Wires And Lights In A Box

During my years as a budding journalist, I had my fair share of history lessons on broadcasters past and present. After reading of Edward R. Murrow he became by far my favorite newsman from days of old. Why? I'm not really sure, but when I read his speech "Wires and Lights in a Box" I knew that this guy was no normal journalist. His diction was incredible, yes, but it was the message within his words that rings true even into today.

"This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference."

To enlighten those that weren't required to read this speech during their four years in college, Murrow was speaking at the Radio and Television News Director's Association convention in 1958. The room was filled with the heads of broadcasting companies, news directors, reporters, anchors - basically anybody and everybody who was the bees knees in the business back in the late 50's. 

Expecting an eloquent speech on the state of radio and television, Murrow instead stood up and spoke as to why television was being misused. His prose was spot on and potentially foreshadowed the rise of reality television, the 24-hour news cycle, and the stupidity that comes along with it.

Another thing I learned from my wonderful mass comm law class was the idea of the marketplace of ideas. This concept basically justifies the first amendment (J-school people feel free to call me out if I'm getting this wrong) and correlates to the spread of mass communication to different media that we all interact with throughout our day. Essentially, because there are so many different ways to gather information, and so many people saying different things, the citizens become informed because they can research the facts and find out the truth themselves.

To me this idea is slightly flawed in the sense that people have to do something for themselves. It doesn't take into account that since the inception of all things electronic constantly bombarding the human psyche with every glance, diminishing the attention span to the point that everyone could be diagnosed with minor attention deficit disorder. 

"One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles..."

Television isn't helping the flow of ideas any more than we are helping ourselves to find out the truth. People will blindly stare at a screen, reading or listening to some dribble that some no name hack is spitting out and take it at face value. This is a disruption to the marketplace of ideas. In the figurative sense, we're buying what they're selling without checking the ripeness first.

Take a look at any FOX News, MSNBC, CNN - any major television broadcast and you'll see stories that are slanted in one way or another, depending on the station, and don't give facts but throw out seeds to plant backward ideas in peoples heads.

What is worse that everyday citizens are watching and listening and not doing anything else. There is a reason why the internet was created, and it's not to look at cats, porn, or your fantasy football scores. It's there to educate yourself on the topics you want. Going back to the marketplace of ideas, the internet and television are those marketplaces. They are fields of information just waiting to be read and ingested and analyzed to create an informed society.

Instead what do we do? Use them to check in on Snooki and J-woww's latest bender, update our facebook status on what food we just ate, and learn what pundits want us to believe.

Now you may say, well informing people objectively doesn't make for good television. Define good television these days? Good entertainment television went by the wayside when Legends of the Hidden Temple, Pete and Pete, and Boy Meets World went off the air. Good informative television started dying with the greats like Murrow and Walter Cronkite and finally croaked when Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather left the airwaves.

"Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live."

Today's news isn't brought to you by journalists with integrity. It's brought you by corporations looking to push their bottom lines. Murrow railed against Senator McCarthy during the red scare, criticizing his efforts to rid the United States of communists without any evidence. Would we see that today? I highly doubt it.

I think the worst part about the entire situation is the fact that we know this is happening. Everyone, every single day, wakes up and is bombarded by advertising and just accepts this as standard. It didn't used to be, and it should be that way now. We're smarter than this and deserve better of ourselves, of our media, and of our politicians. 

We are only as dumb as we allow ourselves to be, which right now is teetering on the edge of permanent impediment of cognitive functionality.

"Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival."