This evening I spent a couple of hours in front of the TV, as I sometimes do, once again only dimly aware of what was happening on the screen. My laptop open, I was gradually working my way through the day’s posts, catching up after a busy day in the office.
I learned that Aaron Brown, that witty, warm and substantial evening news anchor, is leaving CNN, having been pushed out by the popularity of the latest hairdo-du-jour, Anderson Cooper, he who stands knee-deep in water in gusty places everywhere, and then speaks (in high school grammar, to boot) from these places of how the latest tragedy has affected him personally.
From everywhere except Pakistan of course, where tens of thousands of people are dying agonizingly slow deaths of starvation and exposure in a story that hasn’t made it onto CNN’s evening news recently – unless I missed it when I blinked. Or perhaps it was pushed off the schedule by Paula Zahn’s daring (2 hour??) coverage of the latest Hollywood starlet to come out with her tragic story of bulemia, with Jane Fonda tossed in for gravitas. I’m not minimizing the seriousness of bulemia, but please – that’s “tens of thousands”, and that’s news. No, it’s not just “news” – “news” is a cat stuck in a tree – the Pakistan earthquake is history.
Would the media be more interested if FEMA were in charge?
That my laptop was open and I was preoccupied during the entire fiasco was perhaps prescient. That I learned of the Aaron Brown story from the blogosphere, certainly.
But this is merely yet another recent example of the Internet being a profoundly better source of contextual information. And it all boils down to the same thing –
If the broadcast powers that be don’t even try to maintain some relevance to the thinking person, they are going to be entirely obliterated by the Internet. Call it the trash-ification of television, but so far I see no evidence that TV intends to do anything but trudge somnambulantly into a dull drone of reality-this, celebrity-that, and news that merely parrots back the latest announcement from the Government of the day, and substitutes opposing spin-meisters shouting at each other for reasoned, sensible analysis.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.