Bleeech!!!!!!!!!!! Ha Ha HaHey Folks - THERE'S A WAR ON AND HUNGRY AND DYING PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD
Anna Nicole Smith: We can't help ourselves
By John "Jack" Telfer, editor
02/25/2007
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A recent survey showed that a strong majority of Americans felt the death of celebrity Anna Nicole Smith had received too much coverage in the media.
So why is broadcast media, particularly cable television, continuing to bombard viewers with stories about Smith night after night, program after program?
Because the cable companies know that Americans' actions do not match their words.
Those in the tabloid news and magazine business know it as well, as has been demonstrated by their cover stories in recent days.
The media is driven by numbers and the numbers indicate that while people say they have had too much of Anna Nicole Smith, they continue to watch. One recent special on the celebrity brought in the highest ratings for that night. Higher ratings and newsstand sales are numbers the media can use to garner more money for advertising.
So why wouldn't they take advantage of a hot celebrity death story such as Anna Nicole Smith?
If Americans really didn't want to see any more of Smith on television or in the magazines, there is a very simple solution -- they just need to stop watching the programming and buying the magazines. But for many reasons, that is easier said than done. Call it our human nature, our sinful nature, or our natural tendency to play in the mud rather than pure, clean water, the end result is the same.
We can't help ourselves.
We say we don't like the coverage of Smith because admitting we are intrigued by a story like this means admitting we enjoy watching the dirt about a fallen celebrity exposed for all the world to see. Something just doesn't seem right about it, but we are glued to the TV anyway.
Well, not everyone. There are many who are not infatuated with the Anna Nicole Smith story. They have had enough and become experts with their remotes, quickly changing channels when the latest in this bizarre story comes on the television. The problem is even without watching more than the teasers of this soap opera story you learn far more than anyone needs to know, including things like: Another man claiming to be the father of her baby; the family's battle over where she should be buried and the family viewing her decomposing body.
Why do we watch this stuff? As the Apostle Paul said nearly 2,000 years ago (paraphrased), we do the things we don't want to do and we don't do the things we want to do.
The world advances in so many ways, but some things never change.
1 comment:
Yeesh...
"Liberal media"? HAH!
I think our mainstream media is about as "corporate" as you can get. I think they show us what they think will bring in the dollars, because they are mostly concerned about their financial bottom line. Unless they are like FOX, of course, in which case they are trying to pass off propaganda as entertainment. Still, I think people are more likely to tune in to watch Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity verbally bash somebody on the air more than they would be interested in watching news that actually deals with issues and important world events, like the "News Hour" on PBS, for example.
Whenever I hear the aforementioned pundits or others of their like bemoaning the "liberal media" I just want to puke. This myth has been perpetrated on the American public for the last 40 years or so, and people hear it often enough that it has become part of our conventional wisdom. How else could an abomination such as "FOX News" have ever made it? I think the public has pumped and primed for so many years that once certain media types decided the time was right (that the myth had indeed been accepted as conventional wisdom), Murdoch foisted FOX on America.
I believe that once the Fairness Doctrine was trashed in the Reagan years, AM talk radio began to play a big part in the propagation of the "liberal media" myth. Rush Limbaugh seems like kind of the godfather of that whole line of crap when it comes to radio.
Because I believe most corporations tend to be right-wing in nature, and because I believe we have a corporate media, do I therefore believe that the media is mostly right-wing in America? HEh... yeah, I guess one could say that!
I think it is getting way past time we brought back the Fairness Doctrine. A Democratic Congress might be just the way to get it reinstated.
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