by Doug Ordunio
Did Al-Qaeda plan that? I strongly doubt it. That morning in 2001, I awoke and the TV was still on, tuned to the local NBC affiliate. As my vision cleared from sleep I realized there was an image of a burning building on the screen. In a moment, I recognized the WTC as well as the recollection that I had stood on the top floor when I had visited that site many years before when I saw the event held in the ground floor to display in public the 500,000th Steinway grand piano.
Television has brought us the tragic visuals associated with that event ans has done so many times before as in the Kennedy Assassination (and subsequent memorial services {which seemed to go on endlessly}), the Challenger disaster, the Branch Dravidian debacle, and other things going all the way back to Kathy Fiscus falling down the well in the early 1950s.
Even every other day there’s a new high-speed chase on the freeways or perhaps a mass murder to catch our attention brought to us by our friendly news heads who talk to us incessantly.
All of this serves to intimidate and frighten us beyond belief whether or not we know it. In the end, it depresses us and deflates our spirits.
It also invites other viewers to commit copycat crimes so their commissions might ascend to the next level in a never-ending cycle of escalation.
Many years ago, I talked with a man who wrote a book called How to Watch Network News. I asked him this question: if by some miracle of the universe ALL of the tragic and terrible events in the world magically vanished so that the Earth was only filled with happy and heart-warming stories, could Network News survive???
He answered NO.
When asked why, he said “Because positive new stories are not VISUALLY interesting.”
Think about that statement. Perhaps you should turn the TV off.