But the entire coverage was horrible. I couldn't care less. I felt bad for the kids involved, but when you see the people lining the street with the "Michael" signs, you feel a little queasy. When you see a recent picture of the pop star, that becomes full-fledged nausea.
DesMoinesRegister.com: "I knew the exact time Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, and I could tell you that the runaway bride got a half-million-dollar advance to tell her story.But I had lost track of how many U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq."
But the media eats this shit up. Just watch Faux news for a while. Or any of them. They have all lost any sense of their public service or the use of public air waves. It is all about making money. It isn't really about news. Doesn't it strike any of my conservative readers a little odd that the same company (Fox) that serves up Cal Thomas and Sean Hannity's self-righteous dribble is the same company that reaches as low as it can with every new reality show?
Ok, I am tired and a little annoyed. I am sticking to the Daily Show, NPR, and my blogs.
5 comments:
Now let's not go bashing all Fox reality shows here. Hell's Kitchen is actually pretty good! Though Simple Life just plain needs to go. Yeah, my wife and I are reality junkies...but even we have our limits!
Ahem. So as to your actual topic here, yes the media in this country is horrible. All they show here in the NY-CT market is the violent happenings of the day and the latest celebrity tabloid garbage. I used to love watching the news, getting informed about what's going on. Lately, it seems every news program is turning into National Enquirer TV. Your posted quote from the Des Moines Register says it all.
Funny you should bring this up. I've been reading Gerald Posner's Why America Slept, a thorough and compelling examination of the many missed and very real opportunities to have prevented 9/11. A couple of paragraphs came to mind after reading your post: "...we were certainly a country distracted. Terrorism happened somewhere else, not here. We were instead entertained and alternately repulsed by O.J. Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, the booming stock market, Monica Lewinsky, and a host of matters that seem particularly shallow in light of 9/11. While many of America's best reporters chased hanging chads and butterfly ballots in Florida after the 2000 presidential election, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi were also in the state, learning to fly the planes they would turn into giant bombs" (p. xii).
Posner goes on to discuss the Simpson trial as the beginning of a new type of bread and circus, the celebrity trial that consumes far more attention, ink, and airspace than it should. Another excerpt: "When the Simpson verdict was announced that October, the nation stood still for a few minutes. More than 100 million Americans watched the not-guilty finding live on television. Even President Clinton watched the verdict in an anteroom off the Oval Office with some aides, including White House chief of staff Leon Panetta. Congressional hearings were rescheduled. So was the daily State Department briefing. Airline flights were delayed. Long-distance calls dropped almost 60 percent. Stock trading plummeted. During the follow-up analysis of the verdict and what went wrong for the prosecution, a short interview -- the only jailhouse interview granted by Sheikh Rahman -- ran in Time magazine the following week, but it received little notice. The sheikh laid out a blueprint for radical Muslim anger in America" (p. 95).
Marx pointed to religion as the opiate of the masses, but in today's America that role is filled by mindless entertainment. And I would include in that the obsession with sports, however unwelcome that observation may be.
Television news is especially worthless. In the 30 minutes of a wasted broadcast -- out of which only 22 is the actual news program, and from that you have to subtract sports and weather -- I can scan and read countless newspapers online and actually learn something.
I'm especially nervous now. Between the celebrity trials and the latest missing-pretty-white-woman story, I'm noticing an increase in shark attack stories. That makes me nervous because in the late summer of 2001 it was all sharks all the time, though no one seems to remember that.
And, for what it's worth, the number of dead Americans in Iraq, for this morning at least, is 1744. Not that you can get that information easily from Kelly Ogle. Try here for a gruesome calculus: http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/
Peace everyone. Peace.
What really drives me crazy, and leaves me with a deep contempt for teh media, is the overall lack of critical ananlysis of major issues facing our nation. The networks just rehash the spin provided by their sources. The court nomination cases is one example. The media never examined the judges judicial record or stated why their was opposition to their postings. I too will stick to the Daily Show, Prairie Dog out.
JoeG, while I am not a reality show person, I do watch a lot of Fox shows. My point is only that many of the people who hate shows like Married With Children or the Simpsons seem to forget that they come from the same network that gives them Sean Hannity.
Streak -
Yeah, I definitely got your point, and you are completely correct. That Rupert Murdoch is a strange individual. Fair and balanced? D'OH!
Post a Comment