You’ve heard the (by now) cliché: perception is reality.

How we perceive something is what we act on. How someone else sees me forms her “reality of me,” though it might not match my own view of myself.
You could say that perception is made up of the glasses and the earphones that we wear all the time. What we hear, see, taste, smell and feel is continually shaping and governing what we think, feel and want for ourselves.
Our perception is shaped by many things: our parents, our physical environment, our education, our genes, our culture, the things we put in our bodies, and the things we choose to read and watch.
We watch television. A lot. We watch TV news and TV news, like it or not, goes a long way toward shaping our perceptions of our neighborhoods, our cities, our country and our world. If we stretch the point, we could say that we become what we watch. (Scary isn’t it?)
I believe it is terribly important to be aware of the mindset and the perceptions that are in place in television and in TV news. If television news were a man standing on a street corner selling us something (and it is), we would want to know something about the man and why he was doing what he was doing. Consider the source.
Let’s talk about TV news for a moment as if it were a man. First of all, he is very visual. He wants to show us something and the visual, when it gets down to it, is more important than what we hear. This is different than a newspaper. Take a typical winter “story” about an ice storm. On TV we will see, over and over again, pictures of cars sliding down streets, crashing into other cars. And we apparently can’t see it just once; we see the same shot five or six times. In a newspaper we would read about the ice storm and closed streets and the number of injuries or death, but we wouldn’t read the sentence “four SUV’s slid down a side street and sideswiped other cars.”
He’s visual, above all. He shows us.
Second, he wants to be important to us and he wants what he says to matter. Terribly. TV journalists (and to some degree all journalists) want what they say to be so important that we can’t not listen or watch. How could it be different? What if what they showed us was completely irrelevant? What if what they said didn’t matter to anyone at all?
So there’s this guy on the street corner who is a very visual guy. He’s well dressed, maybe got some bright colors on and he’s certainly more attractive than your average Joe. And he has this heightened desire to be important to us. Maybe we’re listening to him, watching.
Then, interestingly enough, we notice a woman on the corner across the street. And then a guy on the other corner, then a fourth. Then there are men and women on the side street. All of them waving their hands and raising their voices, striving to get our attention, striving to show and tell us something that will impress us in some way.
There is, lo and behold, competition. And, we discover, these men and women are employed by a company that is making lots of money by grabbing our attention and impressing us. The stakes are raised.
We might listen to one of these broadcasters more than another. One might convince us that she has “breaking news,” a phrase that, if any has, has become obsolete from abuse and overuse. Other words are in vogue for a while and become meaningless from overuse. That word for 2010-11 is “huge.” And the use of that word underscores the point. Imagine someone standing in front of you and repeatedly trying to convince you that what they’re about to say is HUGE. “This is huge folks, listen to me.”
OK. These TV people are visual. They want very much to be important. And they compete for money. Let’s add one more wrinkle that shapes the perceptions of our guy on the street corner.
They do not take part, these news people. They enter a neighborhood, they record and they leave. They are looking for a story, and not a small story. They are looking for a story that will impress a large number of people. If it does not impress a mass audience they are not interested.
I’ll give you a recent example.
A few days ago a pipe bomb was discovered in a backpack on a street in Spokane. It had been left there along a parade route and luckily discovered by municipal workers before there was any explosion. NBC had a brief story on the discovery and Bryan Williams said as the pictures of the backpack faded away:
“(This) could have been a major news story.”
But it wasn’t. Ta ta Spokane. See you later. We just heard of something that may be huge down the street.
Nothing visual. Nothing important. Nothing our competitors will talk about. We’ve lost interest.
These are the people we listen to and watch. These are the people who have something to do with forming our perceptions, with shaping our worlds.
Here are my questions for the guy on the corner in the nice suit with the colorful tie: What have you added to my life? What can I learn about my fellow human beings by you telling me this? How have you enriched my democracy, my community by showing me these pictures?
Stop showing me the darkest side of the human race. Stop scaring the shit out of me on a regular basis and help me get better. Help all of us get better. Give us something we can use. That would be huge.