“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad…. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! ….You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’” – Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) From the film Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky.
It’s hard to believe that the film Network was made in 1976 – especially when observing the quote above. It seems to reflect the attitudes of many during our common time. The film, which centers on a newsman gone crazy and exploited for his opinions that are treated as fact for profit, is a warning against the country that we’ve become.
You see, we live in an age where opinions are treated as fact. Channels like FOX and MSNBC have are there for one simple reason: to exploit people by re-enforcing their own personal biases (be it conservative or liberal) as fact and replacing knowledge of the true ways of the world with cash grab appeasements to any certain belief in order to make people feel that they’re justified in their ways of thinking.
I’m sorry, but if you watch shows like “The O’Reilly Factor,” “The Chris Matthews Show” or you listen to something like “The Huckabee Show” on the radio in order to become educated, you’ve been duped.
Now, say that you want to treat someone like a Mick Huckabee or Ann Coulter as a sort of radio/television columnist, then I guess I can see that. However, most people don’t. Most people don’t see the connection that these people parading on TV as informers of the people are really charlatans – wolves disguised as sheep.
They aren’t there to force you to recognize hard truths.
They’re there to make you feel better about yourself and rack up the views in order to rake in more advertising.
I understand that all news outlets function as businesses, otherwise – without the money – we wouldn’t have any news outlests because they wouldn’t have funding. But never before have more opinions paraded around as fact.
When respectable news programs like “60 Minutes” would take a moment with Andy Rooney to editorialize on the news, they made sure that audiences knew that Rooney wasn’t reporting fact; he was ranting about his opinions…and there’s nothing wrong with that.
I defend editorializing as much as I can. It’s a necessary function in order to let the world know of the different perspectives that exist on the many different occurrences in the world.
However, you first need to learn what those occurrences are in full detail before you can talk in an educated manner about them. You can’t hear the news as you want to hear it. You’ve got to hear it straight.
But we don’t want to hear it straight.
We just want to be “left alone.” It’s up to you to stand up and have your own “I’m mad as hell” moment. You have to cut through the lies and opinions on your own know.
Paddy Chayffefsky told the truth and predicted our current reality more than 30 years ago, but society didn’t listen and they haven’t learned from that mistake yet.
Brian Laughran
Senior Viewpoints Editor