Media coverage is fast
food to go
Brandon Lacour
"No man ever went broke by underestimating
the tastes of the American people." -- H. L. Mencken
I have decided to cancel my subscription
to Time at the next available opportunity.
The Jan. 22 issue featured an article on
the alleged relationship between Lauren Bush and Prince William of England.
Lauren is the niece of election-stealer/President-elect George W. Bush.
Now, forgetting for just a minute that
it didn't appear in the National Enquirer, something else struck me about
this "news" article. The writer, Josh Tyrangiel, described William and
Lauren's romance through the mail with such droll quips as "the e-mails
were hot. Cinemax hot."
It occurred to me why this style of news
coverage seemed so familiar. It seems culled from the professional reporting
found in Maxim.
For those of you not familiar with Maxim,
it's the best-selling men's magazine featuring articles on models, sex,
sports, beer, gadgets, and such helpful hints as "How to make your girlfriend's
cat's death look like it was an accident."
I take issue with allegedly serious news
journals trying to recast themselves in this image, with insipid coverage
of items that are not newsworthy.
The fact that articles such as "Lauren
loves William" are featured in news journals speaks volumes about the problems
in media.
First, there is the obvious sensationalism
of the news. This also functions as a form of indirect censorship in what
some call our National Entertainment State.
Maybe you folks remember when Seinfeld
ended. It became a media circus. Jerry was on the cover of every magazine
from Time to Entertainment Weekly.
The issue of "life after Seinfeld" became
a major feature of the media.
Incidents like this, which are becoming
more and more frequent, illustrate the tendency of our media to replace
serious news with the pressing concerns of Seinfeld and the Lauren-William
tryst.
Rienhold Niebuhr once wrote that because
of the "stupidity of the average man," he must be given "necessary illusions"
and "emotionally potent oversimplifications" in lieu of the truth.
I can remember when Time would do in-depth
articles on corporate welfare and other serious issues, but that no longer
seems to be their attitude. During the election, Time devoted a page to
the problems of black voters in Florida and featured such luminaries as
Jerry Seinfeld and Harry Potter on the cover.
Ben Bagdikian in The Media Monopoly,
written in 1982, commented that 50 corporations controlled most of the
media. In the book's fourth edition in 1993 the number had gone down to
20 and is still plummeting.
This increased concentration of the control
of media has the end result of tightening the reins of what we see, hear
and know about our country.
