NEW YORK, March 13, 2006 -- As the "Sopranos" return to the airwaves for a new season, the likeable Lorraine Bracco, who plays show shrink Dr.
Melfi, was on the Colbert report suggesting that the HBO drama has one social value, it shows violence as it really functions in our culture.
Odd, isn't it, that we have to turn to fiction to be confronted with reality. What does that say about how well the news we consume on TV every day serves us?
And what does it say about us as a people - our attraction to, and perhaps even need for violence in entertainment? America's love affair with media about the Mafia is obvious, as is our addiction to crime shows. Long after the FBI defeated organized crime in real life, it was reborn as a staple in the movies, in hip-hop, and often sympathetically on TV and our imagination.
What moral separation is there, in the age of Abramoff, between the shadowy, snarling, gun-toting Dick Cheney and the Godfather?
Gangsters 'R Us.
I don't know if anyone has watched HBO and the other movie channels for a week to track the body count, but I am sure it is way up there.
The writer Charles Sullivan speculates that:
"Perhaps America's insatiable demand for entertainment is in fact a form of self medication whose delivery mechanism is television, rather than the hypodermic needle. Mind-numbing, irrelevant, sensory-depriving entertainment is a method to kill the pain of a truth that lives ceaselessly upon the shores of our eroded conscience-a truth so painful that we must suppress it at all cost".
"Reality television does many things. But one thing I am quite certain that it does not do is portray reality. Cheap and shallow entertainment only dulls the senses, like imbibing alcohol in excess to keep us comfortably numb, safely insulated from the reality that our nation is foisting upon the world. For many of the world's people, America has reduced their reality to piles of broken rubble; lonely hours of endless terror called Shock and Awe; the filth and stench of secret gulags where torture is implemented on a scale known only to the CIA"."
This is not the image of the Iraq war that we see regularly on TV.
Instead the war mostly comes to us sanitized and disconnected from its causes.
We see some deaths in the "when it bleeds, it leads" coverage but usually it is only killing by the so-called "insurgents" using IEDs, car bombs, and suicide tactics. Writer John Stokes has tabulated civilian deaths in Iraq and says they now come to a quarter of a million.
He blames the US invasion for creating the climate, writing:
"The most common cause of death is as a direct result of a worsening 'culture of violence', mostly caused by indiscriminate U.S. co-ordinate air strikes, and related military interventions, reveals the study of almost 1000 households scattered across Iraq. And the risk of violent death just after the invasion was 58 times greater than before the war.
The overall risk of death was 1.5 times more after the invasion than before."
But we are rarely told about these patterns. Oddly, the network news chiefs knew they were withholding information. A year ago, I wrote an article for the industry trade magazine, Broadcasting & Cable noting that in November of 2004 the presidents of the Big Three news networks "told a Stanford University seminar that their operations uncritically conveyed deceptive information that convinced the public an invasion of Iraq was the only option. They admitted that they reported inaccurately about the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
"Simply stated," confessed David Westin, president of ABC News, "we let the American people down." Sadly, their partial mea culpa was not repeated on their broadcasts. (C-SPAN covered it.)
At the time, in January 2005, I asked, "Will they face any consequences for their actions? Unlikely. Has there been any outbreak of conscience in newsrooms or, more important, any commitment to cover Iraq in a less jingoistic manner?
Not that I can see.
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