Here's the beginning and the end of a column by Carl Hiassen in The Miami Herald , 3/4/07, about (forgive me) Anna Nicole Smith. It's the best - and worst - I've read on the subject to date. Best in that it mercilessly sums the episode up as regards the news bizness. And, of course, the worst because...it mercilessly sums the episode up as regards the newz business.
We Have Seen the Future & It's Not Pretty - Carl Hiaasen
Now that Anna Nicole Smith is at long last departed from Florida, it's time to confront a simmering disgust over the media's salivating treatment of this dreary event.
Was the press coverage excessive? You bet.
Mindless? Inevitably.
Tasteless? Rapturously so.
But this is the new New Journalism, which is steered by a core belief that people would rather be smothered by seedy gossip about dead ex-Playmate junkies than be bothered with the details of North Korea's nuclear program.
Like the Don Henley song says, crap is king. We are merely here to serve.
If you Googled Anna Nicole's name last week, you got 28.8 million hits -- 10 times more than that of Condoleezza Rice, who is only the U.S. secretary of state.
Debate all you wish about whether the public's interest is fueling the Anna Nicole overkill, or the overkill is inflating the public's interest. The fact is, lots of people are hungry for the story -- and not because they care one bit about this poor woman, or her child.
It's necro-tainment, that's all. The five-car pileup on the interstate. The stunt plane crashing at the air show. The train derailment, caught on tape.
...
Don't make the mistake of dismissing the Smith story as an anomaly; it's a media watershed. If the death of a hapless, doped-up ex-model can knock two wars out of the headlines, there's no end to the squalid possibilities.
We have seen the future, and it's in the gutter.
(Click Here to read between those lines.)
Nice of him to notice but he's a tad late, don't you think? Harry Reasoner predicted this in the early 70's when ABC hired Barbara Walters. Since then we've had - among many others - the OJ Circus, the Runaway Bride Circus, the Princess Diana Circus, and, most recently, the Astronaut in Diapers Circus. The media - the electronic media in particular - have been scraping the bottom of the LCD barrel for at least two decades. The Anna Nicole Smith Circus is part of a pattern that's been well established for quite some time, and those of us who watch the media know it's not a watershed, nothing like it. It's just BAU.
Reasoner was right - the watershed was implanting "celebrity journalism" at the heart of what used to be a news show and treating the resulting hybrid as two sides of the same coin, as if one were the equal of the other. What Harry called (if memory serves) "Celebrity values" have been infecting the news media ever since.
Anybody who thinks we've hit bottom is, I think, fairly naive.
Posted by: mick arran | March 06, 2007 at 12:44 PM
Point well taken. Your base mark is ironic, in that Reasoner was the lightweight at CBS News. He always did the fluff pieces on 60 Minutes.
I guess there IS no bottom to this barrel. Still, I'm all for mustering outrage, even if it's a bit redundant.
Posted by: Reg | March 07, 2007 at 01:44 AM