America’s Cities Are NOT Burning*
*Despite what you see on TV news
Many years ago, I was a producer for a local TV news station in New York.
As often happens in the fall, a hurricane was working its way up the east coast, scheduled to make landfall on New York.
For local TV news, that is a big story.
So it was all hands to the pump for the Big BREAKING NEWS story.
I was assigned to go out with one of our on-air talents, along with the crew. (This was before my VJ/MMJ revelation).
Our assignment — KILLER HURRICANE STRIKES EAST COAST!
Our job — find the killer hurricane.
So we hopped in the van and drove and drove and drove until we at last found the Holy Grail — a downed tree that had hit a car and was blocking the road.
Like the news ‘professionals’ that we were, we jumped out of the van and began to shoot ‘b-roll’ on the tree, car and street. Then our talent, safely ensconced in the car to prevent the rain from damaging her hair, carefully tending to her makeup in the rear view mirror, miked up and appeared in front of the tree and car to do her bit.
And there is was. The ‘news’.
Now, in point of fact, the real story here was that it took us about two hours of driving around to find any film-able damage. But that does not make TV news. You can’t scream BREAKING NEWS! when pretty much everything looks untouched.
But you don’t get viewers with ‘no news to report here’. And if you don’t get viewers you don’t get ratings, and if you don’t get ratings you don’t get any ad revenue. And ad revenue is the lifeblood of most local TV news operations.
So all ‘news’ is geared not to inform and educate, it is geared to grab the viewer and hold them. And the best way to do that is to scare the bejezus out of people.
Fires are great! How many local TV news stories have you seen of a house fire? It makes great TV. Sirens, Firemen, flashing lights — of course, the only people really effected by the fire are the poor bastards whose house has burned down. For 99.99% of the other viewers, it’s just entertainment.
Shark Attack!! Likewise.
Now we come to the notorious BURNING CITIES! This is heroin for TV news operations. Shooting BLM marches are are orderly and peaceful makes boring TV. As with the hurricane, go out and find me something that will rate! And so, TV news crews naturally gravitate toward the most terrible, most violent, most ‘entertaining’ footage they can find.
That’s how the Department of Justice designates New York City an “Anarchist Jurisdiction”. I live in Midtown Manhattan. This is nothing but a lie. But for the rest of the country that can’t look out of their window and a peaceful Fifth Avenue — no one shooting anyone here — this becomes ‘reality’, because they ‘saw it on TV’.
Is this really representative of what is actually happening? Of course not! That’s Entertainment.
Now, combine that with a President who spends 8 hours a day watching TV; whose primary source of information is what he sees on TV. Marry that to the echo chamber that is Social Media and you have either a recipe for disaster… or a pretty good profile of what is wrong with our society today.
Or both.
My new book, Don’t Watch This — which explains all of this in greater detail, is scheduled for release October 3rd. Check it out.
