When I was little, my dad was going for a Ph.D. in television studies at New York University. So every night during dinner, the TV was on for the purpose of taping the six oclock news. The taping apparatus consisted not of a VCR or even a Betamax, but rather a microphone stuck with masking tape onto the speaker of the television, feeding into a reel-to-reel tape recorder. We had to be quiet, like we were in church, so as not to mess up the recording. Day after day, I was part of a catered vigil over news of the war, with its body counts, napalm blasts, and guys saying, From Phnom Penh or from Saigon, this is so-and-so.
I think this is why I grew up paranoid. I also think its why I became a Quaker. (Also called the Society of Friends, we are a small Christian religion, dating back to colonial times and long before, based on not going to war as a religious principle, and on seeking Spirit as the inner light.)
Television didnt change much after the Vietnam War. The news slowly shifted to the urban war, with its nightly reports of who got stabbed or maimed in your city that day. We pretend that TVs job is to give us information, but in reality, its job is spreading paranoia. Some people would say but in our world they are one and the same. There is no real data presented on television, and there are very few facts. It is very difficult to intellectually reason about what youve just been presented. There are mainly graphics and a voiceover that pass by so fast as you juggle multiple senses that most of the time you have no idea what you just experienced.
In the case of a jet airliner plunging into a skyscraper, you sort of know, but the deceptive part about that particular shot is how noisy it was up there. There was a video recording but not audio, so over and over again you now see this same little snip of video tape and lately, to fill in the sound, they give you the voice of a guy reading the names of Arabs.

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