There's a game sensation that's sweeping the nation. It's not Yahtzee, it's not Trivial

        Pursuit, and it's not Quayle hunting (they're out of season, hopefully for good). It's called Blame

        the Media, and it's spreading like wildfire. 

             The feminists cry "Look at the pictures of impossibly beautiful women we see everywhere!

        The media are trying to force us into a sexist mold! It's all their fault!". The religious right

        preaches "Looks at all the sex and loose morality in the media! The media are trying to pervert us,

        subvert us, and convert us to their Godless secularism. It's all their fault! " And the left-wing

        mothers and fathers say "Look at all the violence in the media, and look at the violence in our

        streets! The media are trying to turn us into violent beasts! It's all their fault!". And all of these

        people are advocating censorship of one form or another. 

             But gentle reader, the media is not at fault. In essence, the media are just a mirror of

        ourselves. The media in all its imperfection tries to mirror the real world, and so is not to blame

        for the ills it reflects. To blame the media for the bad in the world is to engage in the modern

        version of shooting the messenger when he brings bad news. 

             Many people at this point would say "but the media is a faulty mirror! I look at my life and

        look at the media and the two don't seem to match up at all!. " Firstly, the media are run by fallible

        human beings, not robots, and thus it can never quite do its job perfectly. Also, the media have a

        very wide scope to try and cover, which means that the picture of ourselves that they show us is a

        very general one, and can be forgiven if it doesn't match some of the details of life. 

             But most importantly the media is mirror which is pathetically eager to please us, and this

        accounts for most of its distortion factor. TV, newspapers, magazines, all of them are trying to

        give you what you want so you'll repay them with buying the products of their sponsors. Thus,

        the media are all, to some extent, yes-men and sycophants. Even the hard-hitting journalists exists

        because we feel we ought to know the truth, and so they will give us whatever they think we will

        take as the truth. 

             It's as though we as a people are a king, and the media our advisors. We say to our

        advisors "Tell me everything that is going on. " and at first, the advisors do, but they soon realize

        that the advisors who tell the king the things he likes to hear and that fit with the way the king

        sees the world get paid more, and curry favor with the king, and the ones that tell him things he

        doesn't like get at best ignored and at worst, hanged.  So the advisors increasingly fudge the truth

        and try to please the king. Then one day, the king realizes this, and suddenly all his advisors are

        on trial and face being hanged for just trying to please the king and stay alive.

             It's understandable for us to want to blame the media. After all, if we think things are

        going well, and then we turn on the news and they are not, we become sad and in a sense, it is the

        TV that did it. But no matter how satisfying it might be to kick the TV, it is a victory only in the

        shallowest, most symbolic sense. The problems are still out there and no matter how many TVs

        we bust, nothing's going to change. 

             Whenever I think about this subject, I'm reminded of an anecdote from my past. I was

        sitting with a friend whom I'll call Lily, and we were looking through her collection of

        photographs. Every time we'd come to a picture of her, she'd say "Oh, don't I look terrible in that

        picture? The camera adds twenty pounds, you know." I said nothing, of course, but those twenty

        pounds were present on Lily whether she was in a photograph or not. 

             People talk about how the media have changed our lives, and indeed it has, but not in any

        evil, insidious way. The media have changed our lives in the way that having a mirror in your

        bathroom changes the way you look every day. We now, for the first time in history, have the

        ability to look at ourselves as a whole in powerful and fascinating ways. So it is now within our

        power to change the way we act as a whole. In a sense, we have self-consciousness.

             People also talk about the media having an 'agenda'. Well with hundreds of newspapers

        and magazines and dozens of television channels, PLUS the information superhighway (a.k.a. the

        Internet), if the media has an agenda it is completely by accident. There is simply far too much

        media out there for any one person or group to have any degree of control over it. 

             The bottom line is, we cannot blame the media for its imperfections, for they are

        imperfections which by and large we asked for. If we resort to censoring the media, we open the

        door for a devastating form of public self-delusion, where we punish the media for trying to please

        us and then demand, once more, that it please us. 

             So what can we do, to correct the imperfections in the mirror? The answer is simple.

        Change the channel. Don't buy the newspaper, Put down the magazine. Feminists, if you don't

        want to see those beautiful women in the ads any more, stop buying those products. Religious

        right, if you object to sex on TV, use that remote control. The same goes with the left, and

        violence. And encourage others to do the same. None of these things would be there if we did not


        LIKE them so much. 

             But most important of all, stop blaming the mirror for what it shows you. If you want to

        change what you see in the mirror, change yourself.