Britney, Britney, Britney

Why Americans are so goddamned ignorant

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/britney.htm
2/18/08

Today’s column is about Britney Spears.

Wait! Wait! Don’t hit that delete key! I’m joking!

I’m actually going to start out talking about David Little. He’s the editor of the Chico Enterprise-Record. Armando Acuña, who became the Public Editor of the Sacramento Bee after a poll revealed that 72% of Americans thought an ombudsman was either a way of preparing potatoes, or someone who likes to have sex with potatoes, wrote about David Little today.

Little got fed up with the amount of media attention that was being lavished on Spears, and, as her personal odyssey shifted from farce to personal tragedy, more than a little sickened. So he decided his paper was just going to stop covering her. She wasn’t, in the greater scheme of things, newsworthy. According to Acuña, he openly declared the paper “a Britney-free zone” back on January 20th.

Then he waited for the response to pile in.

A few readers wrote to praise the decision. Not one single reader protested. In the four weeks since, there have been several media frenzies about the unfortunate Spears, all of which the Chico paper ignored. Nobody called up to wank that the paper wasn’t serving the public interest. Since Chico has access to the internet, cable and satellite TV, tabloids and am radio, it has to be assumed that word got around that there was Britney stuff going on, and the elitist bastards at the paper were denying the public’s right to know!

Not one person has complained. Not one. The paper isn’t tiny. It has a circulation of nearly 35,000.

Acuña has been critical of the amount of coverage the Sacramento Bee has devoted to Britney Spears, especially coming at a time when the Senate was considering and eventually passed a fascistic bill that gives corporations permission to spy on people on behalf of the government and receive government protection for doing what the government itself is banned from doing; a declaration of independence by Kosovo that could spark a war in the Balkans; increasing destabilization in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as Iraq shows troubling signs that the relative calm of the past nine months may be ending; a presidential election campaign; and sharply increased militarism and aggression from Russia. At least some of these must be more important than Spears, surely.

Acuña noted that the Bee subscribes to one of those celeb gossip things, and it carried a Spears story that began with a glittering example of poor journalistic writing: “In a disquieting revelation that would be shocking if fully accurate...” Yes, I’m sure the writer of that piece would be a brilliant journalist if competent or honest.

Well, thanks to corporate control, much of the media in America has fallen to the level of supermarket tabloids. The fall of journalism began in the 80s, when corporations began buying up major newspapers and promptly deciding they would have more readers if they made the news pages peppier and more “topical;” in other words, with an emphasis on “human interest articles” – kids dying of cancer, dogs turning up after being missing for twenty years, celebrity gossip, and lots of pictures of Princess Di. Ideally, there would be a story about Princess Di’s puppy turning up after twenty years with cancer but pregnant with Elvis’ baby.

Local news, which already was at the “if it bleeds, it leads” level, embraced the new journalism, and in the nineties, when cable stations sprang up and corporations decided to make the news programs start operating on a for profit basis, what used to be journalism in America was almost entirely replaced with the Howard Beale show. (Kids who watch “Network” today just don’t get it. Howard Beale is just like most television journalists, and they have no idea what a strange creature he was to American audiences in the 1970s).

And then we got the propaganda programs, such as Rush Limbaugh and the Savage Weiner, and then an entire network – Faux News, which was explicitly dedicated to lying to and distracting the American public on behalf of the GOP.

These days, I watch BBC World News or NewsNight, and then watch the pathetic crap that passes for journalism in America, and the chasm is miles wide.

It has made America dumber. Among the constant racket of celeb watch and endless reports about items that are of interest only to Wall Street millionaires, and handicapping the election campaigns (as opposed to discussing what the candidates actually stand for) TV news makes scant mention of important stuff.

Thus it is that most Americans are intellectually unequipped to fight the Republican drive to strip them of their freedoms. It isn’t getting mentioned on the news, and if the news isn’t mentioning it, then it can’t be important.

I wish I could take some solace from the actions of the Chico editor David Little. What he did was right, and principled, and good journalism. If we had a thousand editors like him in all the right spots, it could make a big difference.

But instead, we have clowns who see nothing wrong with running administration-produced fake “news stories” as legitimate news, and figure talk about the fourth amendment isn’t nearly as interesting to viewers as speculation about why Britney stopped wearing underpants.

But the fact that Little got what appears to be unanimous support, and in a smallish agricultural town in the Sacramento Valley, tells me that even if American journalism has been shoved aside in large measure by sleek corporate fakes out to propagandize rather than inform, even if it sometimes seems like they’ve won, they haven’t. America isn’t dead yet, and a lot of Americans are realizing that something has gone horribly wrong with their free press.

It would be a mistake to demand that people be as mad as hell, and not take it any more. That’s partly what brought us to this place. Instead, people need to demand that when a newscaster gets in front of that camera, he do so with real news, real information, and not what the marketing people think will result in the highest ratings for ad revenues.

In the meantime, if you want real news on your television, get BBC America and start watching World News and NewsNight. You WILL believe what you’ve been missing.