Viewer: "That would be good. More research. Laboratory. The brain."
If, at the end of the newscast, the viewer bothered to review the stories and his own reactions to them, he would realize he'd learned nothing. But reflection is not the game.
In fact, the flow of the news stories has washed over him and created very little except a sense of (false) continuity.
Therefore, every story on the news broadcast achieves the goal of keeping the context thin -- night after night, year after year. The overall effect of this staging is: small viewer's mind, small viewer's understanding.
Next we come to words over pictures. More and more, news broadcasts are using the rudimentary film technique of a voice narrating what the viewer is seeing on the screen.
People are shouting and running and falling in a street. The anchor or a field reporter says: "The country is in turmoil. Parliament has suspended sessions for the third day in a row, as the government decides what to do about uprisings aimed at forcing democratic elections..."
Well, the voice must be right, because we're seeing the pictures. If the voice said the riots were due to garbage-pickup cancellations, the viewer would believe that, too.
We see Building #7 of the WTC collapse. Must have been the result of a fire. The anchor tells us so. Words over pictures.
Staged news.
It mirrors what the human mind, in an infantile state, is always doing: looking at the world and seeking a brief summary to explain what that world is, at any given moment.
Since the dawn of time, untold billions of people have been urging a "television anchor" to "explain the pictures."
The news gives them that precise solution, every night.
"Well, Mr. Jones," the doctor says, as he pins X-rays to a screen in his office. "See this? Right here? We'll need to start chemo immediately, and then we may have to remove most of your brain, and as a follow-up, take out one eye."
Sure, why not? The patient saw the pictures and the anchor explained them.
Eventually, people get the idea and do it for themselves. They see things, they invent one-liners to explain them.
They're their own anchors. They short-cut and undermine their own experience with vapid summaries of what it all means.
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