The Daily News...Between the Lines.

   
           Neil Postman does a great job in the novel Amusing Ourselves to Death. Through multiple examples he shows how the television can really be hurting our population. That the distraction could indeed be taking away any real free will we have to make logical well thought out decisions. In the Chapter “Now…This” Postman makes it appoint to talk about the daily news that we see on the television. This chapter stood out to me because I can see how if something is on the news all we do is talk about it. There really isn’t any action being done to change it. Postman states, “…Most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action” (pg. 68). I have found myself wondering about what is missing in the news report. This definitely fits what Postman is saying. The information just doesn’t make sense sometimes in how they deliver it on the news. Postman also talks about how because we aren’t given the information in the right context there is no way that we could possibly do anything about it. The fine print is what we need to be concerned about. In my opinion, we only hear what the government wants us to hear. Sometimes that isn’t very much at all. Even the news itself is a distraction from everything else going on in the world. An example was a few months ago when all the talk was about the war in Syria, our focus then was switched to the vanishing of a plane from China. Even though the war was an important topic we knew nothing about it to be honest. Once the plane disappeared all news about Syria seemed to vanish. We don’t even know what truly happened there. There was nothing we could do with the information of Syria. All we could do was state our opinions, but even then they weren’t very knowledgeable ones since we didn’t know any of the information that was there.