English: The Footbridge and Canal: The Slippery Slope A slippery walk down the bridge. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Once you decide to titillate instead of illuminate, you’re on a slippery slope.” — Bill Moyers
US journalist and commentator Bill Moyers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(Long ago, the numbers crunchers at all the corporate media outlets took a “damn the torpedoes” approach to this! Titillation is the new name of the game, people. That along with manipulation, of course. We are almost continuously bombarded with stories of some pretty young thing, who either: killed their boyfriend or hubby, killed their roommate, or killed their own child. And if not a pretty perpetrator, then it’s a pretty victim, as in Laci Peterson or Stacy Peterson. You’d think guys named Peterson would be having a tough time getting laid these days. All terrible, PERSONAL tragedies . . . for the families and friends of all involved. The crimes, and the usually lengthy trials, have very little bearing on the vast majority of our lives, and virtually none on the world at large. Why do they feed us these salacious stories? Many reasons. They divert our attention away from the serious matters of domestic and international importance, so more of us won’t object to what is really going on. A blithely dumbed down populace is never a threat to the powers that be. There are ratings aspects to it too, but they’re all giving us the same stories anyway. The networks used to have News Divisions, which were autonomous of the Entertainment Divisions. They did away with the News Divisions, so now it all falls under Entertainment. But, another reason why they continue to do this is because we let them. We should be rejecting all these tawdry, meaningless stories, as well as the all too frequent tear-jerking fluff stories of service men and women coming back, unexpectedly, from war zones, to their young children, or some special needs kid being allowed to score the winning basket or touchdown. Don’t get me wrong, they DO get to me. I’ll choke up, and my eyes will well up with tears, just like the next guy. But when it’s over, I realize that I’ve been played . . . again. The purpose of the news is supposed to be to inform us, not to merely elicit these kind of emotions. We deserve better. We deserve the real news. We deserve more people like Bill Moyers. Be well and do good, friends.) — YUR
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