Is Suffolk Buying Emerson College?

Nope.  Not that I know of.  That would be Crazytown. 

Now to my intended topic.  And I don’t even know where to start. 

I should probably first give the disclaimer that this week’s column might tend to be somewhat educational or informative in nature.  I know over the past few months everyone has gotten used to mindless rants about bad habits of the general population, female bathroom tendencies, backwards bathrobes, and so on, but this week I want to eviscerate a topic that sits near and dear to my heart: the news.  And for those who know a detailed, working definition of the word “eviscerate”, you know it means that I, according to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, plan to disembowel and/or remove the entrails of the News.  And while that seems a bit of an exaggeration, fear not, because I only plan to partially disembowel the News.  I’ll take like an appendix or the tonsils or something; only the stuff we don’t really need. 

Now some of you may be thinking to yourselves, “But wait a minute, isn’t this column published in an online newspaper?”  Well stop thinking so much.  And go make me a sandwich. 

For those of you who weren’t thinking the aforementioned interrogatory statement, maybe you should work on some critical thinking skills.  Maybe make some important cognitive connections here and there.  Contribute something to society.  And make me a sandwich, in case that first one isn’t very good. 

There’s a common maxim that advises against biting the hand that feeds you.  Well, screw that.  I’ve got two sandwiches coming my way.  Let’s do this. 

Over the past few years I’ve become more and more disillusioned with the mainstream media.  Interestingly enough, this decline of faith in mainstream news has correlated perfectly with my increasing desire to gain knowledge of important current events of what is going on in the world.  The result of this riveting news-knowledge relationship is my extreme distaste for what I see newscasters reporting on television and “journalists” writing on the internet and elsewhere.  This, coupled with my impatience for bullshit and proclivity for angry rants aimed at the idiocy of life, more or less explains how this column was conceived (there was also a bottle of wine and a Lady Gaga album to blame, but let’s focus on the task at hand.) 

My issue with News can be categorized into two separate groups: delivery and content.  Seeing as I wrote it first, let’s start off with the issue of delivery. 

Often times I’ll be watching a TV show at night and see a teaser for the headline story on the 11 p.m. local news.  “Are babysitters sending your toddlers dirty text messages?”  Enthralled by the sickening possibly, I tune in a half hour later, only to sit through 25 minutes of stories about Sandra Bullock’s love life, Tiger Woods’ sex life, and Sarah Palin’s daughter’s sex life, before newscasters  reveal to me that my children are not, in fact, receiving dirty text messages from their babysitter.  This should have been a moot point to begin with seeing as I do not have kids or babysitters for those kids, nor would I give my toddler a cell phone.  However, at least now you understand the title of this article.  See, News?  I can do it too.  The difference is no one comes to me as a legitimate reporting source for important current events.  They come to me because I’m awesome.  And they apparently have some kind of odd appreciation for well-written, self-loving, egotistical arrogance.  And redundancy. 

Our second topic, content, is what truly yanks on my journalistic short hairs. 

According to Alisa Miller of Public Radio International, U.S. news coverage blows (actually, according to me it “blows”; she presented the idea much more eloquently).  In February of 2007, a month that included devastating flooding in Indonesia, Kim Jong-Il agreeing to dismantle North Korean nuclear facilities, and the release of a new IPCC report on anthropogenic global warming, the most covered story on network and cable news was the death of Anna Nicole Smith. 

Honestly, I know she had a huge rack and got naked for the general public, and that makes her a highly respected citizen in the United States, but isn’t there something more important going on? 

Coverage of her death, according to Miller, eclipsed that of all other countries combined with the exception of Iraq.  It also received ten times the coverage of the IPCC report that more or less said our country is going to sink unless we stop taking a collective hypothetical shit on planet Earth. 

Dead boobies…sinking coastal cities…which one is more of a need-to-know type story when it’s all said and done? 

Take a second to think about the most covered story of 2009.  What was it?  Michael Jackson’s death?  Tiger Woods’ wood?  Chesley Sullenberger landing a big-ass plane in a river?  Are any of these stories going to matter in five years?  Ten years?  Fifty?  Assuming that we start making “that’s what Tiger said” jokes, then maybe.  Otherwise, it’s debatable whether those things even mattered in the grand scheme of things when they were first reported. 

The reason for all this coverage of worthless events most likely lies in the simple fact that reporting on what patch of rough Tiger swung his shaft in is a hell of a lot cheaper than exposing death and corruption in a third world country. 

To cite Alisa Miller one last time: as of 2008, the number of U.S. news bureaus overseas had decreased by 50%.  According to Miller, “aside from one-person ABC mini-bureaus in Nairobi, New Delhi, and Mumbai, there are no network news bureaus in all of Africa, India, and South America; places that are home to more than 2 billion people.”