What really struck me this week wasn’t even the arguments inside Postman’s article, but the title itself: Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s both depressing and hilariously accurate. You don’t even need to dig into theory, just look at politics. Remember the circus during the congressional testimony on banning TikTok? That was entertainment, not governance.

Take Congressman Richard Hudson from North Carolina. Born in 1971, he literally grew up with the explosion of consumer technology in the late ’80s and early ’90s. And yet, during questioning, he seriously asked whether TikTok “accesses Wi-Fi.” I mean… really? These are the people who regulate tech companies? Postman would’ve laughed and cried at the same time. Then there was Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas, who kept hammering the TikTok CEO about ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Sure, fine, ask once. But the way he repeated it over and over, it really looks like it was less about gathering truth and more about trying to trap him in a “gotcha” moment. That’s not fact-finding, that’s theater.

And of course, the media clipped all this down into sound bites. Conveniently, the Democratic members of Congress barely made it into the news highlights, so it looked like only Republicans were clueless. But if you check the record, 174 Democrats voted for the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. So much for balanced reporting. The truth is, both sides were just as complicit in turning testimony into a spectacle. But because the “medium” here, the TV broadcast of the testimony, members of Congress knowing that they are being recorded, online clips, and the agenda or political leans of each news network, the narrative had to be simplified into heroes and fools.

That’s Postman’s whole point, isn’t it? The medium shapes not only what counts as truth, but how we even think truth is supposed to look. Politics isn’t about evidence or reason anymore—it’s about optics, emotional sway, and the next viral moment. We make the conclusion first, then scramble for “evidence” to justify it. Honestly, this is exactly the reason why, throughout the course, I repeatedly sound the alarm about the distrustful nature of humans. People don’t want the truth; they want their version of it, dressed up and spoon-fed in the most entertaining way possible.