Reading: Bourdieu "Making Everything Ordinary"
Again, the best way to have a conversation about the discussion that we had on Bourdieu during class is through the quotations that we isolated during in-class discussion. TV News "suits everybody because it confirms what they already know and, above all, leaves their mental structures intact. All forms of news, especially television news, contains a significant amount of bias to their reporting, which removes people who do not agree with them and draws people who do even closer. In other words, when you exclusively watch a television news reporting channel that supports your political beliefs, then everything they report on will be through a lens that you already agree with. This means that you are not tempting to think about anything and simply allow your bias to continue without questioning your beliefs, a situation that is more comfortable than the opposite. "Our TV philosophers are called in to give meaning to the meaningless." As is evident from the two quotations I have discussed, the overarching topic of discussion for Bourdieu is the influence of television on our understanding of culture. This quote describes the job of television reporters to continue to create comfortable realities for people by ascribing meaning to meaningless news. For example, rather than reporting on significant global news, reporters will direct all their attention to the restoration of one home from the recent hurricanes. While this is not positive news, we are aware of the consequences of the hurricane from people who are not us, so we enjoy watching a story that we can already guess the ending to.
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