By Harish Trivedi
© 2010
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values. - Marshall McLuhan
Media has become the biggest exploiter of tragedy. Media manipulates viewers' emotions while making a quick buck in the process...
One could say, paraphrasing Marshall McLean that the Media has become a very powerful aggressor against our cumulative consciousness. We all yield to its demand and surrender our private consciousness to its manipulations.
‘One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with’.
Remember the Columbine High School massacre anniversaries, the Waco and Koresh bombing (1999) and the anniversary, the Oklahoma bombing anniversary, the Jim Jones, Peoples Temple, Jonestown, Guyana (1978) when some 900 temple members willingly died.the anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that caused the Tsunami and death of over 230,000 people… We all can see these tragedies in our memories rear view mirror. We don’t need any f…. in TV guy spoon feed us and force us live thru it again and again…
I do not know how the media decides when to stop and when to start celebrating anniversaries of grave tragedies...
Public tragedy, it seems is an all-purpose sure bet for generating viewership and readerships for print and electronic media. We only need to look at the Kennedy assassination theories, the books that are cranked out around the Kennedy anniversary, the Marylyn Monroe’s X-number of unpublished (unpalatable would be the proper description) photographs that emerge around her death anniversary and the ever popular and punch line of many jokes – the never dieing Elvis sightings that is always accompanied by one or two totally media strangers coming out with their encounters with Elvis...
The O.J shenanigans are now forgotten or are almost forgotten.
The court case of the century that help propel the carriers of many an obscure lawyers and attorneys and made them TV celebrities.
Has any one wondered as to what happened to Kato Kaelin the cute-guy and one time model who enjoyed his 15-minutes of fame during OJs legal battle... the Judge Lance Ito ... F. Lee Bailey and Johnnie Cochran? - Both now diseased, Robert Shapiro, now hawking his Legal Zoom on the web and on TV commercials, Marcia Clark, the then 40-year old district attorney, Los Angeles County Prosecutor Christopher Darden, who became Marcia Clark's co-consul and rumored to be her one time lover, Barry Scheck - the DNA expert attorney, LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman, the police criminologist Dennis Fung and the celebrated line of Barry Scheck, 'Where is it Mr. Fungi?'
All forgotten for now.
No news about the funds established by Nicole Simpson’s sister and Ron Goldman’s parents…
All seems to be forgotten for now, but wait for the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Nicole Simpson murder trial in 2014 and see how the media wakes up and reminds us all - whether we want to know about it or not … The media will force us to live thru that trial again and again…
And how can we forget the 24/7 video image of oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in the right-hand corner of our TV screens?
No, it is not forgotten. All these cannot be forgotten. But damn it, we don’t need media to remind us again and again about it.
It would be shown again and again next spring on the occasion of the first anniversary of BP oil-well disaster. It would be shown with the famous clip of BP chief honcho Tony Hayward saying, I want my life back!
There should be a law to punish the Media folks who abuse the public airwaves and inflict pain and suffering on the viewers.
Media – isn’t it the wonderful medium?
Marshall McLuhan must be rolling in his grave. The medium is no longer the message that he once hoped it to be…
The medium is now the messenger of mayhem, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, mass massacres, serial killers, political corruption, human trafficking, drug lords, political demonstrations, and killings of public figures…Media thrives on such news.
Media no longer provides an insight in to an event; it only exacerbates the sad experience.
‘A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding’. - Marshall McLean.
Is any one listening?
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