More On The Danger Of News Watching

ANOTHER ASPECT OF TELEVISION is how passive it is. This is more important than you might realize. In an experiment, researchers gave volunteers two short stressful experiences. One was a twelve-minute memory test. The other was a twelve-minute video showing awful, ghastly, disgusting surgical procedures. The researchers measured the immunoglobulin A in the volunteers' saliva.

Immunoglobulin A is a protein the body uses as a first line of defense against invaders. It shows up in saliva and on the wet surface of the lungs. It prevents microbes from invading the body. It is an easy-to-measure indicator of how well a person's immune system is working.

The researchers found that the stress of the memory task increased the amount of immunoglobulin A the body produced. But the gruesome video decreased it. The immune cells produced less of this vital immune defense when watching the film.

Both tasks were stressful. The study was trying to look at two different kinds of stress: passive and active. What they found was that passively enduring something stressful is bad for the immune system. Although the memory task was stressful (because of difficulty and time pressure), it was active. The person was doing something about it. But they could do nothing about what they saw in the video.

This is one of the dangerous things about television news. Sometimes terrible things happen. The newspeople bring it to you dramatically. It's hard to turn away. They deliberately make it as compelling as possible. But like a fish dangling on the end of a spear, you're stuck there almost against your will, suffering, and being stressed by something you can do nothing about. It's bad for your health. It allows lampreys to invade in force.

In the 1970s a small American town in the mountains had no television. They were studied before and after the arrival of cable television. After they had television, children and adults slowly became less persistent and less creative when solving problems. The nature of the medium keeps you passive.

In 1992 and again in 1999, Gallup polls showed that forty percent of adults and seventy percent of teenagers felt they watched more television than they wanted to. I know that isn't surprising, but think about it. Isn't that strange? I mean, it's pretty easy to turn off a television set. Just push a small button. Physically, it's about as easy as a task can be. But psychologically, television programmers try to make it as hard as possible to turn it off or change the channel.

orienting response

One intriguing theory that explains the compelling nature of TV watching is that television producers and editors are exploiting our "orienting response." Ivan Pavlov first described the orienting response back in the early 1920s. When we see or hear something new, and it occurs suddenly, our brains and bodies go through a sequence of reactions. Alpha brain waves are blocked for a few seconds. The heart slows down and blood vessels to the big muscle groups constrict while blood vessels in the brain dilate.

It appears to be a reaction designed to stop the body and perk up attention. That makes sense. We've all seen animals do this. They hear a twig snap in the forest and what do they do? They freeze and pay close attention to what happens next.

Television producers are trying to arrest your attention, so they use fast edits, constant movement, and novel, surprising sights and sounds to keep you in a constant state of "orienting." Your body feels paralyzed, but you're highly focused.

And because the competition for your attention is so intense, they keep getting better and better at irresistibly forcing your attention on their program or advertisement. Cameramen used to hold the camera steady. Now even the camera is constantly moving. It keeps you in the orienting response; fixated; mesmerized, and (if you're watching a typical news program) inflowing an impression of the world that cultivates pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism. (Read more about that here.)

Read more: News Infection