By Jim Berg

I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one caw run aver on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher, all news, as it is called, is gossip…

Henry David Thoreau wrote this almost 150 years ago. Imagine if he were alive today to see the Five O’clock News. As an acknowledged news junky, his words give me pause. That a man sitting alone in the sticks of New England so long ago could speak so directly to me, a man sitting in front of a 33 megahertz 486PC in Los Angeles.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me how ill-served we are by media, particularly television news media. An editor once said to a young writer to write to an eighth grade reading level (no offense to eighth graders). What he was saying reflected a certain contempt for his readership. That is what the media thinks about us, and that is what they give us.

Call it naive idealism, but I don’t have a low opinion of the readers of this magazine. I say aim about two inches above the readers’ head, and they will rise to it, hitting them right between the eyes. Too often, the media aims at the groin.

In these days of what Michael Ventura calls the “world riot” we must be selective about the media 4 that we consume. Are we well served by a perception of the world that comes through the TV? Can we make sound decisions about the problems we think we have based on information that comes from a profit-maximizing advertising medium?

When I turn on the news, and endure the first fifteen minutes of murder, disaster and crime, I ask myself, do I really need to know this? Is it worth the sense of fear and paranoia to know about the latest carjacking? Will that knowledge make me any safer? How is the presentation of the news shaping my perception of my community, and does it make things better, or worse?

In my work with the North Hollywood Youth Council, I get an entirely different perspective on the problems of our community than I do from the media. I work with wonderfully dedicated people from the L.A. County Probation Department (among others), whose job it is to work with youth who are the source of much of our problems. From them I don’t get a dismal view on our troubles. They work on solutions. They don’t make guarantees, but they work at the problem without fear or hysteria, one step at a time, and that doesn’t make headlines or the five o’clock news.