CNN embraces tabloid headlines
I’ve been really disappointed for the past couple of days. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before or anything, but I think the whole Eliot Spitzer thing is really bringing the mold out of the woodwork.
Case in point, I offer two screenshots of CNN Headlines for the past couple of days. You can see them here and here. The amount of smut and crap that passes for news nowadays is an affront to the intelligence of the American people. This is the kind of stuff I expect from Fox News, whom I won’t even deign to link to. You know, the media smelled blood with the scandal surrounding the soon-to-be former Governor of New York and sure enough a resignation ensued. I’m not even speaking to the point of whether or not that is justified, moreso I’m speaking to the point that the media got their kill, now MOVE ON. Instead, it continues to be sensationalized and now we have front-page headlines about Spitzer’s “escort’s” myspace page. Give me a break.
Notice how the New York Times seems to have moved on and their headlines are no longer tabloid quality. What happened to this ridiculous, illegal War in Iraq? (Or, actually, according to The Onion, things are going pretty well in Iraf.) What about the Chinese arguably fairly telling us to keep our double-standards on human rights to ourselves? (In all fairness, CNN did infact report on this.) But this isn’t just an attack on CNN. Certainly not.
The sensationalist garbage that has been passing for news in the public sphere is pretty reprehensible. Again, I might expect this from the (unfortunately very popular) propaganda and misinformation machines like Fox News, but not CNN.
I’ve been reading Al Gore’s book, The Assault on Reason, and I must say it is very, very good. It pains me that the GOP was successfully able to ramrod the election process with fiends like Katherine Harris and the real “activist judges” on the Supreme Court and keep this man out of office. America would be in a much better position and hopefully one day he will return and lead the party. But I digress. One reason why the book is so very good is because it is a systematic and scientific analysis of the current state of our “public sphere” which comes to startling and inevitable conclusions regarding the extreme abuses of power by the Bush-Cheney administration. Honestly, it’s very non-partisan. It’s actually stated very early in the book that (paraphrasing) “it’d be too easy and partisan to simply blame the Bush-Cheney administration.” So instead, he systematically evaluates what’s going on and how they’re breaking the law. The conclusions are unfortunate, but they’re hard to argue against. I’m only about 2/3’s way through, so I’ve got some more good reading to go.
I sincerely hope that, as Al Gore describes, the power of the television is reduced from its current monopoly and something like the Internet resuscitates the discourse in today’s “news.” Hint: It has nothing to do with a sultry myspace pages or Star Bucks closing for three hours.