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Originally Posted by Mike McCarty
I just can't understand why the media gets such a total pass for such egregious behavior such as I saw in New Orleans. The answer must be that the media can expose anyone, at any time, under any circumstances, and they alone are the arbiter of that individuals rights.
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Sadly, it probably has more to do with the fact that they are well paid -- by us, the subscribers -- to keep doing it. Cut a newspaper's subscriptions by 50% overnight out of disgust, and it would stop. Cause an advertiser to fail to meet financial forecasts because of a boycott based on its support of garbage in the media, and changes would be made.
It isn't going to happen. Some of the greatest revenues being raked in today are generated by a show in which contestants drink pureed beetles and grubs and egg yolks, to see who can keep it down and thus "win." That's the industry that we're hoping will exercise good judgment and display good taste. It isn't going to happen. Not if Jerry Springer has anything to say about it.
I caught he*l just this past week for not being "up on" a recent legal development in New York that, another editor told me, had been "all over TV." Well, the fact is, I don't watch TV. Haven't for years. I can't stand it. Can't stand wading in the cesspool of ignorance and bad taste and bad writing. Most radio is just as odorous (and odious), full of hatemongering windbags and high-wire fraud acts that make "Off" the best channel selection (short of revolution, which we've become too lazy and compliant to even court.)
I agree that the year-round sweeps-week media mentality is degrading and bottom feeds off the most toxic holding ponds in our culture. It disgusts me every time I see a microphone or camera lens pushed in the face of a grieving or tormented or heartbroken soul. But we tune in. For every one of us who just turns them off and tunes them out, a thousand more sign up for satellite radio so they can mainline their Howard Stern fix first thing in the morning and check out of life.
That's the bee in my bonnet for the moment.
What more to do about it? Go ahead and paint those Chinese mah-jhong players, and what the heck, the Irish musicians, with all the dignity that they deserve. Avoid any caricature or false light or mean-spirited invasion of their lives. Hold the result up for comparison with the sinister and the base, and let those who still are capable of choosing, rather than merely being led like cattle, make their choice.
Disclaimer -- I did not mean by comparing them to Rivera or Stern or Springer fans to cast any aspersions on the good members of the cattle community, or any bovine named or unnamed.