For me, the most staggering part of last months Rally to Restore Sanity was Jon Stewart’s closing speech criticizing today’s media environment. If you have not seen it, watch it here, and why haven’t you seen it yet!? The speech is perhaps summed up by this paragraph:
The country’s 24-hour, political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire, and then perhaps host a week of shows on the dangerous, unexpected flaming ants epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.
It explains, in my mind, the essence of Jon Stewart: the most influential media critic of our time, who also happens to be a gifted comedian. Though he spends a lot of time mocking politicians and other public figures, Stewart’s satire is targeted primarily at the media, specifically at the 24 hour cable news networks and all of the pundits and bloggers that surround it.
So in the name of Stewart’s “political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator,” I’ve decided to start a weekly segment on IDTIK titled “Conlfictinator Concoction of the Week.” Each post will point out what I find to be the most fabricated conflict the media has hyped up that week, and this week, obviously, it has to be the “uproar” about TSA Pat Downs.
When I first saw this story I laughed, because I personally don’t care about doing a body scan or even getting an “invasive” pat down. The idea of someone looking at an xray style picture of me naked is funny to me more than anything else. If going through the body scanner has a negative impact health-wise, that is a complaint I can understand, but I haven’t seen any serious arguments on that note. So the whole “controversy” made me laugh at first, until I ran into more and more people who were jumping on the anti-TSA/pat down band wagon. It started to make me mad, especially if you consider the context. There are people all over the world risking their lives in the name of fighting terrorism and preventing terrorist attacks, and here we are complaining about walking through a scanner or getting a pat down… Really?
Of course, if it’s not “necessary” to get a pat down or walk through a body scanner then it would be bad TSA policy to make people do it. But since when are we all aviation security experts?
In the end, though, the point is that on Thanksgiving, the busiest travel holiday of the year, there was absolutely no uproar about body scans or pat downs (other than that lady who wore a bikini to avoid a pat down).
It’s clear that the media completely misread the situation, seeing a major conflict where there wasn’t one. Or, perhaps, they didn’t misread anything, and were simply acting out their role as perpetual panic conflictinators. I mean, throughout their reporting they kept mentioning that polls show a majority of Americans agree with TSA policies… yet the mentioning of these polls didn’t seem to have any affect on the rest of their reporting.
So, Jon Stewart, thanks for exposing 24-hour cable news for what it really is, and maybe IDTIK can help out a little. On another note, the New York Times did a great piece on this very subject, check it out here.
