One sentence summary: Postman demonstrates that even though we are deluged with information every day via television news, we are still not any more informed because of the fact that news is presented as entertainment.
Important paragraphs: Page 110, “My point is that we are by now…” & Page 103, “This perception of a news show…”
Reflection: This chapter was perhaps my favorite so far in the book. I am beginning to see Postman’s ideas connect with the things that I have been noticing and experiencing in my everyday life. His comments on USA Today, for example. Reading about how their bite-size news reporting techniques being the anomaly at the time of this book’s publication made me heavily reconsider the way I consume the news. When I tried to remember the last news article I read–that wasn’t some kind of scientific journal–I realized that very rarely are the pieces of any great length, no matter the source. When something is more than, say, 8 or 9 paragraphs long, no matter the importance of the information I internally wonder why they had to be so verbose about it. Because of the bite-size news stories fed to us by television, we have all come to expect news from all sources to follow this same “get in and get out” strategy of essentially blurting out the facts and running away. I can’t even imagine sitting down to spend a concerted amount of time reading a long news article unless it was exceptionally compelling or relevant to my own life. I hadn’t considered this being anything other than the norm, but after Postman pointed it out I have realized that I see this impact that television has had on the way we consume news is more pervasive today than he could have ever imagined.
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