RonPrice
New Member
FAKE
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.
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)
A different kind of Big Brother
was required to deprive people
of their autonomy, maturity &
history. Huxley saw people as
coming to love-not even aware
of oppression-adore technology
that simply undo their capacities
to think....He feared we would be
reduced to passivity and drown in
a sea of utter triviality-irrelevance.
(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
Revised on 11/2/’10
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.
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)
A different kind of Big Brother
was required to deprive people
of their autonomy, maturity &
history. Huxley saw people as
coming to love-not even aware
of oppression-adore technology
that simply undo their capacities
to think....He feared we would be
reduced to passivity and drown in
a sea of utter triviality-irrelevance.
(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
Revised on 11/2/’10