Yesterday CNN devoted three hours of airtime to Michael Jackson arriving to be charged, leaving to return to Vegas, and physically returning to Vegas.
As it was playing on the newsroom TV I erupted in a small of fit high dudgeon, but I thought I was over it.
This morning I’m pissed all over again. How much more of this idiocy are we going to impose on ourselves before we get it into our heads: The personal lives of celebrities are not news: they are curiosities. Three paragraphs in the “People” column.
Michael Jackson getting busted for child molestation is 60 seconds after the real news gets reported. It does not lead the broadcast; it’s a mug shot and a refer from A1 to a 10-inch story somewhere inside.
I don’t care if the audience eats this shit up. They’d eat up public hangings and cats being thrown out of skyscraper windows. We have to be above their basest desires … that’s why we pass up on the better-paying gigs at the National Enquirer. Well, isn’t it?
News should be what affects the most people. Celebs have no impact on my life or the lives of anybody but their friends, families and co-workers. If Michael Jackson’s arrest hurts record sales, it’s a business story. If it boosts TV ratings, it’s a TV page story. If he molests little boys, it’s a crime story. Whatever kind of story it is, it’s not Page One News.
How many more times must we watch cars drive down highways before we realize, “Jesus Christ, we’re watching cars drive down highways.” What are we hoping, that Michael will jump out with a machine gun and start gunning down the paparazzi? How many more hours of not reporting terrorist attacks in Turkey will we have to endure before we figure out that our celebrity worship has gotten out of hand?
Please, people, get a grip. Have some discipline. Find some real news and leave this pulp to the experts. We look like morons trying to foist a patina of respectable journalism on these kinds of stories. The talking heads on the TV sound stupid and their interviewers on TV look stupid trying to tell us “what it all means.” It means nothing beyond beyond our inability to stop looking at naked people and car crashes. This is hardly a recent development.
A couple Michael links:
Lisa de Moraes in the Washington Post
Mondo Winkie echoes my rant. (Or I echo him, he had his posted first… had I actually read his first I might’ve avoided the machine gun reference.)
Doc Searls has a Michael encounter, sort of.
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