posted 2007/06/07 at 20:34
More than the actual amount of television the average American watches over a given period of time, I think it's important for us to look at the various ways in which television infiltrates other aspects of our lives, in particular mainstream news reportage. There are certainly times when a television show merits such coverage; I can still remember, even though I wasn't older than seven years old at the time, the importance of M*A*S*H coming to an end. Something that transcends the bounds of normal television, such as John Ritter's sudden death a few years ago, certainly merits mainstream coverage. The Super Bowl, even though over the years it's become much more about marketing than actual football, is still one of those cultural phenomena that merits serious press. Even as much as I loathe American Idol and everything it stands for, I will begrudgingly admit that it has become important enough to a large segment of the American populace that I can accept some headlines in mainstream news. That being said, while I can understand covering the finals of American Idol, I don't get why coverage of each night's show is worthy of separate news articles.
This brings me to a few days ago, when I clicked on a mainstream news article that was basically just an episode summary of the recently-aired penultimate episode of The Sopranos. Now, I have never watched The Sopranos, but I've talked to enough people who are fans of the show and heard enough details about it to believe that it is, at the very least, a quality show. However, I can hardly believe that the show has reached that M*A*S*H level where the show's ending is a huge cultural event. Unless a show is at that level -- since M*A*S*H I think the only two shows that have come close to that are The Cosby Show and Seinfeld -- I do not see how an episode summary of any show, let alone an episode that isn't even the final episode of the show, merits a separate news story. Perhaps if the article in question also talked about the history of the show, some of the behind-the-scenes machinations or even tied the episode's themes into current events, I could understand, but this was just an episode summary that you'd expect to see on a Sopranos fan-run Website (albeit a very well-written episode summary).
The entertainment news industry is bizarre enough to start with, and I've witnessed it becoming more and more strange over the years. I can still remember tuning in to Entertainment Tonight during the John Tesh-Mary Hart years, and what passes as entertainment news today is miles away from what the show was then, although in retrospect Entertainment Tonight was quite weird for its time. I don't want to say that entertainment news doesn't have its place within the larger news community, but I think there's a difference between the traditional entertainment news reportage -- the behind-the-scenes stuff like shows getting canceled or renewed, actor/actress contracts, ratings -- and the kind of wall-to-wall coverage shows like American Idol get today. Perhaps today is as good a day as any to ask the question, why has there ever been even a single news story about Paris Hilton? Stuff like this makes me wonder just how much the explosion of the entertainment news industry (and the piffle it covers) has been due to actual market demand or cultural interest, and how much it's thanks to the false packaging of such things (by its very producers) as actually being important and relevant to the average consumer.
Perhaps today is as good a day as any to ask the question, why has there ever been even a single news story about Paris Hilton?
Somewhere along the line, the news agencies got the idea that people want to know where Paris Hilton passed out and when Britney Spears flashed her crotch to a cameraman. And then they found out that people did want to know where Paris Hilton passed out and when Britney Spears flashed her crotch to a cameraman. And in America, more is always better (why buy a Big Gulp of Pepsi when you can buy a Super Big Gulp of Pepsi!), so the justification now is that the more titilating crap they show, the more people they want, and the more money they can (ostensibly) spend on covering the "hard news stories", such as falling over Bono for the same Save Africa campaign he's been running for over a decade.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon