"This is a matter of considerable importance, for it goes beyond the question of how truth is perceived on television news shows.  If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude." (102)

"Viewers, after all, are partners with the newscasters in the 'Now... this' culture, and they expect the newscaster to playout his or her role as a character who is marginally serious but who stays well clear of authentic understanding. ... The viewers also know that no matter how grave any fragment of news may appear, ... it will shortly be followed by a series of commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in fact render it largely banal.  This is a key element in the structure of a news program and all by itself refutes any claim that television news is designed as a serious form of public discourse." (104)

-- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

"Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, we are awash in information, without even a broom to help us get rid of it. The tie between information and human purpose has been severed. Information is now a commodity that is bought and sold; it comes indiscriminately, whether asked for or not, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume, at high speeds, disconnected from meaning and import. It comes unquestioned and uncombined, and we do not have, as Millay said, a loom to weave it all into fabric. No transcendent narratives to provide us with moral guidance, social purpose, intellectual economy. No stories to tell us what we need to know, and especially what we do not need to know.

"Without such narratives, we discover that information does not touch any of the important problems of life. If there are children starving in Somalia, or any other place, it has nothing to do with inadequate information. If our oceans are polluted and the rain forests depleted, it has nothing to do with inadequate information. If crime is rampant on our streets, if children are mistreated, it has nothing to do with inadequate information. Indeed, if we cannot get along with our own relatives, this, too, has nothing to do with inadequate information."

-- Neil Postman, "Science and the Story that We Need," First Things, Jan 1997

Close-up of the third.

Even a bigger close-up.

 

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