Media Distractions and the Quality of Lives

Warner Todd HustonMarch 1, 2024

0 80 5 minutes read

By Jeff Davidson

Decades back, my friend, Bill Halloran, liked to listen to Howard Stern in the morning. Year after year on his way to work, Bill was titillated by Howard Stern’s shock talk. Hundreds of thousands of working professionals must have felt the same way. Howard is now a multi-millionaire.

After hearing Stern, no one was empowered, energized, or better able to face the day. He was, in essence, an electronic fix, a drug, if you will, that briefly took you out of your own life and into some form of contemptuous humor that got you through the next ten minutes. Even among those who know this on some level, why did so many people listen? The answer is what I call “electronic addiction.”

The Anxiety of Electronic Addiction

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

Yes

As a society, our exposure to the media, especially via the internet, has increased several hundred percent within a few decades, and while worldwide media coverage provides many benefits, it also has many side effects. As we spend more and more hours glued to our cell phones, we are exposed to untold numbers of messages and images. Just as too much food at one sitting, isn’t easily ingested, neither is too much data in any form.

Concurrent with the deluge, we have become an anxious society that uses electronics to not feel alone, evade confronting why we can’t seem to get what we want, or to avoid better use of the hours we say we so earnestly want. We retain, embrace and offer rapt attention to all forms of media, and to the devices transmitting them to us. So it’s logical that we then make million dollar superstars out of TV meteorologists and inane talk show hosts.

Our cultural, electronic addiction to the mass media inverts our perception of available time, and diminishes our attention spans. Hence the masters of the airwaves capture the attention of otherwise distracted listeners. Television and radio news and features are growing ever shorter to match the fragmented, decreasing attention spans of viewers.

The Rise of Sensationalism

Around 1900, to build his newspaper chain faster and to sell more papers, William Randolph Hearst used sensationalism to heighten the most mundane of stories. For example, if one of his reporters turned in a story about a dog who got his foot stuck in a sewer grate, Hearst would have the headline changed to read,

“CANINE TRAPPED IN TUNNEL OF DEATH.”

Hearst perceived that the public was interested in prominent names, and he loaded the paper with them. In every city having a Hearst paper, an index was kept of people willing to be quoted along certain lines. For example, if Hearst favored the Navy’s buying big battleships, a list of retired admirals would be taken from the files, and each of the old gentlemen would be approached for his opinion. Those who agreed would be heavily quoted in articles, i.e., “Retired Admiral XYZ Says Navy Lacking In…”

Remarkably, the Pulitzer Prize, an award alleged to represent the highest aspirations and achievements in journalism, is named for Mr. Joseph Pulitzer. While Pulitzer did not originate sensationalism, he played a crucial role in the history of American journalism simply by living at a time when social and economic changes enabled sensationalism to flourish.

Pulitzer used frivolous pictures, poetry, short stories, and the like, to make the newspaper a medium to entertain as well as inform. Pulitzer borrowed ideas of sensationalism that were not his own and brought them up to date to fit a modern America of cities and factories.

When Pulitzer set up shop in New York, he wanted to achieve the greatest circulation in America’s history. He needed a large circulation to have a platform from which his liberal principles could be heard. To obtain it, he had to win the confidence, as well as excite the interest, of the masses of people. Many features that appealed to a working-class audience – pictures, lurid accounts of crime and violence, the air of irreverence – were bound to appeal to others as well.

Overstimulated and Distracted

To this day, to capture an overstimulated, distracted population, news media rely more and more on sensationalism. With a planet of eight billion people, the media are easily furnished with an endless supply of turmoil for mass transmission. At any moment somebody is in conflict somewhere. Such turmoil is packaged daily for the 24 hour news cycle.

Beyond mere politics, we are lured with images of crashes, hostages, and natural disasters. We offer our time and rapt attention to each new hostility, scandal or disaster. Far more people die annually from choking on food than in plane crashes or by guns, but crashes and shootings make for great footage, and play into people’s fears.

Your chance of dying from a commercial airplane mishap actually is less than one in 2,600,000. So, you need only be concerned if you fly five flights per week, 52 weeks per year, for several thousand years.

Gaining Control

It is not immoral to not “keep up” with the news. However to “tune out” – turn your back on the world is not appropriate either. Being more selective in what you give your attention to, and to how long you give it, makes more sense.

There is little utility in intellectually resonating with the world’s challenges and problems. Pick one cause or one issue, and take some kind of action outside your home. For most of us on the Right, the burning issue today is reclaiming our country from Leftist zealots.

Action is customarily invigorating. Your ability to make a real, if minute, difference will immediately lessen your concerns about attaining some breathing space.

Tomorrow morning, quietly envision how you would like your day to be. Include everything that’s important to you – the commute if you make one, entering your building or your office, sitting down at your desk, handling tasks, and taking breaks.

Envision interacting with others, going to lunch, conducting or attending meetings, using the phone, finishing up projects, and walking out in the evening. With this exercise alone, you’ll begin to feel a greater sense of control in aspects of your job that you might have considered uncontrollable.
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Jeff Davidson is “The Work-Life Balance Expert®” and the premier thought leader on work-life balance, effectiveness, integration, shift, blend, and harmony. Jeff speaks to organizations that seek to enhance their overall productivity by improving the effectiveness of their people. He is the author of Breathing Space, Perfect Timing, Simpler Living, Dial it Down, and Everyday Project Management. Visit BreathingSpace.com or call 919-932-1996 for more information on Jeff’s keynote speeches and seminars.

Cross-posted with The Lid

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