Meditating on the Media

WASHINGTON -- The King of Pop is dead and Representative Peter King is outraged that the news media have paid too much attention to his passing. How quaint. I don’t mean to be snarky with a well meaning public servant, but I must ask, where have you been? You must have missed the slow, sad sloughing of our national news media toward their current residence in Hard-Copy Land, 101 Maury Povich Lane.

The truth is that our news media have long been infected by what columnist Christopher Hitchens has called our “celebrity rotten culture.” They, the media, are celebrity besotted, and, along with the general population, now nod approvingly at candidates for office, not on their ideas or ethics or statesmanship, but on their “rock star” status or their “coolness.” Stick that in your civics pipe and smoke it.

The current media whirl over Jackson’s death and state funeral reminded me of a brilliant column by George Will (Newsweek, Sept. 15, 1997) in which Will commented on the bathos-filled media coverage of Princess Diana’s death. In his column, titled “A Week of Sheer Fakery”, Will noted that:

“A wit defined a newspaper as a device incapable of distinguishing between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. At the century’s end we have mass media with wondrous capacities for subtracting from understanding by adding to the public’s inclination for self-deception and autointoxication”.

Will went on to decry the guignol abuse of language that the media employ in such circumstances:

“During the 1979 malfunction at Three Mile Island nuclear plant, a hyperventilating journalist on TV referred to the event – no deaths; no public-health impact – as a “catastrophe.” Viewers were left to wonder what words remained to describe, say, war. The premature death of any young mother is, of course, sad. But when it is the celebrity of the deceased that triggers behaviour that gets identified as “grief” and “suffering,” what words remain to describe what occurs in, say, a pediatric oncology ward?”

Comedian Dennis Miller humorously quipped recently that Oprah monetizes other people's misery so that we the public can gulp from the chalice of schadenfreude. Well, the Oprahization of our news media is well nigh complete.

Perhaps it has never been really other than it is now. Or perhaps the news media are just shovelling out what we as news consumers demand. However, as we lap it up, someone, say perhaps the news media, should pause and consider what damage this ingestion is doing to us and our culture.

(Don also is executive director of STATS. He holds an M.A. in political science and an MBA from Temple University.)