An Analysis of The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders Essay

Imagine you are sitting in your cozy, warm bedroom with your TV turned on to the news channel. All of a sudden, the screen turns red with enormous white letters flashing across the screen saying Breaking News. The tune in the background has changed from before its now more intense, making your heartbeat faster and faster. You start to hear the news anchors saying, that a plane crash has occurred on 29th Street, Martin Luther King Drive. While taking a minute to digest the horrific news, there are many thoughts running through your mind. Youre now wondering, how many people were aboard on the plane? Were their any serious injuries? God forbid did anyone die? How on earth did this crash happen in the first place? Wanting the answers to your questions, you find out two minutes later that there was no plane crash. It was a misunderstanding from a scene being filmed for a TV show. You were just told that a crash happened and a few minutes later you are being told that it was all a misunderstanding. Im pretty sure that the news at first caught your attention, and it is obvious you also believed it really quickly. Thats one of the main goals of the media. The media is shooting information at us, and sitting behind the screens, we are easily buying into most of it instantly. And the important thing to note is that most of the time we fail to see any problem with it. We are being fed false information most of the time, and we rarely even notice it because it effectively manages to preoccupy us. We actually find it as a way of entertainment. This is portrayed in the outstanding essay of George Saunders, The BrainDead Megaphone.Did you ever find yourself desperately wanting to hear from the media? Or as what Saunders would call the megaphone. The media attracts us to be sensational to it, wanting...

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