Idiocracy Essay

Giving the People What They Want The state of the media is a matter of contention in today’s society. The conversation usually goes like this: is the media improving in an age where everyone is connected, has a voice, and carries a supercomputer in their pocket or is it becoming diluted and perverted to attract larger audiences. Do people still want to read a 2,000-word profile of Jeb Bush in The New Yorker, or would they prefer to view a Business Insider slideshow with pictures and bullets of the candidate to get the gist of his positions? This question leads to a bigger question: should the news be easy and entertaining or should it challenge and question its viewers and readers prevailing views? Films like “Network” and “Idiocracy” portray

The greatest flaw with the media today is its incessant pandering in the attempt to garner popularity. This essay will explore how the media’s desperate pursuit of popularity negatively impacts its quality by examining the current state of cable news, information bubbles, and the media’s transformation of politics into sports.
Mike Judge’s film “Idiocracy” portrays a news media fueled by sensationalism that solely delivers content that its viewers find captivating like violence, strong opinions, and crude comedy. The media in the film “Idiocracy” acts as an unseen character that is complicit in the dystopian future that Judge dreamed up by abandoning all sense of responsibility in the pursuit of popularity and profit. In Judge’s film, cable news reigns supreme. One scene depicts a satirized Fox News segment where the lead in graphic is accompanied by heavy rock music and a machine gun animation. The anchorwoman in the scene is wearing sexualized clothing while her male counterpart is not wearing any clothing at all. This type of spectacle that Judge envisions is not far from our current reality. Most of the personalities on Fox News look the same and are generally attractive. Though this scene may seem absurd it is not that far from reality. Both network and cable news have

Similar to “Idiocray”, Chayefsky prophesizes a world in which the public only responds to anger, violence, and gimmicks. A world where the only thing media companies are beholden to is the ratings and the bottom line. Newsman like Howard Beale who let the public know what he was thinking, feeling, and informing the audience how they should feel and why they should be outraged. Chayefsky’s prediction of the angry newsman that does not only report the news, but preaches the news and how they feel about it, and how their viewers should feel about it was spot on. Outrage is hot in the media with several famous personalities that are professionally outraged like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly and many more. So many of these professional angry television personalities exist because people like them and watch them more than the more measured, albeit less entertaining newscasters. Politico Magazine ran a story entitled Are Americans Addicted to Outrage? where the authors Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj discuss why the public is so attracted to