant fact and no analysis. Hundreds of bits come at us in pieces never lasting more than a few seconds—for the dumb-downers tell us that the average Americans can’t assimilate anything more complex or pay attention to anything longer.

The oddly “democratic” procedure makes all bits equal—the cat who fell off a roof in Topeka (and lived) gets the same space as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Equality is a magnificent system for human rights and morality in general, but not for the evaluation of information. We are bombarded with too much in our inordinately complex world; if we cannot sort the trivial from the profound, we are lost in terminal overload. The criteria for sorting must involve context and theory—the larger perspective that a good education provides.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “Bully for Brontosaurs” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 91

I wasn’t planning on saying anything about the Virginia Tech shooting, but then I read what Justin at Radical Congruency wrote about the media’s exploitation of the “Massacre of Virginia Tech.”

Like Justin, I find the media’s handling of such issues appalling, which is why I rarely watch TV news. Everything is made into entertainment. The media does not respect the dead, but rather profit from them and exploit them. It’s like today’s quote from Wendell Berry: “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love.” The media sees only value in death, thus exploiting those who have fallen.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. I probably am. But this is not the first time it has happened. Think of Columbine or 9-11 or plane crashes. I first realized this during 9-11, when they played the videos of the towers being hit over and over and over again. It felt like propaganda. I had to turn it off. But, oh, how the media lives for such moments! The world is watching, and they want to see it again and again. They don’t want to think; they want to feel. And feeling is where TV news excels.

(If you are interested in understanding this phenomenon further, the best two books I’ve read on the subject are Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) and Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961).)

Once you’ve clicked on a video and hunched over to concentrate your attention, the experience comes at you, bold and instant, as immediately intelligible as a billboard and rewarding as a dopamine rush. Your inevitable education in pop culture allows you to fill in any contextual blanks automatically. This is TV reduced to its ether—click, respond, repeat—and every video is, first and last, an advertisement for itself….

In this and so many other respects, watching YouTube is far closer to consuming Internet pornography than staring at the television. Like Internet porn, Web video promises something to gratify any appetite in an instant and for a moment. The two also share an illicit quality: You generally watch them alone and when you really should be doing something else. Each mixes the raw with the slick. Neither makes a fetish of too much internal narrative.

But then, all of media culture has an increasingly pornographic feel, doesn’t it? Web video dovetails with both the show-me morals of MySpace and the spy-eyed ethos of reality TV and tabloid glossies. YouTube is the product of an America where every normal person knows he deserves to blow up and get paid, to be naked and famous; where you’re not really consuming unless you’re producing in kind and where your “production” can be your own banal self. Web video is the ideal medium for a world populated by instinctual exhibitionists who double as full-time voyeurs. To quote a performance artist who might have thrived on the Web, nothing succeeds like excess.