“Chilling final words” before a man enters a tiger enclosure and is killed. Cornell suspends fraternity parties following rape allegations. People discovered climbing into NYC manholes. Selma Blair’s alleged attack on flight attendants. Four teen killers react to life sentences. Fifteen worst years to be alive in human history. NATO warns Russia: “We will destroy you…” Former San Francisco police officer allegedly kills wife and 24-year-old daughter.
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Or just a few hours later: “The tragedy of Kaley Cuoco.” “Celebrity plastic surgeon gunned down in his office.” The Fed’s new warning for Wall Street. “He tried the rope swing of death — and instantly regretted it.” The tragedy of Jonathan Taylor Thomas. “Clinically dead woman meets unsettling beings.” I was tempted to click and find out who those “unsettling beings” were but resisted the urge. As for the rest, who cares?
And that was only a few hour’s worth of headlines. It’s not overstating the truth to say we are inundated with sensationalized and negative news to the point that we may come to believe that is all there is. We may think we live in a world of pervasive violence and perversion, and that there’s little we can do about it except hunker down in our homes and avoid going outside. That is a fiction, but it sells news, and it will continue as long as we continue to consume it and react to it. The reality is very different.
The media selectively focus on the most extreme and sensational stories they can find anywhere in the country and in the world. It plays videos with trigger warnings. (“The images you are about to see may be disturbing…” — then why watch them?) It dwells on the most violent and disgusting stories until their effect wears off, then goes on to others. But in doing so, it is creating a false and harmful version of reality.
If left unchecked, watching news of this kind can lead to cynicism, depression, and hopelessness. It can kill the human spirit. It is not just the news, “fair and balanced” or otherwise. It is the deliberate attempt to addict viewers with the need for negativity and sensationalism. It is the attempt to alter the brains of viewers so they become dependent on this false version of reality, so that the moment they get up in the morning, they feel compelled to check in on the “news” and continue following until late at night.
This is not living. This is not freedom. It is the “mind-forged manacles” that Blake wrote of in the poem “London.”
Blake understood that there is another reality that is free and joyful (and for this, he was judged insane). In the poem “Eternity,” Blake wrote that “He who binds to himself a joy/Does the winged life destroy/He who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in eternity’s sunrise.” Our present-day media can hardly be accused of kissing the joy as it flies or living in eternity’s sunrise. In fact, our media have nothing at all to say about “joy.” And those who succumb to the appeal of media sensationalism will lose the joy that Blake described.
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The other reality that Blake cherished can be described as an exuberance for life; joy in the presence of life, especially new life; wonder at the beauty of God’s creation; and faith in the goodness of life and of human beings. Again, those are not topics often covered by the news media, though they occasionally make their way into stories on Fox News.
The best way to escape the mind-forged manacles is to separate oneself from the negative media. A “news fast,” during which one watches no news for a period of days, weeks, or months, can be a healthy cleansing of the spirit. There are far more important things happening in one’s life than people climbing into NYC manholes or Selma Blair (whoever she is)’s alleged attack on flight attendants.
Today was a painfully beautiful day, and many people missed it while caged up in front of their negative news screens. Where I live, the air was cool and dry, and the sky was an astounding shade of deep blue. Each deep breath brought with it the knowledge that I am alive and well. In that breathing, under that sky, there was joy, and I fear that my mumbled affirmations caused a few bystanders to judge that I, like Blake, am insane as well. But joy is not insanity; it is the purest and most truthful reality one can experience, and it leads one toward a conservative reverence for life and awareness of the goodness all around. It is “the truth” that never gets reported in the media, which are inflicting on the public an addiction to death and perversion.
When one shuts off the media, one enters the calm truth of a totally different way of thinking and feeling. In the poem “Ash Wednesday,” T.S. Eliot wisely wrote, “Teach us to care and not to care.” In this he expressed exactly the condition of freedom beyond the mind control of the media. George Orwell said something similar in “The Prevention of Literature” (1946): “The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.” By freeing oneself from the control of the negative media, one can regain what Orwell called “imagination” — originality, insight, freedom, and independence. But more important, one can regain joy and purpose.
There is nothing good about the mind-forged manacles of the talk shows running all day long or the evening news hour, beginning as always with the most sensational events of the day. These are not “events”; they are the media-constructed fiction, constructed through selection and emphasis based on what will compel the public to watch. The “truth” is not what is selected according to its disturbing qualities; it is calm, harmonious, at peace with life, and filled with beauty and joy. It is filled with goodness and kindness, and it exists all around you. All it asks is that you reclaim your freedom and reject the destructive idea that life is violent and perverse.
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