The book that I have selected for this semester is a book that closely relates to a post that I wrote on movie theater etiquette and the loss of common knowledge due to the media. Like Michael Moore pointed out in his movie on gun control, the media in america is reporting thing that are tragic because they are entertaining. The black people getting tackled on Cops because that is what people want to see or various violent things because it makes a good story for the news. The author of the story spent months watching 24 hrs of one days television shows across all of Fairfax, VA’s 90 something cable channels. Then he went out into his backyard, climbed a mountain, and sat a day reflecting on his experiences watching TV in the wilderness. He says, “Television tells us we have everything in common. But we don’t. And as we lose our particularity we lose prodigious [excessive] amounts of information”(41). The author, Mckibben, is saying that as the news becomes more and more international, the audience becomes larger and the cultures that will watch news networks such as CNN will become greater. This means that when the news gets a hold of a story they try to either spin or choose stories that apply to an international audience and “we must restrict our conversations to what we have in common... [because] the things that interest me may not interest, or be even be comprehensible by you”(48). This erases a piece of information that may be important to know, but it is irrelevant to a specific international group and is subsequently not reported on because certain viewers would not comprehend it. We are being censored by the fact that we as a international group are brought closer together through the television screen.
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