John Zada - Veils of Distortion: How the News Media Warps Our Minds

Veils of Distortion

How the News Media Warps Our Minds

John Zada

Copyright 2021 by John Zada

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ISBN: 978-1-7773571-0-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-7773571-1-5 (ebook)

Cover design by Michel Vrana.

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For everyone

PREFACE

Around the time I signed up for my first television news writing job over a decade ago with the newly launched CBC News Network in Toronto, I started noticing a trend across society: people were tuning out of news coverage in droves. Every time I met someone new and the subject of my job came up they would tell me matter-of-factly that they recently made the decision to stop consuming news. Oh, I dont watch the news anymore. Its way too gloomy, one person said. The news media instills fear and hatred in us, quipped another. People were often tired, or fed up, with the negativity and pessimism of news coverage and felt that the world the news was portraying didnt equate with their living experience of it. Others told me they felt emotionally manipulated for ratings, subscriptions and clicks to the point where their wellness was being negatively impacted. Some even held the deep conviction that the news stoked, or amplified, the chaos in the world. Those sentiments reached a crescendo during the COVID-19 pandemic, when news operations went into full-throttle to churn out as many daunting stories as they could on a daily basis without taking stock of the consequences for society. To safeguard their already strained mental and physical health, nearly everyone I know made a calculated decision to largely tune out of the unrelenting coverage.

Whatever our exact opinions, many of us feel that news cycles in the West, especially in North America, have turned into spectacles of imbecility. News organizations, which have seen their advertising revenue streams reduced to a trickle by the internet, have doubled-down in their pursuit of emotive sensation with the desperation of a drowning person grasping for a life raft. This tireless attempt to win and hold audiences resorts to the same old methods which have sent so many news consumers packing in the first place. Donald Trump was brought front-and-centre in this effort; indeed, the phenomenon of his coming to power in the first place is not inextricable from the calculating and excessive media coverage of his belly flop into politics in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election.

But the madness gripping the news media goes beyond Trumps erstwhile presidency. Every contentious issue and debate is now seized uponwhether about politics, race, identity, or genderand thrown into a coliseum where its partisans brawl like professional wrestlers in front of cheering and jeering audiences who later continue those battles online, and sometimes on the street. The elevation of local crime stories, celebrity scandals and social media tiffs to dramas of national and international importance also figures in this new campaign to agitate and entertain the masses. Hardly a day goes by when we arent blindsided by stories so bizarre and unlikely, so irresistibly morbid at times, that truth and fiction seem to swap positions like magnetic poles that have flipped:

TEENAGE BOY DIES OF BUBONIC PLAGUE AFTER EATING MARMOT

BANGLADESH 'TREE MAN' WANTS HANDS AMPUTATED TO RELIEVE PAIN

GRETA THUNBERG LOOK-ALIKE IN YUKON GOLD RUSH PHOTO SPARKS ONLINE FRENZY

DOCTORS REMOVE LIVE WORM FROM WOMANS TONSIL

WOMAN DETAINED AFTER VIDEO APPEARS TO SHOW HER THROWING OWN FECES AT TIM HORTONS STAFF

There seems to be no end to these circus shows offered up by a once more respectable profession now co-opted into the entertainment industrial complex to such a degree that it has become a surreal parody of itself. The problem is not that these reported events arent happeningthey are. We live in a strange world that is undergoing greater and more rapid change than at any other time in recorded history, and in which nearly anything that happens can be documented by ad-hoc citizen reporters. But what we dont learn from the newsbecause its doyens either wont tell us, or cant because they dont realize itis that the events it covers tend to be outliers: they are exceptions and not the rule. The choice of stories and the extent of the coverage and significance attributed to them are not reflective of most of our day-to-day experiences. By featuring them as they do, the news creates a distorted picture of our reality. Ironically, by implying that the world they depict