Mass Media and Sensationalism – A Brief Reflection

As I read the quote below from Thomas Merton’s book Seeds of Destruction, I noted how his thoughts from the 1960’s fit in with what is happening today in the world of mass media.

…in the moral climate of mass opinion, engineered by publicists, “truth” tends to mean a sensational revelation of some new iniquity on the part of the enemy. And the misfortune is that on both sides there is enough real iniquity around to make the concoction of sensational news items quite easy. Justice, in this climate, operates on a double standard: one for one’s own side and another for the enemy, so that what in him is criminal is, in us, simple “realism.” — Seeds of Destruction (location 1067, Kindle Edition)

We as a nation must wake up before the totality of the nightmare of George Orwell’s book 1984 becomes this nation’s reality. Do we really want this to be our reality?

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. — 1984