The contribution of television to evil

The late Malcolm Browne in 1964.

Starting about three years ago I started putting up a lot of newspapers from a century prior right at the point of their publication centennial.  It's been illuminating as I hadn't appreciated, prior to that time, that the news services already existed and the better newspapers ran major news stories from across the country, and indeed across the globe, often within 24 hours of their occurring or even on the day that they occurred.  So people were informed of what was going on pretty quickly.  This is all the more the case as people really read the paper back then, as opposed to now when newspapers have declining readership.

But there is something really different about printed news.  It has a sense of remoteness about it.  Just last week, for example, the papers of a century ago were running a front page story about tornado deaths in Arkansas that, freakishly, occurred on the exact centennial of the same thing happening in 2019.  The difference is, however, that even over the span of a century, it's hard not to have the sense that the deaths in Arkansas were terrible, but they were not immediate to the lives of those who read the story elsewhere.

Television news alters this.  As we are a visual species, we react to images as if they are immediate.  This is why film has always been so impact.  Triumph of the Will wouldn't have matter a whit if it was a radio show.  It did as a movie.  Images have a way of impacting us the way other things do not. And part of that influences is that images exaggerate the importance of remote events.

Because of this, remote natural events have, in recent years, taken on a sense of political importance even though there's absolutely nothing anyone can really do about them.  President Bush was criticized vehemently over Hurricane Katrina, as if he could have done anything about it. Since that event, Presidents have been required to go to the scene of such disasters so that they can be filmed worrying about them, even though logic tells us that they'd be better off staying in the oval office where the news is likely a bit more clear.  Bush didn't make that mistake with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack as he traveled to "Ground Zero". But why?  Franklin Roosevelt didn't travel to Pearl Harbor to look at the disaster there.  It's all just for the camera.

That's one thing, but an added aspect of it is that even though we are now in the most peaceful episode of all of human history, television has promoted violence in more ways than one. So has film for that matter.

One way that this has occurred is that television and film have celebrated and promoted every type of vile behavior including violence.  Violence and sexual depravity that at one time would have never appeared in film is routine in it now.  Entire major and still celebrated movies about World War Two were filmed that didn't devolve into gore and didn't feature a nearly mandatory act of sexual depravity prior to the 1970s, witness The Longest Day or Tora! Tora! Tora!  In contrast watch Fury or Pearl Harbor now.

Beyond that, however, televised news footage, now available twenty-four hours a day on everyone's computer, has contributed to acts by lone actors against masses of people in all sorts of ways.  Indeed, we know now that the horrific events in Christchurch New Zealand were inspired by that.

Already, because of the nature of images, the reactions have been out of sync with reality.  New Zealand's prime minister has indicated that "something" will be done about her country's lax gun control provisions when in fact the attack was stopped at one of the mosques where it occurred because a worshiper was armed and the attacker abandoned the attack there.  And based on what we now know of the immigrant attacker who wanted to attack immigrants (apparently he didn't conceive of himself as an immigrant as he was white and not a Muslim, but he was) he would have struck out no matter where he was.

But more than that, if this news was regarded as remote, it would be remote, as horrible as that may sound. This sort of thing has spread due to the camera.

In 1963 journalist Malcolm Browne was informed to be at a certain location in Saigon where something was supposed to occur.  Browne was one of the few people who heeded the call to be there.  When there, he watched as a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, sat down in an intersection and another monk calmly poured ten gallons of gasoline over him.  Doing that takes some time.  The seated monk then set himself on fire.

Browne admitted that he could have intervened and stopped it and he admitted that he had that urge. But he stated that he couldn't as he was as journalist.  Instead, he took photographs of Thich Quang Duc burning.

Browne was a chemist before he was as journalist.  His instincts were right but his actions were wrong.  If he later was bothered by what he'd not done, he should have been.  He was complicit in the death of a human being.