Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a educator and writer who lives in North Calais.
I’m sorry, but the princess’ morning sickness is giving me evening sickness as the international media descends further into the abyss where news and entertainment cross-pollinate, creating total nonsense. Although it’s extremely easy, through a huge array of technology, to acquire massive amounts of information about almost anything, it’s almost impossible to unlearn some of the things you unfortunately find out along the way.
That a beautiful woman who lives across the sea pukes every day is fairly inconsequential to most Americans, but it doesn’t stop websites, publications and newscasts from breathily reporting every lurch to the loo. This tsunami of pointless factoids has resulted in me reallocating the space in my brain I once reserved for Rick Santorum quotes and old episodes of Monty Python.
Headlines from Kansas City to Katmandu trumpet the royal regurgitation as if discussing something of global import.
Presumably, the news of Kate Middleton’s pregnancy and subsequent dilemma with keeping breakfast down has enraptured millions. Headlines from Kansas City to Katmandu trumpet the royal regurgitation as if discussing something of global import.
Through no particular special effort of my own, I also know that Hugh Hefner at 86 is marrying someone 60 years younger who looks like a startled Chatty Cathy doll, that the pope has a Twitter account and that Eminem’s daughter said mean things to Taylor Swift online … seriously.
I have little control over the situation. My television is beamed into my living room from outer space and evidently our decision to purchase the least expensive “package” assures us the choice between stations that have commercials and stations that are commercials. My meager hopes for actual news from news programs are so frequently trivialized, reporting Princess Kate’s dilemma is as unsurprising as it is disappointing.
I’m old enough to remember President Lyndon Johnson saying “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America” in reference to the legendary CBS news anchor’s criticism of the Vietnam War. Johnson subsequently did not seek a second term and Cronkite remains a reviled icon in conservative circles, thought to have influenced the eventual withdrawal of American troops from Southeast Asia.
Hard to imagine a 21st century talking head wielding that kind of gravitas, particularly with words like “preggers” rolling off their velvet tongues. The idea of purported news programs devoting larger and larger portions of their allotted 22 nightly minutes to bizarre curiosities or cloyingly sweet, dramatic nonsequiturs is enough to make a news junkie …well ….nauseous.
In my futile search for TV journalism I’ve discovered that – in addition to Home Shopping — I have stations devoted to knives, guns, buttocks, pills, potions, comfortable bras, and 17 different evangelists hawking everything from redemption to five-gallon End-Times buckets of food, courtesy of convicted fraud Jim Bakker.
Wondering who in God’s name still sends him money, I realized uneasily that I actually paid to have him transmitted into my living room whether I watched him or not. He’s as much a part of my package as the Duchess of Disgorge has become of the evening news.
This unremitting frivolity of TV programming is nothing new. FCC chairman Newton Minow famously suggested that television was “a vast wasteland” in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961. In the ensuing half-century we do not appear to have come very far.
