Checkpoint July 2021: Is the Media Helping You Feel Better About Your Life?

(From the archives, this article was posted a year ago. Unable to write new posts the past 2 weeks, this article contains edits to update. Thank you, Readers, for checking back with me.)

Mark Twain lived most of his life in the 19th century and Malcolm X lived during the 20th century. These men could not have existed further apart in history, society, or proximity. Consider these quotes.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

MARK TWAIN, B. 1835–1910

The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty more innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”

MALCOLM X, B. 1925–1965

Even though Mark Twain and Malcolm X are dead, these two men speak to our contemporary prejudices, growing animosity, and a spiraling suspicion of people.

The connection between these 2 sources––men born nearly a century apart––illustrates the power of the media medium. Mark Twain’s writing about travel was limited to published words in books, periodicals, and newspapers––the only available media in his lifetime. 

For the most part, news stayed close to home. News traveled slowly.

What happened in Hannibal, Missouri would have little interest to someone living in Denver, Colorado. Yet for those who could travel, at home or abroad, people soon found through first-person encounters with human beings living in other places that they had more in common than they had differences. 

People reinforced their prejudices simply by remaining in tight circles of community influence, as if hemmed in by barbed-wire fences. Travel, Twain would argue, would tear down those fences.

Summer 2021

I have traveled again this summer. I hope you have too. I saw so many cars and RVs and motorcycles heading into Colorado before the 4th of July weekend, just as I was leaving, that the traffic in places looked like Dallas. Gas stations and convenience stores had booming business. Lines for the restrooms bulged. People stretched their wings again to take in scenery and fresh air.

Mark Twain observed how travel made for more charitable views, less small-mindedness, and greater understanding of his fellow man.

If we remain open, we can meet ourselves coming and going as we travel.

War and Peace Spreads by Words

It took the seismic shift in media sources for news from around the world to reach into the everyday lives of ordinary people. For example, news during World War II relied on radio and bold, alarming newspaper headlines to report from the front lines of war in Europe and with Japan. After that, the Vietnam War brought disturbing filmed images of war into living rooms, broadcast nightly during the news on television.

As the nation grew, so grew the problems that affected the masses. And so grew the spread of information and misinformation through the media. 

By mid-20th century, Civil Rights leader Malcolm X understood the power of the media to influence and ultimately control what the masses think. 

Anxiety increased as a result of reporting the news from everywhere on the planet. The 24/7 news cycle began with the O.J. Simpson murder case in 1994. Since then, the insatiable news cycle has required feeding, like sharks in constant motion seek food.

When is too much of a good thing not good for us?

Frankly, human beings are not built to carry the emotional freight of problems beyond their power to deal with, help or heal, or even comprehend. 

Media input is available from various and disparate sources: written publications, radio, TV and the Internet, or Social Media, which travels that path of least resistance and virtual anonymity.

Besides emotional limitations, a lot of our collective anxiety stems from the source of our information. 

Inflated by opinion and bombastic rhetoric, he who holds the microphone in this age directs the the cacophony of sound and fury. 

Sounding the Alarm

More than a decade ago, Marilyn McEntyre wrote Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. In this book, she sounded an alarm, raising questions and concerns about the imprecision, disintegration, and the abuse of language.

Author Marilyn McEntyre, who also teaches at UC Berkley and previously taught at Westmont College, is a graduate of UC Davis and Princeton. McEntyre writes, “The more candid among those who work for network news media will acknowledge that they are driven not only by corporate interests but also an audience conditioned to a shrinking attention span: many newspapers write to fourth-grade reading level and so trains readers to expect nothing more challenging.”

People Replace Reading with Listening and Hearing without Analysis

“One study of 21–25 year-olds showed that 80 percent couldn’t read a bus schedule, 73 percent couldn’t understand a newspaper story, 63 percent couldn’t follow written map directions, and 23 percent couldn’t locate the gross-pay amount on a paycheck stub (Laubach Literacy Action Council).

“Forty-four percent of all American adults do not read a single book in a year (Literacy Volunteers of America). 

CARING FOR WORDS IN A CULTURE OF LIES, BY MARILYN MCENTYRE

That leaves an astonishing number of American adults to get their news from television, the Internet, and Social Media. 

A-B-C news. Already-been-chewed, like the gum. The thinking done for you, the flavor is gone, while the feeling that you can do something disappears. 

“Caring about words is a moral issue.”

Persistent changes in the language of public discourse are dangerous and destructive. The coronavirus heightened my attention to how words are used to manipulate, incite, and control people. 

The concerns of ordinary citizens are ignored by the media in favor of economic, political, and issue-driven agendas that favor special interests.

Only now, we the people can travel again. We can discover for ourselves what Mark Twain did. We can gain a broad charitable view of our fellow man. We can ignore the news that makes us afraid, stories that lead us to think the worst about other people.

We can take a vacation from the media maelstrom.