No This Is Not News



CNN.com keeps putting this crap on their homepage. How is this important or newsworthy? O.K. if a lot of people are interested in it fine (I'm not by the way - I was still thinking that somehow radio shock jock Howard Stern was involved until yesterday). But people can turn to Entertainment Tonight or US Weekly or scroll down the CNN page to find entertainment/gossip stories.

If it isn't Anna Nicole then it's Britney. NOT NEWS! At least not when America is in the midst of a war, swiftly losing allies and helicopters. Not while our delusional political leaders are considering Iran the next military target. Global warming etc.

Is this stuff boring or depressing? Maybe. But it demands more attention from the corporate media because it actually affects our lives. Britney's shaved head might be interesting (not to me, but I do find many non-newsworthy things interesting), but it doesn't really affect anyone's life, except maybe hers, her children's, her ex, and her hair-stylist. Same with Anna Nicole. It's a family matter not a matter for national headlines.

Of course this gets into a much longer subject of how the corporate media makes news seem like passive info-tainment. Just a bunch of stuff happening that interests people - little difference between news and reality television - just comedy/drama/and horror that was never scripted. Meanwhile we can watch it like any other television show, but we're mostly powerless to do anything about it. It definitely makes the fluff news more appealing. Why watch a horror movie that might actually hurt you when you can watch a comedy or a drama that entertains and has nothing to do with you?