The Public Sphere,Alan McKee makes a lot of allegations about the media and the public sphere in general. His theories are very similar to those of George Orwell's in his political essay "Politics and the English Language." McKee states that "the public sphere should ideally deal only with serious issues of real importance" and "not celebrity issues... or entertainment". Now-a-days it's all too common to turn on one's television to CNN, a serious news network, only to find that they are fact-checking Saturday Night Live, a satirical show which should not be taken seriously. Instead of talking about SNL's latest skit on President Obama and his achievements (and/or fails), why not focus on the real President Obama and what is actually going on in the world? But CNN is not the only network/media outlet/public sphere outlet who is committing these mistakes. Many newspapers, political websites, and news networks are now focusing on giving news for entertainment value rather than for giving real, valuable news stories. The worst part is that no one is complaining. Most people take the information they are receiving as something of importance, because of how much they trust their informational outlets. The news networks do this "entertaining" rather than "informing" to raise their ratings. Like Orwell says in "Politics and the English Language", "Modern English... is full of bad habits which spread by imitation..." What he means is that as outlets start using odd tactics in their reporting styles, many will follow. This is a bad sign of our public sphere. If this pattern of unimportant reporting continues and probably worsens, what should we expect from our future public sphere?
I couldn't agree with you more. I think that we should definately focus on the less trivial things, but like i said in my blog, people just aren't interested or just don't care in the major issues anymore like they were "back in the day". Like we talked about in class on tuesday, we all consider what is important according to our own experiences or what affects us individually and if it doesn't they don't take an active role.
ReplyDeleteGreat post. It is interesting to see how a network that is supposed to have credible information is fact-checking with a sketch comedy show. One thing I realized with different media outlets is, it is no longer focusing on what the public wants to see, but more of what they think we want to watch. While it is true that the masses can easily get caught up with the latest Hollywood scandal, the media tends to overload it's viewers with this trash. It's like we can't escape it.
ReplyDeleteGood posts. I definitely agree with the media overloading us with this "trash" and not being able to escape but how can we really with the technology and options we have these days. As the post said up above "back in the day" we cared more about the more important issues but I feel like we didn't have as many options to get our information. For example, the radio used to be the main source to get your info but thats definitely not the case now. We used to only have a couple channels on t.v. but now we have like 1,000.
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