noozertainment

Over the past few years it's become more and more difficult to tell the difference between news and entertainment, because to a large extent news has actually become entertainment. The management at all four major networks (I'm including CNN, but not FOX) now require that their news divisions turn a profit. Or else!

Gone are the days when networks and local stations expected news programs to have lower ratings than, say, "Your Hit Parade," or "Saturday Night at the Movies." Station and network managers knew back then that the news was serious. And without saying so, they were very much aware that a lot of the public finds anything more serious than "American Idol" boring, and they made allowances for that reality.

Fast forward to today's bean-counting TV execs saying, "Oh, no! Not boring! We can't have that!"

So we see media frivolity mirrored on internet political discussion sites, where partisan one-upsmanship and juvenile name-calling often replace serious debate. But that's only because some in those places take their cues from the mainstream media. What would you expect from people who get most of their information from TV?

A lot of the time the only way a viewer can tell whether he's watching "CBS Evening News" or "Entertainment Tonight" is by i.d.'ing the anchorbabe -- is it Katie or Mary?

Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent column on this topic today at Salon.com, in the process of reviewing a new book, "Game Change," by a couple of high-profile "political" reporters. Apparently it's a shallow, sensationalist gossipfest which pretends to be serious political reporting. Greenwald says:

No event in recent memory has stimulated the excitment (sic) and interest of Washington political reporters like the release of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book, Game Change, and that reaction tells you all you need to know about our press corps. By all accounts (including a long, miserable excerpt they released), the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as "reporting." And yet -- or, really, therefore -- Washington's journalist class is poring over, studying, and analyzing its contents as though it is the Dead Sea Scrolls, lavishing praise on its authors as though they committed some profound act of journalism, and displaying a level of genuine fascination and giddiness that stands in stark contrast to the boredom and above-it-all indifference they project in those rare instances when forced to talk about anything that actually matters.

The whole thing is well worth reading.

This is happening at a time when the U.S. is threatened with several crises simultaneously, any one of seriously threatens our continued existence as the kind of nation we've historically been. And instead of serious examination of these issues from our corporate media, we get political gossip about a dumb and careless statement concerning race made by Harry Reid, global warming denial, partisan bickering of the "we're good and you're bad" variety, blame game evasions and general incomprehension of the ongoing economic collapse, and pants-wetting childish monster-under-the-bed cowardice over terrorist attacks that misfired. The economic and social ramifications of peak oil, and a looming world-wide food shortage are not deemed worthy of even the slightest mention.

I know we can do better than this. But we'll have to re-transform ourselves back into adults and outgrow news as entertainment if we're going to deal adequately with what we're up against. The consequences of refusing to do so may well be catastrophic.

Click on Tom Tomorrow's "Action McNews" for a larger (and legible) view.