Prism40%
One bite at a time: the media as a mirror 16%
By Derek R. Trumbo17% Sr.17%
7/23/2026, 6:07:50 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Appeal to Emotion, and Negativity Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 13.4% saturation with 290 hits. Analysis detected 2,330 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,168 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 27.3% and a BS Rank of 16% (21,520 of 25,563 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 84.20% of the article peer group.
As I sit down to share yet another column about my adventures in reentry, I find myself slightly embarrassed to tell you about how I spend my days beyond the daily grind.
Maybe you can relate, but there can be a lot of monotony in day-to-day life, especially for me in between work, writing, and parole check-ins.
You’d think I’d be used to this, after almost two decades behind bars.
But as we’ve previously discussed, freedom is hard to get used to , and I’m still figuring out how to spend my downtime.
I now have a smartphone and pretty quickly, I grew accustomed to mindless scrolling.
Coming home from prison made me realize that not only has pop culture changed while I was away, so has the pace of it.
Everything moves so much faster now.
A song can become popular and disappear before I even know it exists.
Shows come in seasons meant to be consumed in one sitting.
People talk about celebrities, scandals, trends, and viral moments as if the public is already intimately aware of the details.
Sometimes I feel like I am standing outside a conversation that started years before I arrived.
At first this was overwhelming, but over time I stopped feeling pressure to keep up with it all.
Prison taught me to live with very little, and release is teaching me to make careful choices when there is too much.
Just because I can watch, listen, scroll, or stream does not mean I have to.
What I find myself most drawn to is content that gives me space to think.
I appreciate stories about people who are honest about struggle, growth, accountability, and change.
I listen for music that carries pain without glorifying destruction, music that tells the truth without trying to make brokenness seem glamorous.
I am less interested in rhythmic noise and more interested in meaning.
I mostly see my media and pop culture consumption over time as a mirror.
Sometimes it shows me who I used to be.
Sometimes it shows me how the world kept moving while I was away.
And sometimes, when I am patient and attentive enough to listen, it shows me the kind of man I am still becoming.
Now that I’m out, music has taken on a different meaning.
Songs I used to experience one way now reach me in another.
Some lyrics feel heavier than they once did, not because the words changed, but because I did.
I have lived enough, lost enough, and sat with myself long enough to hear certain songs differently.
Music no longer feels like something I use to escape.
At its best, music helps me better understand myself.
There are artists I once considered favorites who no longer speak to the person I am trying to become.
This realization slowly unfolded.
At first, I would put on familiar songs and expect to feel the same rush, the same confidence, or the same numbness.
But I mostly only heard the younger version of myself: angry, insecure, high, and trying hard not to feel anything too deeply.
I do not judge that version of myself as harshly as I once did, but I also do not want to keep feeding him.
These days, I do not watch much television, partly because my parole limits what I am allowed to watch.
After spending so many years with restricted access to the outside world, I thought I would come home hungry to catch up on everything I missed.
Instead, I find myself moving more slowly, cautiously choosing what I take in.
But that wasn’t the case when I first returned home.
I immediately wanted to get cable installed so I could jump right back into watching the same shows and movies I gravitated toward when I was younger.
My tastes skew toward rom-coms, horror, and science fiction.
I was very fond of modern pop culture classics such as “There’s Something About Mary,” “Mr.
Deeds,” “Fifty First Dates,” and anything Freddy Krueger related, except the latest remake—it’s too extreme for my liking.
I couldn’t wait to rewatch “Ghostbusters,” “Scrooged,” and “Groundhog Day.”
In my humble opinion, Bill Murray is a comedy legend.
But much to my chagrin, cable was a thing of the past in my region, and streaming wasn’t an option for me.
This ultimately led me to rely on DVDs and YouTube, where I’d watch endless clips on my phone to pass the time.
Initially, I was not impressed by YouTube.
I didn’t understand the point of watching short clips filled with ads for things I had zero interest in, but I still found myself endlessly scrolling through random stuff that over time somehow zoomed in on my very particular tastes.
I later learned about a little something called an algorithm and how social media sites like YouTube adjust to become more addictive based on our views.
This seemed invasive at first, but honestly, it later bothered me less as the app began to feed me more stuff I liked watching.
I got sucked into clips about historical conspiracy theories, detailed accounts of human origins that aren’t explained in school, and celebrity scandals I couldn’t follow while imprisoned.
Next, I turned to viewing clips about magnet fishing for recyclable metals and interviews with hip-hop and rock icons who had tragic downfalls.
I was obviously seeking meaningless entertainment, not yet fully aware of the educational potential of YouTube.
This scrolling was fun while it lasted, though it consumed many, many hours of my time.
I really began to tap the potential of YouTube when I stumbled upon interviews with my favorite actors and authors.
I took a deep dive into the Stephen King universe, for example, and explored the making of the dystopian thriller “Soylent Green.”
One of my favorite finds was Variety’s “Actors on Actors” and similar channels that provide masterclasses from actors and authors discussing their crafts.
This fully piqued my interests.
While I certainly enjoyed perusing thrift stores for obscure DVDs, I am also someone who takes my writing and storytelling very seriously, and these channels gave me new insights to hone my art.
One of my favorite interviews was with Murray, who during a 2014 press tour for a movie, discussed his early career, personal struggles, and how a chance encounter with a French masterpiece in the Art Institute of Chicago changed his life.
Murray told the story of how as a young comedian, he’d just bombed onstage, and he walked out of his show to wander the streets in despair.
He was considering ending it all: his acting and comedy, his pursuit of the craft, and potentially his life.
He neared Lake Michigan and, for some reason, made his way inside the Art Institute of Chicago, where he laid eyes on the 1884 painting “The Song of the Lark” by Jules-Adolph Breton.
The work features a peasant woman laboring in a field as the sunrise begins, and a distant skylark greets the day.
Naturally, I looked up the painting and I, too, was tremendously moved.
My breath caught in my throat as my eyes drank in every detail of the painting.
There were so many intricacies woven into the scene, each brushstroke captured the duality of despair and possibility.
Murray said of the painting, “I thought, ‘Well there’s a girl who doesn’t have a whole lot of prospects, but the sun’s coming up anyways, and she’s got another chance at it.’
So I think that gave me some sort of feeling that I, too, am a person, and I get another chance every day the sun comes up.”
Murray recounted how true art can literally save lives when artists themselves figure out “the art of living.”
After incarceration, after addiction, after years of being told when to wake up, where to stand, what to wear, when to speak, and how small my world was allowed to be, “entertainment,” as we call it, actually feels more like atmosphere and influence.
It is how we choose to spend our precious time when no one else is there.
I know what it is to have time taken from me, so I am careful now about giving it away so cheaply.
That realization has made me more protective of my attention.
I know what it is to have time taken from me, so I am careful now about giving it away so cheaply.
I know what it is to live in an environment where loudness is mistaken for strength, cruelty is mistaken for honesty, and numbness is mistaken for peace.
So, why would I want to spend my freedom replaying the same emptiness—only this time in a home of my own ?
What I’m telling you, dear reader, is that I want the media I consume to enlarge me, not shrink me back into the man I fought so hard to leave behind.
This does not mean I only watch serious things or listen to songs that sound like homework.
I still laugh.
I still enjoy the ridiculous.
I still watch horror movies, old comedies, strange interviews, thrift-store DVDs, and explore the occasional rabbit hole that leads nowhere useful.
Joy matters too.
Laughter matters too.
A person rebuilding a life cannot survive on structure and discipline alone.
Sometimes the soul needs a foolish movie, a familiar song, or a clip that makes you laugh so hard you forget, for a few minutes, how heavy the world can be.
But I am learning the difference between rest and escape.
Rest returns me to myself.
Escape abandons me somewhere I eventually must come back from.
Rest allows me to breathe, reflect, and keep going.
Escape tries to convince me that the work of becoming can wait forever.
When reentering society after incarceration, these distinctions matter.
While on parole, we are already fighting to prove we can be trusted with our choices, our emotions, our schedules, our money, our relationships, and our future.
The things we watch and listen to may seem minor in the scheme of things, but repeated small acts can become habits and habits shape our character.
That is why Murray’s story moved me.
It was not only because I admire him, or because “The Song of the Lark” is beautiful, or because I understand what it feels like to stand at the edge of yourself and wonder if there is anything left worth saving.
The painting reached me because it did not shout.
It did not demand.
It simply presented a woman in a field at daybreak, carrying the weight of her labor, pausing long enough to hear a bird sing.
She was still poor.
She was still tired.
The work did not disappear.
But the sun comes up anyway.
For anyone trying to begin again, I would argue that there is something sacred in that image.
Reentry is not a singular, grand moment when the prison doors open, and everything becomes easier.
It is more like the field in the painting.
You wake up before you feel ready.
You carry tools you may not fully know how to use.
You walk into a day that does not promise kindness.
You are surrounded by unjust systems, painful memories, temptations, and doubts.
Then—somewhere in the middle of this muck, if you are fortunate and paying attention—you hear something that reminds you that you are alive.
For me, that something comes through art, through writing, through music that tells the truth, through conversations with people who refuse to let me disappear into my worst chapter, and through the quiet knowledge that I have so much left to do.
I may be late to the party when it comes to streaming platforms, viral trends, and the latest shows, but I am not late to my own life.
I am arriving exactly when I need to, carrying everything I survived, and trying to turn it into something meaningful.
So, what am I watching?
I am watching the world with different eyes.
I am watching how easily people give themselves away to noise.
I am watching how quickly culture moves past pain without really seeing it.
I am watching old actors talk about craft, old musicians talk about regret, old movies carry new meanings, and ordinary people teaching me things I did not know I needed to learn.
I am watching myself become more selective, more thoughtful, more human.
Pop culture—the music we consume, the shows we watch, the content we consume—actually tells us a lot about society and our shared beliefs.
At its best, it’s art.
At its worst, it’s junk.
What I’m searching for in this media landscape are signs of life.
Not perfection.
Not easy inspiration.
Not the kind of cheap hope that asks a person to pretend the field is not hard, or the labor is not real.
I am watching for real hope—the kind that stands barefoot in the dirt, listens for a song, and decides to keep going.
Analysis
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