On March 18, 20, and 21, the Arizona Daily Star published news articles about a traffic ticket State Senator Frank Antenori received for running a red light in the late night/early morning hours during a break in budget negotiations in the Legislature. The traffic violation resulted in no harm to anyone, and Antenori paid his fine.
Since December 9, news about TUSD’s former Mexican American Studies director Sean Arce’s domestic violence crime spree has been ignored by the tabloid, Tucson Weekly, and by the Arizona Daily Star.
Both men are public figures. Both men hold power. Both men influence our lives. So what is the difference?
The answer depends on who you ask. If you were to ask a staff member at the Arizona Daily Star, they would and have claimed that Arce is not a public person. They would explain that the guy who holds up a Circle K, and who has never and will never go on a whirlwind tour of the United States selling his program to educators and the eager “reporters,” is a public person and their robbery is newsworthy, but a state certified teacher who travels the country selling an ideology masked as a curriculum is not a public person or of interest to the public.
When pushed, the staffer will finally tell you that their boss/editor would not allow them to do the story on the national celebrity who sells his ideas about authentic caring who beat his wife.
The red light traffic ticket is breaking news months later during an election. The Circle K robber is someone about whom you must know now that he is in custody. The educator who assaulted one public official, one member of the public, and has been arrested TWICE for domestic violence is of no concern to the average person because the editor says so.
Why do they say so?
They decide what you will and will not know not because it is not newsworthy, but because it might affect the way you view the world and those people who make up the policies that define and control that world. They will be the judge of what is and is not reasonable. They ensure that we will fall in line by either providing or withholding information.
The reporting on Senator Antenori’s red light violation and Sean Arce’s domestic violence is the perfect example of the manipulation of you by the media.
Make no mistake, the news you read or watch does form your world view. Your world view does form your choices. Your choices are limited only by your world view and the politicos who try to offer you choices that align with the world view formed in part by the media.
Ultimately, we do not know what it is we do not know. We only know what they decide we should know. Fortunately, our values form our world view as well. Our values tell us that we are missing something, that what we are hearing or reading doesn’t jibe with what we are seeing.
It is our values and our instincts that tell us that we are fearing shadows cast on the cave walls. They warn us that all is not what it appears to be.
If we ignore our basic instincts, and replace our common sense with that prescribed by the media, we are doomed to be the cave dwellers living in fear of our own shadows.
We must begin to shed light on the real culprits of our society’s decay; the mainstream media.
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