Is America Really Divided?

Maybe twenty years from now, the next Marshall McLuhan will appear and write a book about how the internet has changed the way we communicate with each other and create the behaviors which form the human community.

If and when that book appears, I hope there will be at least one chapter on how the way we communicate what we refer to as ‘news’ has changed, if only because I have been a news junkie ever since I was a little kid, and my father sat down in his easy chair waiting for dinner and read me the editorials from The (failing) New York Times.

What I believe is the basic difference between the olden days when the news was either what you read in the newspaper or watched for 30 minutes on TV versus today when TV news is 24 hours and the internet news websites number in the hundreds or more, is that most of the video and internet news content is nothing more than whatever stories can be invented by the editors and producers of today’s news, because the actual amount of real news hasn’t really changed.

BY ‘real’ news I am obviously referring to events — something which happened somewhere and is in some way different from the ordinary course of events.

A big hurricane is different, ditto a volcano or a tsunami. War is also different, even though in many countries organized, mass violence is actually a normal event.