Fake news made its debut on TV in 1962 with That Was the Week That Was--a weekly comedy review. This review included a fake news segment and was anchored by David Frost who went on to host The Frost Report in 1966/67 which parodied a current events show.  I began my pioneer-travelling life in the Canadian Bahá'í community in 1962 and, by 1967, I was living among the Inuit on Baffin Island which had no TV at that time.

In 1968 Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In became a weekly series which also featured a fake news segment usually anchored by Dick Martin.  The fake news was introduced by a song that began: “What’s the news across the nation? / We have got the information / In a way we hope will amuse you.”  By the time the program went off the air in 1973 I had become an international pioneer, teaching high school and living in South Australia.

As early as the 1960s, news as entertainment, sometimes called infotainment, had already made its mark and that mark has been present all my adult life.  Although Laugh-In went off the air in 1973, it took a mere two years for another weekly-sketch comedy to hit the screen: Saturday Night Live which debuted on 11 October 1975 just ten weeks before my second marriage.  Both that program and my second marriage have been going for the last thirty-five years. -Ron Price with thanks to Ana Kothe, “When Fake Is More Real: Of Fools, Parody, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” Americana: Journal of Popular American Culture, Volume 6, No.2, Fall, 2007.

Can things like this which
we spend so much time on
be so very unimportant???

Is this entertainment permeation,
this spurious gratification, part of
our disillusionment over the lack
of a definition of culture and moral
solutions......this preference for fun
over edification........and part of the
very complexity of issues we face,
part of a new public discourse of
amusing ourselves to our death!(1)

Had we forgotten that alongside
Orwell's dark 1984 vision there was
another, slightly older, slightly less
well-known equally chilling vision:
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.(2)

No Big Brother is required to deprive
people of their autonomy, maturity &
history.  Huxley saw people coming to
love, not even be aware of oppression,
adore technologies that simply undo
their capacities to think....He feared we
would have so much info we would be
reduced to passivity and drown in a sea
of utter triviality, irrelevance and fun!!!

(1) Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985.
(2) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932.

Ron Price
10 February 2010

Excellent post, Karnal. I enjoyed the read--a rare event in many of the threads I go to these days.-Ron

Well I thought both your contributions were more interesting than the kind that seem the fashion here now, the kind that bag a particular politician then, without achieving anything, rush on to bag another politician tomorrow.  It doesn't take much intelligence to write about the stupidity of politicians, they provide so many examples, and journalists for the mainstream media thrive on it. But it is counterproductive for we, the sheeple, to waste our time on it.

Firstly, even if the politician being written about could be kicked out of his job as a result of our complaints, he would be replaced by someone similar within hours. The new bloke would be directed and restrained by all the same forces that drove his predecessor; the same problems would reoccur all over again, so nothing much would change. There's little to be gained by discussing individual politicians.

Secondly, when we waste our time gossiping about personalities we never get around to discussing the fundamental flaws in our systems, the better opportunities we could strive for, and ways of putting our ideas into action.  People who like our present systems as they are (and there are a few who benefit from them) do not want to hear of us changing the present systems, perhaps removing them from power. They would prefer to distract and confuse us at every opportunity. Gossip about personalities provides endless opportunities. Be aware of this next time you see a heading about ruddy, gillard, abbott or whoever.