My Little Corner

“After dissection, in the old days, the human remains might be ground up as bonemeal, or rendered into candles, or fed to the pigs. There was no waste. You could say that burial is a waste – at least the way it’s done these days, in solid caskets, worm-proof, rain-proof, anything to stop the natural processes of death. Death is natural. Yet nothing looks more unnatural than a dead body.”

“Nevertheless, everyone had an opinion about this event [the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis], for in American everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering that meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”