Post by Daniel on Jun 17, 2015 8:35:00 GMT -5
John Stonestreet | BreakPoint | Friday, June 12, 2015
Move over, professors and newscasters. A new class of public intellectual now leads America: comedians. At least that's what Megan Garber, writing in The Atlantic, recently declared.
“Comedians,” she explains, “are exploring and wrestling with important ideas. They're sharing their conclusions with the rest of us...acting not just as joke-tellers but as truth-tellers—as guides through our cultural debates.”
Steven Colbert, John Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, Amy Schumer, and John Oliver are just some of the names young Americans revere and trust for current events and cultural commentary. But they're more interested in the laughs than in the truth.
These TV comedians are quite good at taking the grinding gears of Washington and the mud-slinging of campaign season and turning them into riotously funny routines. But, remarks Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig at The New Republic, “no longer must we sift through the challenging work of being serious thinkers.”
Instead, we tune in to our favorite comic commentator and cynically yuk it up over the latest headlines. It's a ritual Bruenig says only serves our intellectual laziness and our longing to be in-the-know—to see through what everyone else takes seriously. But as C. S. Lewis observed in “The Abolition of Man,” to see through everything is the same as being blind.
And therein lies the problem. Depending on comedians for our news may make us feel informed, but it's little more than an illusion. In one famous study, Pew Research revealed how woefully uninformed most Americans—especially the young—really are. Just 27 percent of those under 30, for example, knew which party was in control of Congress. And just 15 percent could name the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
And that’s not the extent of the problem. As Neil Postman pointed out 30 years ago in his remarkable book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” “being informed” can create the illusion that we are actually “doing something,” when in fact we aren’t.
continue reading
www.christianheadlines.com/columnists/breakpoint/americans-substitute-comedy-for-news.html
Move over, professors and newscasters. A new class of public intellectual now leads America: comedians. At least that's what Megan Garber, writing in The Atlantic, recently declared.
“Comedians,” she explains, “are exploring and wrestling with important ideas. They're sharing their conclusions with the rest of us...acting not just as joke-tellers but as truth-tellers—as guides through our cultural debates.”
Steven Colbert, John Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, Amy Schumer, and John Oliver are just some of the names young Americans revere and trust for current events and cultural commentary. But they're more interested in the laughs than in the truth.
These TV comedians are quite good at taking the grinding gears of Washington and the mud-slinging of campaign season and turning them into riotously funny routines. But, remarks Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig at The New Republic, “no longer must we sift through the challenging work of being serious thinkers.”
Instead, we tune in to our favorite comic commentator and cynically yuk it up over the latest headlines. It's a ritual Bruenig says only serves our intellectual laziness and our longing to be in-the-know—to see through what everyone else takes seriously. But as C. S. Lewis observed in “The Abolition of Man,” to see through everything is the same as being blind.
And therein lies the problem. Depending on comedians for our news may make us feel informed, but it's little more than an illusion. In one famous study, Pew Research revealed how woefully uninformed most Americans—especially the young—really are. Just 27 percent of those under 30, for example, knew which party was in control of Congress. And just 15 percent could name the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
And that’s not the extent of the problem. As Neil Postman pointed out 30 years ago in his remarkable book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” “being informed” can create the illusion that we are actually “doing something,” when in fact we aren’t.
continue reading
www.christianheadlines.com/columnists/breakpoint/americans-substitute-comedy-for-news.html
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