Turn the channel? Are you kidding?

FRANK MIELE

All information is not equal.

You would think we would know that by now, but all education is not equal either. In fact, it seems like our modern education prepares us more to be consumers than connoisseurs of information. A connoisseur of wine can tell the difference between an exquisite wine and a merely good one. A consumer, on the other hand, just likes the burning sensation in his belly and the empty sensation in his head.

Knowledge is much the same way.

There is truth, and there is untruth. There is valuable information, and there is dangerous information. There is information which can save lives, and there is information which can destroy lives.

Only a fool would treat all information as of the same value, but more and more the ability to discern what is helpful and what is hurtful is being robbed of us by what can only be called information overload. Cable television, the Internet, the endless chatter on our cell phones, talk radio, e-mail. Everywhere we go, we are learning more and more. So much, finally, that we can't really be expected to take the time to find out which parts of what we know are true, and which parts are false.

Every week, for instance, dozens of people e-mail me chain letters which someone sent to them with a headline clamoring URGENT … PASS THIS ON TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW … VITAL … OUR FUTURE IS AT STAKE … and there wasn't even any fine print anywhere that said "may not be true." Time after time, I have researched the claims of those e-mails and found them to be half-truths or non-truths, usually blatant lies. I try to send them back to whoever sent them to me with a note about our individual responsibility to become better informed.

But who am I kidding? The Internet fake-news machine is not going to shut down because I caution one stray forwarder of phony e-mails. Nor for that matter is society going to become civil just because one parent teaches his or her children how to say please and thank you. Both accomplishments are better than surrender, but surrender may be inevitable. Thanks to the deification of mere information, there is no longer any reason to get a story right before spreading it around. There is no reason to think about consequences, and there is no need to be respectful or courteous. I say what I like, and if you don't like it, turn the channel.

That indeed sums up the problem.

"Turn the channel" has become a mantra for cultural surrender-monkeys. No matter how bad it is; no matter how vile; no matter how dangerous - turn the channel. And one after the other, we become numb with frustration and fear and do what we are told - "Turn the channel" and everything will be OK.

Except everything isn't OK - because plenty of people don't want to turn the channel. They want the violence and sex and smack talk. It turns out the lowest common denominator is lower than any of us thought.

Our culture is collapsing all around us, and we are only fooling ourselves if we think we can avoid the inevitable consequences as one tradition after another falls to the ground. The truth is, we aren't avoiding injury; we are avoiding responsibility. If you wonder why another young man went crazy and shot up a campus, it's because we turned the channel, but he didn't. If you wonder why young girls are having sex before they even reach puberty, it's because we turned the channel, but they didn't. If you wonder why the waiter at your favorite restaurant insulted you or why the next driver over just flipped you off, it's because you turned the channel, but they didn't.

Or maybe you didn't turn the channel either. If you look at the ratings, none of us has been.

Take the strange case of Rosie O'Donnell, for instance. Just last week, she announced her timely departure from ABC's "The View." I call it timely because "it was about time" that she lost her platform to spout anti-American propaganda on national TV.

But she didn't go because she was unpopular. She used her time in the national spotlight to mouth support for terrorists, disdain for Christians and hatred for the president, but no one was turning the channel. As long as she insulted Donald Trump's hair, she was everyone's favorite loudmouth. Indeed, her presence on "the View" sent the ratings soaring, which just encouraged her to be more and more outrageous.

Finally, in late March she announced that the World Trade Center attack was an inside job:

"I do believe that it's the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel," she said. "I do believe that it defies physics that World Trade Center tower 7 - building 7, which collapsed in on itself - it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved. World Trade Center 7. World Trade Center 1 and 2 got hit by planes - 7, miraculously, the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible."

She probably thought she could say anything she wanted and no one could ever prove her wrong, but as usual she forgot about the hand of providence. Just a month after her pontification, a gasoline truck exploded beneath a section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge highway ramp. Due to the high temperatures caused by the burning fuel, the concrete and steel structure collapsed.

If Rosie were an engineer, she would have known that steel doesn't have to melt to lose its structural integrity, but one thing Rosie O'Donnell doesn't know anything about is integrity.

Nor, from what we can tell, does ABC, or CBS, or NBC - because O'Donnell will be back on TV in some fashion sooner rather than later. So far as we know, the only reason she is not there right now is because ABC was not paying her enough to say things that don't make sense, but ARE provocative.

Which brings us to the point.

Samuel Johnson said that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," but that was in another time and place. Today, in the United States, more and more, it seems like the First Amendment is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Everyone claims it as their own - Don Imus, Al Sharpton, Larry Flynt (the publisher of Hustler magazine) - and because it is a bedrock of our republic, everyone is afraid to consider whether it has any cracks in it that could cause the foundation to crumble.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission released a report that said violence on TV is bad for children and that Congress ought to do something about it. This has the "First Amendment Refuge" crowd hopping mad. According to them, it's all right to put anything on TV because consumers can "turn the channel."

That was the conclusion of an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, for instance, which said:

"The ultimate filter is the on/off switch, which not only shields children from violent programming but tells networks and advertisers to offer different fare. If the report's findings about the effects of TV violence on children are true, then the biggest wake-up call should be to parents, not regulators."

Unfortunately, this is the equivalent of telling each of the people in front of the 2004 tsunami that they were in charge of their own flood control. There is simply no way for a parent to monitor and filter media content in anything like an effective way. We can educate our children, and hope for the best, but we cannot follow them around 24 hours a day.

Even more significant, however, is that any parent who does successfully prevent his or her children from imbibing the filth on the national airwaves has accomplished nothing. The filth is not just on the TV; it is in our culture. Turning off the tap in one kitchen may prevent contaminated water from entering the home, but if the reservoir is itself polluted, then how will any home be made safe?

It is not just violence on TV that is the problem; it is the continuing collapse of any kind of standards. NBC airs its "To Catch a Predator" shows about men attempting to have sex with children during what used to be called the "Family Hour," from 7 to 8 p.m. Daytime TV is filled with the worst kind of trash about sexual adventurism and secular dysfunctionalism, and the cable networks engage in a non-stop stream of tradition bashing that can only serve to destroy the anchors that hold us together as a society.

The reason we have to start thinking about some reasonable controls on our information overload is that for the past 50 years, our society has been engaged in a great experiment to see whether self-restraint and the greater good could prevail over self-centeredness and private demons. That hypothesis has now been proven wrong, definitively.

Apparently, too many of us forgot to turn the channel.