The war on the American intellect

In today's fast-paced, instant information culture where the Internet is king and cable news has a virtual monopoly over public discourse, what is the point of reading a newspaper? Why do newspaper journalists even bother writing an article about, for example, the Michael Vick case, or any other major news event for that matter?

 A newspaper is incapable of showing the public an event. We are limited to giving you a picture and a story. Television news has the ability to cram a newspaper's worth of daily news into an hour or even less. Almost certainly, more GHC students have watched television news in the last week than have read more than a page of a newspaper.

Think about the last time you watched the news on television. Did you want to learn more about what was happening in the world? This is the intent of a majority of people when they view television news. In reality, they are not being informed in a meaningful or intellectually stimulating manner. Television news is mind-numbing entertainment disguised as news. Everything on television news, be it the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the genocide in Darfur, is presented in a manner that defies context, meaning and relevance.

One moment you are bombarded with stock quotes, then with whatever war we happen to be in, then you see Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan stumble out of a nightclub and then hear about a drug to cure baldness. None of these things are related, but they are presented so quickly that no viewer has time to fully comprehend any news event before something else replaces it.

You as a viewer have no time or context with which to analyze what you are seeing, thus everything on television seems to be credible. In short, television media does not report the news, it trivializes it. Print media is a completely different animal. Print journalists do not seek to entertain. Our goal is to make the public more aware of the world around them, to stimulate their intellect, and encourage them to think for themselves.

If you ever read an article in the Six Mile Post and decide after reading it that you know everything you need to know about that topic, then we have not fulfilled our responsibilities as journalists. Conversely, if after reading an article you decide that you wish to learn more about what you read, then we at the Post have done our duty as journalists.

America has a worldwide reputation of having a vastly ignorant populace. While this may not be completely true, the fusion of information and entertainment is certainly a reason for our lack of understanding of the world that we live in. I challenge readers of this publication to question what they are told and strive to learn more about the seemingly insurmountable problems facing our generation.

This publication is the voice of the students on each GHC campus. As such, it requires input from the larger college community. Please, let us know what is on your minds. E-mail us at: [email protected]