What's News?

YONI LAVIE from Shabbat bi-shabbato Parshas Vayigash

"Beep... beep... beep. Kol Yisrael (the Voice of Israel) from Jerusalem. It's six o'clock and here is the news, read by Malachi Chizkiya. Today at two o'clock the father who killed his two children and then committed suicide was buried. He threw his children, for and five years old, off the roof of a twelve-story building in Tel Aviv and then jumped to his death. Our police correspondent Hadas Shteif reports that only a month ago he attacked his divorcee with a kitchen knife and threatened to kill her." That is what we heard on the radio a few weeks ago, just a normal weekday news broadcast. It was one of thousands of broadcasts that the average Israeli hears during his or her lifetime. Sometimes such broadcasts can be heard several times on the same day. After all, it is important to be aware of what is happening around us. No modern person wants to disassociate himself from what happens in the world, isn't that right?   But I think that there is still a problem, deeper and more serious than what we tend to think. This is symptomatic of an entire culture and of the people whose characters are created within it. We do not notice how these "hot" reports from the field and the "objective" and "serious" news broadcasts which are available hour after hour on radio and television by their very essence lead to long-term harmful elements that affect millions of listeners and viewers. We will discuss just two of these damaging factors.   Getting Used to Atrocities   Every ethical person who has good moral traits has a natural sensitivity that causes him or her to react to cruel and evil deeds with disgust. But what happens when he is exposed several times every day to concentrated doses of sick evil and heart-rending tragedies? The result is inevitable. The person will develop a dull reaction and apathy towards atrocities.   The next time he hears about yet another family which was completely destroyed when a train lost its brakes and fell into a canyon, he will shake his head, make a face, and change the station to something broadcasting light music. He will take another valium pill and say to himself, "That's terrible, it's the third time that this has happened this week..." The only way the masters of the rating have found to keep the attention of the listeners is to make the broadcasts more and more outrageous as time goes on. There will be a constant rise in detailed and graphic descriptions of murders, elicit sexual encounters, and other atrocities. Don't be fooled. This is not merely poor taste. It is an explicit policy of exploiting the pornography of death and cheap views of evil merely to keep the listeners from leaving.   As an aside we will ask some questions. Has anybody thought at all about the effect this can have on millions of confused children or adolescents who ride with their parents in a car and who are constantly exposed to such horrible reports? Do they have the tools to assimilate such stories? What does listening to this material do to their souls? What does it teach them about the world or about life in general?   Is there any Comparison?   Let's go further. "The number of deaths in the earthquake in Indonesia the day before yesterday is estimated to be about a hundred and twenty thousand, with tens of thousands still missing and half a million people who have lost their homes. Our foreign correspondent Yonatan Regev reports that rescue services continue to search for survivors, but that the probability of finding any survivors is constantly decreasing. Today the Israeli tennis star Dudi Sela defeated the Russian Ivan Sergeiv, and he will go on to compete in the semi-finals of the Challenger Tournament in Kazakhstan. Selah, who is rated as number 115 in the world, defeated his Russian opponent in three sets - 6:2, 6:4, 6:0." Do you see what happened in this news summary? As if it was the most natural thing in the world, in a clear show of nonchalance and apathy, the announcer moves on easily from one story to the next, maintaining the same serious and cold attitude towards a terrible tragedy that took the lives of tens of thousands of people and a report of a quite trivial tennis match. The sharp message of a lack of proportion that represents terrible moral blindness is passed on to the minds of the listeners again and again. But if we assume that the listeners are living people and not lifeless models made of wood, what damage is done to their honest and moral attitude towards life in general?   The Daily Dose of Drugs   We can be assured that from the point of view of "keeping up-to-date" the phenomenon of people addicted to the news is completely superfluous. It is possible to get a dose of the "drug" between twelve and sixteen times a day every hour on the hour (ignoring regular bulletins on the half hour), but it is also possible to manage with about a minute of selectively reading the main headlines on the internet. In both cases, the bottom line of being informed about the events of the last twenty-four hours will be the same. But the cumulative effect on the soul is very different, especially since we are talking about phenomena that take place at an unconscious level during a period of many years. To summarize what we have been saying in one sentence: The news broadcasts tell the stories of post-modern culture which is addicted to strong emotions and to peeping at the lives of other people instead of experiencing life directly. This is a culture that sees the right of the people to know as an important principle even with respect to trivialities or insane acts and ignores the obligations of a human being and the need to develop into a moral being who is sensitive and who yearns for good. In view of all this, we are left with one very important question: Where do we stand in this matter? How long will we continue to consume this product without paying attention to the consequences, or is there any possibility of acting differently and possibly even creating a worthy alternative?