Sign of the Apocalypse #36: The "new" Katie Couric

No, this isn't Katie's doing. At least it doesn't appear to be. So, no, she doesn't deserve the blame (just as she didn't necessarily deserve the blame the last time she was mixed up in a SOTA -- see here). In fact, she claims, she likes the original image, the real Katie, more than the touched-up one. Fair enough, but the fact is someone somewhere has inched us closer, a wee bit closer, to the Apocalypse. And that sucks.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, surely you've heard that "[t]he incoming 'CBS Evening News' anchor appears significantly thinner in a network promotional magazine photo thanks to digital airbrushing". Like, 20 pounds thinner.

Who cares, you ask? This goes on all the time, you say.

I'm sure it does. And, obviously, there are far, far more important things to care about. But the SOTA-worthy issue here isn't simply the appearance of a digitally thinner TV news anchor, it's the far more serious problem of the presentation of reality in the media and the willful transmission of media-generated reality to consumers who perceive that reality to be truth. In short, the Couric photo fiasco, as innocuous as it may seem, serves to remind us that the truth is not always as it appears to be, that in fact the truth is often, and far more often than we realize, only what it is manipulated to be.

In Plato's Republic, Socrates presents to his interlocutors the famous parable of the cave. The vast mass of humanity, which sits chained facing a wall, mistakes the shadows of objects flickering in front of them, objects controlled by those above them, to be the objects themselves. That is, they mistake the manipulation of reality for reality itself. They mistake the shadow of the truth for the truth itself.

The parable is a universal expression of a key facet of the human condition. Does it not also apply to us? Our media control us through the manipulation of reality. All the more reason for us to be educated media consumers, to know how to interpret the media-generated reality that threatens to overwhelm us. All the more reason for us to be angry at that someone somewhere who airbrushed Katie Couric.