Was Asked the Other Day…
I was asked the other day why I hadn’t bothered to blog about a senator and the scandal he is currently embroiled in. I won’t share who asked, but the reason to ignore the headlines, I think, is somewhat important.
News agencies, more than 90% of the time, are entertainment venues. I know, I know, it seems weird to think of CNN or Foxnews or NBC or MSNBC or a whole host of other news outlets as being entertainment, but they are. They make money by sharing with the public something that, in some morbid way, entertains a part of the viewership. As a result, news agencies are not always the best resources for real news. In fact, unless you want the shocking or the explosive or a weather report, most of the time your time is better served scanning headlines in the newspapers or online and ignoring news channels.
What is happening in politics right now is that the news channels are following a whole host of candidates. I believe a lot of these are in the race to further their political careers and put them solidly in the spotlight specifically for re-election purposes with their current jobs and their current constituency. For the most part who said what or who did what in the presidential race is moot because we are still a long way away from actually voting for a president. That happens in an even numbered year, in November, traditionally on the second of the month. We are in an odd numbered year, in September, and we’re not even close to actually caring who the president will be, let alone whether or not Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are fighting and if some other sot is better suited to do the job that all of these marginally qualified or interesting people seem desperate to do. Moreover, the amount of money being spent by the various candidates from Mitt Romney to Rudolph Giuliani is deplorable given the amount of time left.
The race hasn’t even begun and there is a multi-million to multi-billion dollar spending spree going on.
As for scandals taking place: they take place all of the time. Do I think this one senator who was caught in an airport deserves the crap he is receiving? It doesn’t matter. I do believe that we choose the punishment we receive by choosing to be a part of the process we are in. Was it fair what happened to Nixon? Clinton? Absolutely not. However, they chose to be presidents with Congresses that were opposed to them, moreover, both men did illegal things and were actually bad men while in office.
Does an affair, whether same sex or adultery really matter? Yes. I think it says a lot about our nation and what we are becoming. That we allow a politician to be in office when they knowingly and aggressively pursue affairs and illegal activity denotes that the voting public is more to blame than the individual. A child knowing it can steal a cookie isn’t going to stop stealing because he/she is caught; instead, they will apologize and go back to the same old game. I know. I was that child.
Is it right for the press to spotlight one man or one woman and to destroy their lives? Absolutely not. But it is entertainment. You, as the viewer, receives some level of satisfaction by watching the powerful fall. There is a notion of satisfaction in the everyman to watch someone in perceived or real authority lose that authority because they were caught. We don’t care that our representatives are corrupt, we care that they are caught. We don’t care if they affairs. We only care when those affairs become news. The problem, though, isn’t that it became news, rather the problem is that we are duped in to thinking that entertainment can be news.
Focusing on a senator or congressional representative or president or governor or a whole host of other individual is a whole lot like focusing on Hollywood. Sure, you love to watch them in the movies, and you love to read about their lives, and you are even willing to listen to them when they try to open their mouths and speak out; but actors and actresses and their lives, the pop-tarts, the stars and starlets of tomorrow are not news. Their antics on and off set are not news. The things they do, get drunk, flash people, do poorly on stage, break down, go in to rehab, whatever… none of it is news. It’s all publicity and its all worth about as much as the gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe.
The problem, though, is that we, the viewing public, are so sick and so thirsty for something real that we believe the crap that is being fed to us. We believe that if this pop-tart is having a nervous breakdown that we should care and pay attention and forgive her. Or if that star is doing drugs that we should look the other way for an appropriate amount of time, let him get over it, and then continue supporting the very habit that caused the problem in the first place, second place.
We, as a nation, look at musicians and actors and politicians and we listen to what they say and we care about what they do and we joy, secretly, in their failures and we do this not because it is good or nice or fun but because we don’t know the difference between real news and something that is designed specifically to entertain us. We ignore the fact that the news allots 2 minutes for a headline story and less than 90 seconds for something that doesn’t matter so much. And by watching this we feel like we are informed.
We choose to read the first paragraph or two of a news article and then discard it.
The outcome, though, is that we have these entertainment outlets that promote themselves as “News Stations” and we watch them not for what they are doing right now but for what they do when a crisis happens. I didn’t recognize that an anniversary took place yesterday. I knew it happened, but 9/11/01 is still too close to me for me to want to think too much about it. What was done right, during that time, was that the news agencies shared the news. They shared what was important. They updated their consumers with what was necessary to help the consumer understand the implications of what was happening in the world around them.
It is during a crisis that the news agency actually shares news. Not during an election cycle. Not, really, during a war. At those times, it’s sensational. Otherwise, and barring the laws that require news services or the like, most channels would ditch the news and would find a better way to entertain its viewing public.
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West