The Media Unmasked and COVID-19: How Media Literacy Saves Lives
Nearly 6,500 new cases of COVID-19 in Florida have been reported in the last five days. Travis County, Texas — where we live — just reported 118 new COVID-19 cases in the largest single-day hike to date. According to NPR, cases in Arizona are up by 219%.
The news media wants all your attention on whatever it’s serving today. We have to be better than this. Stronger. More able to think for ourselves. More willing to dig for the facts. The media business is reactionary by design, and to get out of the many binds we are presently in, we need to be pro-active, individually and collectively.
We have an economic crisis and pandemic, both of which are raging out of control. We are also burdened with a lawless federal government and their jackboots who are busy looting Main Street in the most thorough and violent ways imaginable. It’s obscene.
The media could serve as an aid to the people now, but that’s fantastical thinking. The media will continue to do whatever it can to make money. And that means shining a light on the most dramatic “car wreck” of the moment. It does not mean analysis, research, or the threading of disparate narratives into a cohesive whole. That part is up to you and me.
Remember the old maxim, “Don’t believe everything you read?” The line needs an update for the 21st century. Now it’s safe to say, “Believe only half of what you read.”
It is fully incumbent on us to find the truth and meaning in a sea of media debris, yet there’s no center, no verifiable source of one truth. Your truth is as good as mine. When all is relative, we shrug and walk away. We retreat to the more comfortable finger-pointing and “otherizing” that now passes as acceptable behavior today, especially online.
Shame Shame
The only thing that’s rising faster than COVID-19 cases across the US is online shaming. Social media is a festering wound of shame at the moment. It’s a place where anyone can log on and start spewing all sorts of directives. Do this, don’t do that, the Tweeters say. Some folks are trying to be helpful, others are just letting it all out — their rage, fear, guilt trips, the whole ball of emotional wax.
I understand the deep frustration, and some the the perplexities too. I also am calling for a massive move to a higher frequency. It’s easy to get caught in a binary ping-pong of right and wrong, but it’s not helpful to one’s sense of well being or to the larger cause. We are standing at the precipice right now, at the edge of centuries of oppression and lies. A new day is dawning, and an old way is dying.
In the middle of the tumult and radical changes, people are getting sick. People are dying. People are being beaten and killed by police on the streets of this never truly free country. People are daily being defeated by racism and buried by poverty. It sucks so bad and hurts so bad, it makes me cry. It also makes me want to help.
We all bring so much to the party, from writing letters to marching, to registering voters. I am a writer, advertising professional, and media critic. One part of what I offer today is insight into our media-saturated culture and how to make sense of it. There’s a lot to say on this topic and its relationship to democracy, but for now, I will simply ask that we all widen our lens.
When you wide your lens, you will see more than what you’re fed, more than what is in the frame. Doing so takes practice and effort, but it’s worth it. Our health is on the line. The nation’s democratic frameworks are on the line. The economy is on the line.
Reading between the lines has always been critical to independent thinking. Today, it’s more important — it’s all on the line today. We can’t get it wrong, we can’t be lazy, and we can’t look the other way. This mess is ours to clean up now. No one else is going to do it. We are the future and this is the moment to act, to think big, and to remember that we are all riding this blue ball through space together. One love.
