Boy not in balloon: Cable TV is making us crazy

[Mr. Sparkle]

If there is a moral to the national freakout Thursday over what was believed to be a boy in a balloon over Colorado, it's this: Cable TV has helped create an absolutely crazed culture that's as vulnerable to fads, freakshows, hoaxes and hypes as America was during the 1920s and the Great Depression. And those were not exactly eras when the national psyche was in its greatest shape.

What a couple of hours of absolute madness. It was worse after the balloon finally landed, and it was discovered that the 6-year-old boy believed to have been inside could not be found. Speculation about the boy falling out began, and I saw one onscreen image of the balloon with a circle drawn around a tiny speck halfway between the balloon and the ground. It could have been almost anything -- including the falling body of a child. Can you say gruesome?

Was it the hope of rescue that had viewers galvanized to the screen -- like the 1980's saga of Baby Jessica falling down a well in Texas? Or, are we just ready to latch onto anything bizarre or out of the ordinary that pops up on the screen as long as it's not more news about Americans losing jobs?

I have to say Fox's Shepherd Smith did a nice job of giving voice to some of the TV weirdness of the moment when he said: "I can imagine you're flipping around on the channels this afternoon, you're watching your 'Judge Judy' and looking for 'Rachel Ray,' and flipping by the news stations, and there's this flying saucer creeping along Colorado, and you're like, 'What in the world is this.' I mean, like I could not flip away."

As a TV nation, I'm beginning to think we are officially flipping out. As I am sure you know by now, the boy was found safe hiding in a box in the attic of his family's home. His family is as strange as they come with a history of twice being on ABC's reality TV show "Wife Swap." A family made for freakshow and fakeshow TV if every there was one. And we are foolish enough to fall for their craziness and watch. Maybe TLC can sign them up to replace the Gosselins.

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/zontv/2009/10/boy_balloon_colorado_cable_tv.html

[alsame]

1. Infotainment. There is very little real news on the cable channels. nt

[Buzz Clik]

2. That family played the media like a fine instrument. Falcon: "We did this for the show."

[mike_c]

3. there's a very simple solution that EVERYONE can implement right now....

Turn that shit off. I haven't watched TV other than during an occasional hotel stay in DECADES. The plug-in drug wastes our time, makes us passive observers watching other peoples' lives, more often than not fictitious lives, rather than active people living our own real lives, and manipulates our behavior. Interestingly, most of my friends are college professors or other well educated people, and there's hardly a television among them. People who have plenty to fill the hours of their lives don't need to sit on the couch "watching."

Turn that squawking box off!

[peace13]

4. We worried so much about one child floating in his family's creation

Yet few of us give thoughts to the children that our country kills every day in Afghanistan and Iraq and other corners of the world. That is the real crime. Wake up folks. There is no shortage of children in trouble.

[sabrina 1]

8. Thank you for making that point.

In Afghanistan, children are dying of starvation and cold every day. Their desperate parents are trying to sell them to save them and the rest of their families. Boys are worth more, I've read. In one story covered by an independent jouranlist, a father cries as his children stand behind him, in the freezing cold, with no shoes, no food and his story, as he tells it, is heart-wrenching. 'I would sell her if I could', he says pointing to his little daughter 'because I have nothing to give her'. Not long after the film maker recorded his desperate pleas, we are told the little girl died.

But because the presence of the US in that sad country has worsened the plight of ordinary Afghans, we don't talk about it. Because if the media covered what is actually happening to those children, the war-mongers would have a much more difficult time getting the public's support for their criminal wars.

So, people watch these stupid reality shows and 'worry' about children who, compared to those in Iraq and Afghanistan, are living in paradise.

[ixion]

5. What to do with Cable News:

Turn it off. :)

[pscot]

6. Turn off the fucking TV

Nobody's making you watch it.

[bertman]

7. Everyone who's saying "TURN IT OFF" is exactly right. The problem was that reliable

shows like The Ed Show got caught up in this network mass distraction exercise.

I think they do this every now and then just to see how many of us they can distract from the REAL and important events that we should be hearing about or discussing. Of course, that's just the tinfoil talking.

On the other hand if it's true that they "did it for the show" as guileless Falcon said, this could have been set up by the teevee producers and "launched" at a convenient moment.

[Mulehead]

9. To paraphrase Karl Marx

"Television (like Religion) is the opiate of the Masses".

Benedict Anderson observed that newspapers, and later, national educational systems, created a sense of "simultanaity" in people essential to the project of making them identify with the "imagined community" of the nation-state, and with the interests of the nation-state's ruling classes. TV is that process on steroids. Guy Dubord called mass media "le spectacle"; MacCluhan had it right with "the Media is the Message." TV is the Global Village Idiot. TV is essentially a means for substitution of actual lived reality (and local, family, and personal values) for TV's similacrum of reality, and the values of mindless consumer Capitalism in the service of Capital, and the class that owns it.

Everyone could do much worse than to follow John Prine's advice:

"Blow up your T.V.
Throw away your papers,
Move to the country,
Build you a home..."