Media Focus: Irrational Fears, the Sensational | The Big Picture

I'm less interested in the media bias slant then I am in the cold hard facts of what can kill us:

But it turns out that relative to the coverage, the reality is quite different.The media covers issues that are exciting, sensationalistic or have good visuals. This leads them to present a very different view of the world, one that does not conform very closely to reality.

For example: Automobiles are a far larger cause of death than homicides. The way deaths are portrayed on the news is hardly proportionate.

Dramatic television is even worse. CSI: Miami is far more exciting than CSI: Someone ran a red light and the ensuing accident left 2 injured, one dead. Yet auto deaths far outnumber homicides.

Even within accidental deaths, there are approximately twice as many Suicides as there are Homicides. Not that an American watcher of TV would ever know that. Murder, She Wrote has far more intrigue and drama, and is probably a whole lot more watchable, than “A painful incurable disease of an elderly person led to a suicide, She Wrote.”

Denial of Death

The New Republic has an article on how the Denial of Death plays into politics. Summary quote:

In The Denial of Death, Becker tried to explain how fear of one's own demise lies at the center of human endeavor. "Man's anxiety," Becker wrote, "results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation." Becker described how human beings defend themselves against this fundamental anxiety by constructing cultures that promise symbolic or literal immortality to those who live up to established standards. Among other things, we practice religions that promise immortality; produce children and works of art that we hope will outlive us; seek to submerge our own individuality in a larger, enduring community of race or nation; and look to heroic leaders not only to fend off death, but to endow us with the courage to defy it. We also react with hostility toward individuals and rival cultures that threaten to undermine the integrity of our own.

I don't think the anxiety caused by knowledge of one's own mortality can explain everything, but I think Death must be one of the essential things in the human psyche that motivates us. And clearly in art and literature it is an obsession: from tragedy to war epic to horror story to funeral poem, it sits side by side with romantic love as art's great topic.

The problem with the "Worldview Defense" is that it doesn't explain the red state/blue state divide, nor does it explain why some people are motivated by fear and death, and others by more positive principles. Perhaps it is the difference between "deficiency needs" and "growth needs" as in Maslow's hierarchy. The fear of Death could just as easily be seen as anxiety about safety and security (Crime, jobs, etc.) and the unmet desire for stability and certainty. If there is a difference between how New York and West Virginia responds to 9/11, it is probably rooted in the social and economic anxieties each community is already facing. It may also be that some areas offer more choices and improve your ability to cope with these anxieties by providing greater social mobility and economic diversity.

It would be interesting to see how these sorts of job and safety concerns correlate with voting patterns.

Ben Gibbard Acoustic Live

NPR has a live acoustic show of Ben Gibbard at All Songs Considered. It's worth a listen and proves a few truths:

• Gibbard has a deceptively supple voice that is often in danger of going too high and shredding itself.
• That being said, even he can't sing some of the songs on Plans. If you're a long-time Death Cab fan who couldn't quite dig the album, I think it's because he wrote the songs in the wrong key for his voice. Just listen to "Soul Meets Body" about halfway through the show.
  
• The reason the Postal Service album is one of the best albums of the 00s is that all the songs are built on strong foundations and can be played on an acoustic guitar without all the electronica (the same is true when you hear Jeff Tweedy sing songs from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by himself on a guitar).
• Gibbard sounds better with a guitar than with a piano.