Celebrities and the State of the News

I think we all get tired of celebrities spouting their political opinions, as if being famous makes them insightful. There are a few I do view as insightful. Not Sean Penn. Not Babs Streisand. Not Alec Baldwin. But George Clooney--there's a smart fellow who understands the media and the vanities of Celebrity Land. Yeah, I know, he's in the "liberal" camp. But I'll listen to what he has to say (just as I'd sooner listen to Al Franken than a self-absorbed, truth-twisting weasel like Bill O'Reilly).

Anyway, I read an online interview in which Clooney talked about foreign relations (he's been doing a lot of work on behalf of Darfur), and talked about how the rest of the world views us as unilateral bullies. Which we are.

But he also talked about the news (and he comes from a news background). He said this: "24-hour news does not mean that you get more news. It means you get the same news more."

Ain't that the truth! At one time, The Latest Missing White Girl Story would get a minute on the evening news. Now it gets a whole evening, getting handed off from one talk show to another, each exploiting the story with nothing factual to add (though, thankfully, MSNBC and CNN are getting away from that cycle).

He mentions the recent story about the three hikers stuck on an Oregon mountain. "It was 24 hours of three guys stuck up on a mountain. A tragedy, but it is three guys who chose to go out on a mountain for sport and had a terrible accident. Yet there were hundreds and hundreds of people dying in vicious attacks in places all around the world; there were tons of news stories that day that were so much more important to what was going on in the world."

This is why I increasingly appreciate Keith Olberman (MSNBC), Lou Dobbs (CNN), and Anderson Cooper (CNN), all of whom avoid the "sensational" story in favor of other things that matter. Cooper, especially, gets out of the studio and does original stuff that people should care about. But for the most part, the national media gurus are lazy penny-pinchers, blanketing stories that cost little to cover, rather than venturing something new that might require airfare.

The three national broadcasts--CBS, ABC, and NBC--still do good stuff. But they're done in a half hour, and that's it. Then we must switch over to the cable channels, which run the latest sensational story into the ground while recklessly flinging around self-righteous pronouncements. But it's not as bad as it used to be, as long as you avoid Headline News, whose evening schedule is a wasteland of fluff.

Posted on February 6, 2007 09:02 AM|

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