Be warned, I tell you. Yes, be warned as we so often prove we love being. Yes, warned. We love to be warned. We are excited when warned about harm. We like being frightened by our media, titillated by a broadcast and print media insistent on overdramatizing the news, creating news based on the demands of sensationalism, irrespective of truth or value as news. News does have a value. It does have a need as well as serve other needs in a society. This need the news itself has is firstly determined by the demands of Truth–and I do know how grandiose this sounds to a contemporaneity driven by a metaphysics of doubt, an overriding doubt that knowledge can be had or the limits of knowing determined. Truth is not a lie used to reinforce the hegemony of elites–we have the most elitist society in out history, all the time we masquerade as being more democratic, or more pluralistic, which always tries to parade as Democratic Truth.
In the case of most of America’s Yellow Press–and what is this about the press being Yellow, you ask? Most news in America is Yellow–and please do not misread this though one or another mis-steps taken from our systematic under-education, especially in matters pertaining to reading and writing and what must be called literacy and not alphabetism. Most news is driven by one kind of scandal mongering or another. The Brian Williams affair only reinforces this notion of mine that the news has little idea what Truth is–we determine the uppercase value of Truth through consensus more than by philosophical evaluation. Even to say “philosophical evaluation” is met with either derision or mockery in a culture that prides itself on being ignorant, which we do, and falls right in line with doubt having become the highest form of wisdom in our culture. What we have in this milieu of doubt, doubt and more doubt is in effect to have so relativized all minor ‘t’ truths that the Brian Williams affair seems logical, inevitable by necessity. The desire to pursue Truth does not exist in the news as we have it. No! We have been overwhelmingly subsumed, once more, by doubt, doubt and more doubt everywhere without a drop of truth to drink. News is in a desert.
Mr. Williams is in broadcast and not print–yet each is all of a piece, both of them conglomerated. Print media and broadcast media are not separate in the news business. But what I must warn you about is that the trite, the cliche, the complacent or any one of the many, many received ideas of our culture built on the cornerstones of doubt, consensus, relativism and sensationalism will not be found in these pages or within its blog. The only time you will see the received ideas of our culture appear in these pages or inside its blog entries are when they are questioned, critiqued or explained–yes, exposition must always include appropriate explication.
Dogmas are always scrutinized as they must be by any people wanting to be or claiming to be free–democracy demands debate, but not endless ping ping of opinions that in the end must reach consensus. Americans need consensus because they have been taught to need, trained to masquerade as independent by disagreeing, all the while knowing in their minds that they must reach consensus in the end, leave their disagreements behind and play hop-scotch with Truth.
The Falling Leaf Review 