I am 62 years old. So I have seen the TV news business ever since there was a TV news business. I remember watching John Cameron Swayze with my father, for cryin' out loud, when the nightly news broadcast was only 15 minutes long and was sponsored by Camel cigarettes! And I'm a news junkie – so I've been as close an observer of the TV news as anyone I can name.
In all that time, NEVER has the "news" business degraded, debased, and discredited itself as it has over the last week and a half, culminating in today's revolting orgy of celebrity-worship over the death of Michael Jackson.
Even as a celebrity, Michael Jackson was not in the same class as (for example) Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra. Both of them changed the course of popular music and maintained their popularity, influence, and musical significance for FAR longer than Michael Jackson ever dreamed of doing. (In fact, Michael Jackson's fame is due almost as much to the fact that he was a probable pedophile as it is to his music.) But ten days after the deaths of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, no one was pretending that they were still the biggest news stories of their day.
The newspeople can defend themselves that they were only giving the people what they wanted, but that won't wash. First of all, the news media clearly fanned the flames of the idiotic hero-worship that erupted when Jackson died. Secondly, TV news is not show business. TV reporters refer to themselves as journalists. That means they have a professional responsibility to make decisions as to what is worth spending three or four hours of news broadcast time on. In this case, they shamelessly abandoned that responsibility.
What has happened since the days when news was news? The irresponsibility of the news media has contributed to a culture in which people actually take a fool like Sarah Palin - a woman who wouldn't even make the list of top fifty-thousand most qualified Americans - seriously as a presidential contender, for heaven's sake – all because she's a celebrity! Millions upon millions of people have grown up without a shred of ability to distinguish serious issues from trivia. Thus, millions of those sawdust-brained fools were glued to their TV sets today, actually thinking they were witnessing something that mattered!
And don't think this kind of empty-headed inability to make judgements about what's important is just an indication of the emptiness of American culture. In Britain, a few years back, the BBC held a poll to determine who were the 100 greatest Britons of all time – mind you, that includes Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, John Maynard Keynes, Elizabeth I, St. Thomas More, Francis Drake, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Queen Victoria, Admiral Nelson, Francis Bacon, John Locke, ... and there in THIRD PLACE was a little blonde twit who died tragically without a single noteworthy accomplishment to her name – Princess Diana.
You tell me, over and over and over again: You don't believe we're on the Eve of Destruction.
