This weekend I was in a hotel lobby with two TVs visible: one showing CNN and one showing Fox News. CNN was talking about Playboy's new 3D centerfold and Fox was talking about the Miss USA Pageant's "new sexier photos." Ugh, just kill me.
Monday, May 17, 2010
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6 comments:
Hotelling's Law as applied to smutty Infotainment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
I remember being at the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and hearing that Chilean President Salvador Allende had been arrested. But the lead story on TV in the U.S. was that Michael J. Fox had quit Family Ties. Unbelievable.
I think you are mixing some stories. I don't doubt the main thrust of your story - that US new media can fixate on trivia. But when Salvador Allende was killed in a coup d'etat in Chile (1973), Michael J. Fox was only 12 years old and Family Ties wouldn't be on TV for another 9 years.
Oops, sorry. It was Pinochet.
:-)
Let's blame the media for failing to adequately cover Chilean political history!
Most people have never been much interested in the real news. Newspapers have supported their reportage with gossip columns, screeds, cartoons, and other popular entertainment since Gutenberg was printing Latin bibles. So it's just not surprising to me that 24/7 news channels are 95% fluff.
And I have to admit that when I watch the NewsHour on PBS with its more international coverage, it can become tedious to see the daily drill of random violence and random disasters in random places that seem to have no connection to my life. At some point, an earthquake in Bhutan, a new album by U2, and a special election in PA-12 all become equally obscure to even to news consumers. We just don't do lots of international news here, but face it, we do have a very big and very physically isolated, largely monolingual country.
I guess what I'm saying is that I can only get so much out of crapping on US commercial media. It's better than it was 100 years ago when Hearst could start a war. I guess. Sort of. Thank god for blogs, eh?
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