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Topic: Television and Media
Well. Nick and Jessica are splitting up.

A cat-eating python has been caught in Florida.

UNICEF bombed a smurf village in Belgium.

These are the headlines I'm seeing. Now, while I'm also seeing stuff that's really interesting and really news, such as the hurricane recovery efforts and Supreme Court personnel changes,* I really am not interested in Nick and Jessica. They're not news. People split up all the time. Bloody Hells... this was a Hollywood marriage. It took place on MTV, for Gods' sakes! Did anyone not see this coming? It wasn't news when they got married, either! I got married, and it didn't happen on MTV. Maybe that's why I'm still married.

You know what I think. I think they never really got married. I think it was all staged, they've been living together, and it was all put together by MTV to make a show. Now, their contracts are finished, and they can start being single again and get on with their lives. They got their money, there won't be breach of contract because they pretended long enough, and now they're going their separate ways.

See, that's the kind of cynicism that Hollywood instills within me. Television isn't real. Movies aren't real. Hollywood isn't real. They may as well be a cartoon, or puppets.

The Hollywood psychology of a need to sell a story is also present in the news media. They need to sell air time or page space to advertisers. They won't sell it if the story sucks and everyone is watching some other channel, or reading some other paper. So, along with a little bit of real news, they give us stupidity.

That's the really bad thing, though. They wouldn't get people to buy this drek if people weren't interested in the first place. People want to see this! They actually, for some reason, care more about the relationships of people they've never met than they care about the relationships of their own family members. Or about their own relationships. They care about someone else's cats being eaten by pythons on the other side of the country. They care about smurf villages being bombed by UNICEF. It actually matters to spectators whether or not one team of players defeats another team of players, even if neither team is from the spectator's home town.

Why? I don't understand it. I never have. Yes, I think the plight of the people in Louisiana is sad, and knowing it could happen here makes it important to me as well. That's why I consider it news... it's relevant. Smurfs, pythons, and yes, even Jessica, are not.

I really don't know whether the news media began delivering drek because people started wanting it, or if people started wanting it because it was what was being delivered. But enough people live Jessica's life vicariously through the media that she has become news.

Television isn't real... not even so-called reality T.V. All the people on those shows have signed contracts to do the things in the show, even if it is to accept the show as part of their every day lives. That's the point... I have financial agreements, but they are limited to things like rent and utilities. I live with people because I choose to do so, not because I'm getting paid for it,** and I don't have a video camera up my ass the whole day either.

I do my part. I don't watch these shows. I watch documentaries and a few cartoons, for the most part, with a bit of Comedy Central's The Daily Show. I know television is there for entertainment. And not the kind of entertainment I saw several years ago, where the news broke in to the regular programming to replay footage of a man getting gunned down by the police. Yes, they actually showed a man getting killed by multiple gunshot wounds on prime time television, on all the networks, thanks to the local news recognizing the peoples' need to know and see people killed. It is the most recent foray into public execution that I can remember. It wasn't planned, but it didn't need to be broadcast every five minutes, either. (No, that's not an exaggeration, and I got pretty sick of it, shut off the television, and opened a book). Television is there to attract viewers so that the station can make profits by selling air time to advertisers. The viewer only matters as a parameter to be met when deciding what to broadcast, and apparently, we want to see drek.

Television and other forms of "news" used to be there to educate and inform as well. To a degree, it still does that. But only to a very minor degree. You have to look carefully for it, but it's there. Program directors are there to disguise their drek as fulfilling entertainment. It's our job to not be fooled.

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*Okay. The smurf bombing is kinda cool.
**I'm not.

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