Why Do We Need to be Shrill?

I’ve noticed recently that the weather announcers have started reporting predicted temperatures as wind chill figures, in many cases never predicting actual temperatures.  Wind chill measures are not universal, and their intent is to indicate what the temperature at the predicted wind speed, minus the assumed speed of the general movement of the person, would feel like on the exposed skin of a person.  While this smacks of subjectivity, there have been some efforts at instrumental measurement of the factor.

More interesting to me is the media’s apparent need to report more extreme temperatures than plain old dry bulb air temperatures.  This represents just one more case in which shrill, or hyperbolic presentation, has become more common than calm, or pacifying, presentation.

Recently I’ve watched a bear try to eat Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant; I’ve watched heads exploded in Thirteen Hours; I’ve listened to accounts of a machete butcher in Columbus, Ohio; and I’ve watched the political debates of both parties.  No elements of our media are immune to the tendency to increase the distance between the experiences of ordinary life and the tone and tenor of their stories.  Why is that?

Is the competition for our attention so great that only the most outrageous have a chance of gaining it?  Are we, in fact, drawn to the most bizarre, heinous, and extreme stories and reports?  Have we become so indifferent to ordinary stories that we pay them no heed?

No doubt there are those reasons and others that I can’t imagine. As I write this, days after the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the President has announced that he will do as one would expect him to by making an appointment, and the President of the Senate has done as one would expect of him announcing his unwillingness to confirm a  nominee during an election year.  The commentators on all networks and cable channels are promising a “battle royale,” “a fierce political fire fight,” and the like over what will simply be another election year stalemate surrounded by righteous pronouncements on all sides.

One must wonder if the impact of this incessant escalation of anger, violence, and the extreme in the media that surrounds us day by day plays some role in the apparent increase in angry, violent, and extreme behavior we witness more commonly.  I’d suggest that by bringing stories continually framed in the extreme into the common vernacular the media outlets are major drivers of a growing callousness when regarding the extremes and increasing inability to reach consensus through ordinary discussion.

I suspect I’m just showing my age when I long for the days of Walter Cronkite, and other real journalists, and predicted temperatures expressed in degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius without the subjective overlays of wind chill and heat index factors.