The Media

As soon as I saw the 1st frame on CNN yesterday afternoon about the death of Anna Nicole Smith, I said to myself, "well, I know what's going to dominate the 24 hour news cycle for the next 3 days,***EDIT: try next 30 days.*** drowning out the din of anything else actually important in the world going on."


Nothing extremely wise there.

Today I was listening to Left, Right, and Center, and Arianna ranted about the media's responsibility and how this utterly meaningless and fogettable non-event steals the wind from important national issues like the Libby trial and Doug Feith being skewered for essentially being proven to have fabricated intelligence about Iraqi ties with al qaeda.

Sure sure, she's totally right and its the same story we hear from any halfway intelligent pundit commenting about the media in times of Britney haircuts or Tyra gaining 20 pounds or whatever.

But the thing is CNN and MSNBC and all these 24 hour news networks just play by the numbers. Don't hate the new networks Arianna, hate the stupid fucking retarded shallow cunts that are the American people. CNN knows that they will get better ratings and thus more ad dollars for tomorrow if rather than showing yet another corruption scandal of national importance or thousands of people being slaughtered because of government lies and blunders, they talk endlessly about Anna Nicole and her son and her lawyer and her refridgerator and all that bullshit, WAY WAY WAY more people will watch. The American people want to hear about tabloid bullshit, they don't want to hear yet another story on top of the towering pile of stories about how the government has lied to them and taken their money and spent it on making the country less secure, and how our lifestyles are causing global ecological collapse, or any of those other most-important-thing-in-the-whole-fucking-world kind of stories.