HILLARY
Recently I have begun to feel what I call "media fatigue". I want to be informed, and I want to stay current with events, however I don't get the information that I need from network news and the internet is so overwhelming that I sometimes don't know where to look. I'm starting to feel like a character in an Orwellian novel. Do you have any sense of what I'm talking about, Jack?
JACK
Absolutely. Your reference to Orwell is always frightening, because as the creator of "overspeak" he projected with amazing accuracy our worst nightmares in communication. The world has become so complex, and there are so many voices telling us how and what we should think that it puts our brains into overload. Another famous philosopher once said, "the media is the message" and we can feel the absence of neutrality in the presentation of the news. You refer to the network news, which in the early days was never a profit center, and was considered a public service. Today's anchors are more like entertainers who are responsible for ratings. Network policy is totally involved with driving profit to the bottom line, and the idea of performing a service has all but disappeared. The only way that we can absorb, qualify and act is to train our own minds to be discriminating, and separate fact from fiction in the daily news.
HILLARY
But how does one do that? If I only get 30-60 minutes of news every day, and the major stories are Michael Jackson's death or killer whales or Sandra Bullock's love life, there can't be enough coverage of the stories that I want to know about – the wars we are fighting, our promise for change in government, etc. I know that I can look this information up on the internet, but then it becomes a vast ocean of information and it's hard to know where to start, let alone which site to trust. I just don't know how average people are supposed to have time to really educate themselves on what's happening the world. If I'm about ready to give up and live in a media vacuum, and I've been considered a news junkie, how are the rest of our fellow citizens supposed to be informed?
JACK
This dilemma has always been the problem in a free society. I always have the hope that the system is self-adjusting. But the more complex the world becomes the longer it takes for all the elements to come together. I do know that it doesn't happen by a bureaucracy planning, guiding and ordering each element of our society to conform. We need only go back in history to the Soviet Union, and the dozens of five-year plans that were created and, to my knowledge, never successfully executed. The dictatorships were much more efficient, but at the same time totally destructive. One of the great climaxes of conflicting ideas was WWII. The great statesman Winston Churchill said that democracy was the most unstable and confusing form of government, but it was the best system and far superior to anything else.
We have an indication of what Churchill was talking about when we examine all of the extreme parties in our country. At the end of the day they want everyone to conform, but only to their ideology. I have the feeling, and the great hope, that the majority will reject the nonsense that passes as news and make it both mentally and economically feasible to get the latest on subjects that really matter.
HILLARY
I hope you're right, because right now my instinct is to turn it all off and stick my head in the sand. But I know that this is the intention of those in power – to keep us ignorant so they can control the issues that truly affect our lives. So I'll to my best to withstand this media fatigue…maybe after a nap.
JACK
You are beginning to realize that the only thing in this world that really control is your own reaction to circumstances that surround you. The real answer is not to waste your energy on changing others, but to concentrate on how you react and, ultimately in that reaction, how you can benefit those around you. In other words, it is sometimes better to adapt and live with a situation and if it is wrong it will collapse of it's own weight.