Media accents

This past year on PBS -- we don't get cable, and yes, I do watch other stations -- I saw a show about accents in America. How the differences in accents, say in the Deep South of Mississippi or the fishing towns of Massachusetts, were not melding but were actually strengthening. Intuition would have said that the proliferation of TV news anchors and sitcoms, etc., would result in the blending of phonemes into a more common language. Such was not the case.

Why is this? I don't know. But it is an example of how intuition, or at least my intuition, was not correct. The presence of more communication technology resulted in stronger accents.

Ever wonder why our political society has separated so much into disparate camps? I think it was Mark Shields on PBS who said that maybe 30 or 40 years ago, about twice the number of independents or swing voters existed as compared to today. That's quite a change —approximately 40 million people migrating toward the ends. Why is that?

During these years we have seen an explosion of sources of information -- print, TV with 500 cable channels, Internet, Blackberries, cellphones, etc. I would have thought that with so many sources of information we would all become so aware of what was going on that we would be on the same page.

A plane hits a building in New York and two people come into my office to ask if I had heard the news. There it is live on CNN, three apartments fully engulfed in flames. Was it terrorists? Could this be happening again? No, it's a small plane and an accident.

A huge number of folks saw it on the news or read about it in the paper or on the web. It became part of our history, our shared experience. We were commonly drawn together, staring like a wide-eyed baby mesmerized by the yellow/orange flame of a candle.

Shouldn't this experience, alongside Katrina, Terri Schiavo, American Idol, and the Runaway Bride, bring us together and give us a common frame of reference? Shouldn't it give us the lexicon with which to share and translate our world?

When someone mentions Columbine, aren't similar images conjured up that nearly every one in America who has been here long enough recalls? Two hundred years ago, perhaps communication would not have permitted this ubiquitousness. Isn't 9/11 and the Twin Towers the objective correlative to summon the appropriate tragic response?

Evidently not. What may seem intuitive is not. The proliferation of media seems to have isolated us, has separated us from the unifying language of experience. There are so many television channels that we can avoid knowing each other. The Iraq war, for example, was seen differently depending on which news source you selected. ABC called it the Invasion of Iraq. Fox called it the War for the Liberation of Iraq. You can guess how each network's coverage differed.

The same is true times 10,000 for the Internet. Consider the differences between the Drudge Report and MoveOn.org Web sites. A person can avoid rubbing up against conflicting views by selecting Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh over, say, "Now" or Al Franken. Their respective views might not overlap on wedge issues such as the war, wiretaps, torture of combatants.

Michael J. Fox and John Kerry provided examples this week of the polarity of the media. Had you watched only Rush, you might have believed that Fox was faking the inability to control his movements as a cheap way to pander in order to get votes for stem cell research, while Michael said, on an overly long interview on CBS News, that he indeed was not acting and what's wrong with a chronically sick Parkinson’s patient wanting research to help him out. Two takes on the same ad.

Two days ago my coworker came into the office all hot and bothered because a 12-second video on the Drudge Report site showed Kerry calling the soldiers in Iraq slackers or uneducated stuck in Iraq. If you had not seen John's interview about this a few hours later, shown on ABC and other mainstream media, you would have missed the context, Kerry said, that showed him as criticizing the president as ignorant, uneducated about history who got us stuck in Iraq rather than soldiers.

There are so many news choices that we can go deeper into our mindset rather than challenge our thinking.

Perhaps America was better when we had three networks and Walter Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley, and Howard K. Smith. At least then there was commonality of experience.

Like accents, politics has become more differentiated. Maybe being able to insulate your self in your ideology at the expense of tolerance of the opposing view is an unfortunate consequence of so many options.

Good analogy, Jim!