Angelus News | August 2-9, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 27

“It is not necessary to conceal
anything from a public
insensible to contradiction
and narcotized by technological
diversions.”
Neil Postman has nailed us.
The author of “Amusing Ourselves to
Death,” written 35 years ago, Postman
has written the epitaph for our age.
We need only look at our politics to
see that we have become insensible to
contradiction. Be ye left or right, progressive
or populist, the contradictions
of our leaders should be impossible to
ignore.
Yet politics, as Postman predicted,
has become entertainment: “If politics
is like show business, then the idea is
not to pursue excellence, clarity, or
honesty but to appear as if you are,
which is another matter altogether.”
Reporting on politics now resembles
sports reporting. There is very little
serious coverage given to policies and
proposals, to honest assessments and
substantive debate. Instead, journalism,
particularly television journalism,
is increasingly about keeping score:
Whose numbers are up. Whose donations
are down. Or shallow sideline
reporting: Joe looks old. Pete has a
husband. Would you want to have a
beer with Elizabeth?
Journalists chase after every tweet,
presidential and otherwise, while
bemoaning that they are chasing after
every tweet. The news is too negative,
says practically everyone, yet a study
by researchers at the University of
Muenster shows that bad news spreads
much more quickly than good news.
Other journalistic organizations are
more likely to pick up and pass along
bad news because the data shows it is
what we the audience want.
We say the news is negative but we
INTERSECTIONS
BY GREG ERLANDSON
Seeking screen time over salvation
are drawn to the negativity, and this
negativity has become one more form
of entertainment. What is President
Trump’s latest outrage? Who is The
Squad badmouthing now?
“When a population becomes
distracted by trivia, when cultural life
is redefined as a perpetual round of
entertainments, when serious public
conversation becomes a form of
baby-talk, when, in short, a people
become an audience and their public
business a vaudeville act, then a nation
finds itself at risk; a culture-death
is a clear possibility.”
Oh snap! Postman nails us again.
What is so striking about his observations
is that he wrote all of this before
the internet was a thing; before Snapchat
and Tinder and Facebook and
Twitter; before the endless ways we
are distracting ourselves. Yet in the television
age he saw it coming: “People
will come to adore the technologies
that undo their capacities to think.”
I have more friends who are telling
me about their children — teens,
millennials, and older — who spend
hours gaming. It’s not so bad, my
friends say to comfort themselves.
They make friends online and have
a social life. This despite the fact that
their grades are tanking, their flesh
and blood relationships are suffering,
and their plans for the future become
increasingly vague or unreal.
As Postman once again diagnosed:
“There is nothing wrong with enter-
SHUTTERSTOCK
26 • ANGELUS • August 2-9, 2019