"[E]veryone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive [people] of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”~Neil Postman, from his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
2 comments:
How remarkable that it has not only not dated, but become even more appropriate. Especially since in NZ, it was 1988 when television news became info-tainment, US local TV news style. However, even more so, is how social media packages tiny snippets of press releases and opinions as if they are what you need to know - when so much of what passes as news fails to give even a basic background of what is behind the story. Beyond the news stories that "journalists" love the most (crime, disasters, entertainment and sport - all because the narrative is simple - i.e. bad thing happened or good thing happened), is superficiality from people who know little behind the current history of a topic. An age where there is actually the greatest potential ACCESS to knowledge and information, but possible the lowest mass distribution of it.
As the Clint Eastwood character Dirty Harry said in the 1970's, "opinions are like assholes - everyone's got one"
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