#Greg Jackson Stand Up Game Pdf Download tv#

News shows cannot connect viewers to meaningful actions they might take in their own lives to relieve this distress because these actions would mean ceasing to watch TV.

#Greg Jackson Stand Up Game Pdf Download tv#

The principal effect of TV news is to create engagement through distress. Consider that most viewers would vote similarly, and not necessarily less well, with much less information. Consider what all these people, with all these hours, might otherwise accomplish. It believes it does-insofar as its audience members vote-but hundreds of hours spent consuming news in a given year put to the service of one vote in one election is a terrible use of any person’s time. If you are a teacher or a car mechanic or a doctor, your job is not simply to identify a problem but to connect people to a solution. Their content says, “This is very important,” but their format says: (1) No more important than the next segment (2) In a time slot (3) Keep watching. In life, when someone alerts you to a problem, the problem’s meaning takes shape within an implicit context, answering: (1) How important is this problem? (2) Where does it fit into the rest of my life? (3) What should I do about it? News shows cannot answer these questions because their format and their content are at odds.

Television news aims to alert you to problems. The news today, properly understood, is about the careers of politicians and journalists. Interest shifts, by turns, to how the game is played, how the media fits into this game, and, eventually, how journalists do their jobs. Reporters and pundits cover politics by analyzing how politicians succeed and fail as spokespeople and media figures. As things are, the job of politicians is to feed the emotional-entertainment industry that we call “news,” which is accomplished by grandstanding and self-promotion. But the work of politicians might become the work of governing. If the news covered only the proposal and passage of specific legislation-or the proposal and enactment of specific policy-we would have little news, and audience interest would quickly fade. This transformed politics from an industry of policy and legislation into an industry of emotion and entertainment. To meet our demand for newness and stimulation, we refashioned public life as a ritual sequence of pseudo-events. Take away the pseudo-event and what is left to fill the news? To make up for the non-glut of occurrences.

It is not that pseudo-events are always uninteresting or meaningless but that they are always not news. News analysis is a second-order pseudo-event, not an event per se but the dissection of pseudo-events: that is, theater criticism. Some familiar examples: the speech, the rally, the press conference, the briefing, the ribbon cutting, the political announcement, the political response, the interview, the profile, the televised debate, the televised argument, the televised shouting match, the televised roundup of other televised events, the official expression of outrage, remorse, righteousness, fear, sanctimony, jingoism, smarm, or folksiness. What is a pseudo-event? They are everywhere we hardly notice. “We need not be theologians,” writes Boorstin, “to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.” The chief tool in this new labor is the pseudo-event. In his 1962 book The Image, Daniel J. Boorstin explains, “There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, ‘How dull is the world today!’ Nowadays he says, ‘What a dull newspaper!’ ” The first American paper, Benjamin Harris’s Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, committed to appearing only once a month-or “oftener ‘if any Glut of Occurrences happen.’ ” Clearly, things have changed. But what is important? What’s in the news. Then boredom decides? Boredom and a sense of what’s important. Not entirely? It matters what people read and watch-you can’t bore them. Editors dictate consequence? Not entirely. Why? Its consequence is ensured. Ensured. And this has been measured? What? The relationship between what is covered in the news and what is consequential. Important in what sense? In being consequential. But everything is new: a flower blooms a man hugs his daughter, not for the first time, but for the first time this time . Beginning in 1979, Stokes recorded television around the clock for over thirty years. Stills from Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, which is currently screening at Northwest Film Forum, in Seattle.