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

I like that quotation from Ayn Rand, Chancellor. Here is another pice I wrote thanks to Ayn Rand.-Ron Price, Australia
------------------------------------
LIFE-GIVING FACT

The philosopher Ayn Rand(1905-1982) had a conception of art that has some parallels to my view of poetry. Both of us see artistic expression, and hence poetry, as the concretization of the widest metaphysical abstractions and of our own particular philosophy; as broad brush strokes that assist in developing an integrated world view; as an exercise in contemplation; as an art form which depends not on the extent of our knowledge but on the means by which we acquire it; as a form whose value lies primarily in the process of cognitive integration it affords, as the mechanism, the means, for providing an integrated view of existence; as an art form whose sense of life is the product of philosophic conclusions; as an art which offers "life-giving fact" and "moments of metaphysical joy and of love for existence," which confirms our view of existence;" as something which satisfies the needs of our cognitive faculty; as an indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal; as an activity in which one can learn a great deal about life; as something that induces a sense of life through the work itself; as an act whose roots lie in the nature and requirements of our mind and in an objectification of our view of man and of existence. -Ron Price with thanks to Michelle Marder Kambi and Louis Torres, "Critical Neglect of Ayn Rand's Thoery of Art," The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol.2 No.1, Fall 2000, pp.1-46.

Seeking a quiet place
and, then, a quieter place
for this profoundly satisfying
bit of philosophy made concrete,
point of sanity in an anarchic world.

With my broad and fine brush strokes
trying to bring it all together
in what you might call
cognitive integration,
with a sense of finding
life-giving-fact,
moments of metaphysical joy,
of love for existence,
satisfying my cultural sensibilities
and the requirements of my mind
defining that integrated world view
that I became associated with
insensibly in those years
when Lenny Bruce was writing
about how to talk dirty and influence people.(1)
and the average American family
was consuming about 1000 cans
of food each year and new teflon pans.(2)

1 Bruce, a popular commedian of the time, published a book by this name in 1962.
2 Teflon pans went on sale in December 1960.

Ron Price
25 October 2001
Updated for: politicspoliticalforum.com
On: 9 April 2011