Still Cranky

Q:  What do the following headlines have in common?

600 Missing After Taiwan Typhoon

Kim Kardashian Goes Blonde

U.S. Targets Afghan Drug Lords

Kate Gosselin Breaks Down

Iraq Suffers Bloodiest Day Since U.S. Pullout

Miley Cyrus Busts Out a Pole Dance for Teen Awards

A:  These were all "Top Stories" on my Comcast home page this week.  And thus, they were all given equal weight and importance. 

On any given day, you can find an equally ludicrous blending of the truly significant and the utterly vapid.

And if that alone doesn't prove that our so-called culture is going to hell in a handbasket, then I'll buy you a new handbasket.

Of course, Comcast pretends to divide the stories into separate "News" and "Entertainment" categories.  It's a nice try  — but whom do they think they are they kidding?  We all know there is no distinction; the serious and the shallow are now all lumped together into one stinking, simmering morass of news-like substance, spewed out 24/7.

The Internet – and many TV networks – can barely be bothered serving up "real" news stories anymore.  They know Americans are hungry for garbage.  We need our daily, minimum requirement of endlessly regurgitated celebrity bullshit.       Our appetite for trash is seemingly insatiable — the beast must be fed.  And by golly, The Media isn't going to let us go hungry.

I realize that celebrity gossip has long been a part of the American scene.  But in the early days of Hollywood, there was a clear line between what made it to the front page of a respectable newspaper and what was on the cover of Photoplay.  True, an occasional event — like the Fatty Arbuckle murder scandal of 1921 — might rate as a national news story.  And Rudolph Valentino's untimely death at the age of 31 caused mass hysteria and was a major, international news story.

But I don't think you would have ever seen a story about W.C. Fields' drinking problem splashed across the front page for weeks.  Or that one of FDR's
Fireside Chats would be interrupted for an urgent, breaking news story about Loretta Young and Clark Gable's secret love child.

What the hell happened? 

It's easy to blame The Media — and they deserve plenty of blame for their sleazy, shameless opportunism. They make an absolute fortune sinking to the lowest common denominator.  This is America the Shallow – and shallow sells. If it didn't, all of this crap would disappear faster than Tori Spelling's baby weight.

By now, you're probably thinking I have a keen grasp of the obvious.  What?  America's become a tabloid news-obsessed nation?  We're even more superficial than the suntans on The Real Housewives of New Jersey?  Geez. Tell me something I don't know.

But I guess what also disturbs me about the headlines on my web browser page — or the so-called "news crawl" across the bottom of the CNN screen — is that
there's something else going on, as well: cross-promotion.  Nothing is ever what
it seems.  All of those incessant headlines about Jon and Kate are really just ads to help fill the coffers of the TLC franchise and sell more copies of Us.  That's what it's really all about: marketing.  That's what it's always about.  Which is
nothing new.  Except that now, the Internet and the 24/7 cable news cycle have made all that blatant marketing even more ubiquitous, insidious and obnoxious. 

And as long as we've blurred the line between marketing and legitimate news, there's not a chance in hell of stopping the madness.