Learned Helplessness

[lostnfound]

Last edited Tue Jul 23, 2019, 09:07 AM - Edit history (2)

Many days I have puzzled over the obvious divide between daytime MSNBC and evening MSNBC. obviously there’s a difference in budget and viewership, but surely its management realizes that daytime MSNBC is just repeating the one or two headline topics of the day which are generally “Trump tweeted..” and “isn’t what Trump tweeted awful?”

In the evening, you can learn stuff, but these days it’s really just a single theme: we have an awful person in the White House, and there doesn’t seem to be a darn thing we can do about it, hahaha, anytime, except a little meager hope that somehow in a year through the magic of an election it might change.

I thought about education professionals and workers coming home from their 9-5 jobs for the evening news, and about suburban moms (I’m one) listening to the daytime drones in the background, repeating a seriously dumbed down version of the same stuff.

Should we have hope, since there’s actual information on tv about the bad stuff they are doing?
What’s the lesson we are being shaped with?

Maybe, learned helplessness is the lesson we are being taught.. If educated and active people come home in the evenings to discover that their rights were being encroached, such people might be inclined to organize. Instead, we turn on the news and see a whole lot of people wringing their hands, yet looking, well...helpless.

Last night Rachel even said this is what the news has come to and this is the whole new thing we are supposed to swallow today and move on. All due respect to Rachel and several others, who are probably hoping that the old adages and functions of journalism still apply — “if the public knows about it they can do something about it” — but the message that the public is absorbing is that “we all know about it and get outrage fatigue and there’s nothing that can or will be done”. THE LESSON PLAN IS LEARNED HELPLESSNESS.

Maybe it’s intentional. Frankly I’m wondering if we will end up with Tiennamen Square in Puerto Rico — a show on TV watching US citizens in the streets get mowed down for protesting their corrupt governor. So that another lesson will be taught. Resistance is futile and fatal.

[Ilsa]

1. MSNBC is all politics, all the time. Never

any news about anything else important, it seems, unless there is an active shooter in progress.

[lostnfound]

2. The devolution will be televised. We devolve into fascism and tyranny.

We can watch the intellectuals wring their hands about it on TV.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

3. Honestly, I see it a lot here. People will post the latest terrible tweet or the next degree of

warmth on the boiling frog, and talk about how terrible it is, and then there will be a bunch of posts about "of course, the Trump supporters don't care," and no discussion about the kinds of actions that can be taken to address the specific issue. It's frustrating.