Posted on 08/15/2003 5:18:50 AM PDT by Theodore R.
Trivia As News
The decline of the American television media is evident in its inordinate attention to the Kobe Bryant case.
The Los Angeles Laker is charged with rape. OK, a not-unusual occurrence for professional athletes. It is legitimate to report his arrest, his arraignment and his trial. It is illegitimate in the extreme to report hearsay stories and tales and to conduct endless speculation with lawyers who want to be on television but who know nothing about the facts of the case.
We're still months away from a trial, and I'm sick of the whole business already. In first place, who gives a hoot about Bryant's sex life other than his wife? In the second place, news media show how far removed they are from reality by devoting so many resources to what is a trivial story. Whether Bryant is innocent or guilty doesn't matter to the country. He's just an entertainer. God knows the media should be concentrating on reporting the real problems facing this country.
They tell us a million times more than we want to know about an adulterous athlete and practically nothing about the federal government, the environment, agriculture, business or science. Their idea of reporting business news is to tout stocks and report the daily up-and-down of the stock averages. Their idea of reporting on government is to cover the perpetual campaigns for re-election.
Admittedly, the ink-and-paper guys have shown more perspective and good sense. Most newspapers have relegated the story to the sports section, which is where it belongs. After all, Bryant's sole claim to fame is that he is a pretty good basketball player. The cable news channels, however, have gone bonkers. They act like a five-minute routine arraignment is a major story. They've created media frenzy over nothing.
The villains are the owners of the networks and cable channels. They have shown they will do anything for ratings and, hence, higher advertising income. Nothing is too vulgar and in such bad taste that they won't broadcast it. They are already into soft porn, and it won't be too many years before they will graduate to the hard stuff.
When television first began in the 1950s, an intelligent person forecast that it would become a wasteland simply because it eats up material faster than good material can be produced. How can anyone supply quality programming to hundreds of channels running 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Can't be done. Good work, whether it's a novel or a movie or a documentary, takes time.
When late-night television first started, Steve Allen and Jack Paar held intelligent conversations with interesting people. Now the late-night shows are just a parade of actors or musicians promoting their latest offerings.
The power of television, however, is awesome. You could put a baboon on camera for 30 minutes a day for five days and it would become a national celebrity. Unfortunately, in our time, celebrities are often nobodies who get a lot of airtime. Also unfortunately, a lot of television documentaries and docudramas are full of falsehoods and propaganda. The great potential for good is usually wasted.
Smarter people than me long ago pointed out that the problem in our country is that the elite are corrupt. It is the wealthy, outwardly respectable executives and multimillionaire owners who publish, promote, produce and broadcast this trash. It is the wealthy elite who swindle honest investors and callously ship American jobs overseas to sweat-labor countries.
But you're not supposed to think about these things. You're supposed to be enthralled with the rape trial of a basketball star or the bankruptcy of a punch-drunk boxer or the romance of two actors, the political buzz about candidates, etc., and so forth.
Just watch the games in the arena. Don't look too closely at the emperor and his court. That way, you won't notice they're developing hernias carrying the loot away while the country slides toward Third World status.
© 2003 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Truer words were never spoken.
I'm tired of the inverse of that,i.e., "The Trivia as News". Yesterday's blackout was maybe 10 minutes of good solid news. All the networks have been trine to stuff that 10 minutes into 24 hour coverage. I've heard some awfully lame questions like 'By 'multiple failures', do you mean that many things in the system failed?'
Almost every single thing that has been said on TV about the power outage has turned out to be false - designed more to control the sheeple rather than inform them.
"The power will be back on within hours" - Mayor Bloomberg"A lightning strike (or a power plant failure in NY) caused the outage" - Prime Minister Chretien
"There has been no significant looting" - everybody
"The problem originated in Canada" - US Officials
"The problem originated in the US" - Canadian Officials
"I'm 100% sure that it wasn't terrorism" - President Bush
This last, even though the cause of the problem - or even where it started - has not been determined. And now we find out that the entire NY grid is being operated by a foreign country. Who is National Grid USA? Who is National Grid Transco? [[Outage] vanity].
As some electrical engineer pointed out on Fox last night, all it would take is a minor tweak of a relay setting in an obscure substation somewhere...
The equivalent of Scottish Power all over again.
I see someone's been watching Dan Rather again.........
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