I don't often post links to Atrios since his blog is pretty politically polarizing,
This post, however, is damn near brilliant. It's apolitical, too. There have been two shark attacks recently in Florida, one of them fatal, and our ever-fickle media appears to be jumping in with both feet. (Not literally, of course... there are sharks out there!) As Atrios reminds us, the summer of 2001 was declared to be the "Summer of the Shark" with several attacks getting big headlines, sharks on the cover of Time magazine, and so on. Seldom mentioned was the fact that there weren't any more shark attacks than usual that summer; it was just a hysteria created by the media saturation.
All of the silly shark coverage of 2001 came to a crashing end in early Septemberj, of course, and afterwards there was much navel-gazing by the media over their role in the dumbing down of public discourse. Here's a bit of the transcript from an interview between Howard Kurtz and Dan Rather, from late September, 2001.
KURTZ: Do you think now that we are headed into an era of more serious and sober news, as opposed to you know, the devoting lots of air time to sharks and Tom and Nicole and stories of that kind, or, three months from now, six months from now, as this story ebbs and flows, will we slip back into covering mini-scandals and celebrities and some of the lighter fair in the news business?
RATHER: Well, it is a key question. I wish I had the answer to it, Howie. I hope, and I honestly do believe that for a long period now there will be rethink among American journalists, in particular those who have some television, about concentrating more on serious news.
But I've thought that any number of times before, for example, in the wake of the Gulf War, I thought there would be a re-emphasis on foreign coverage. There wasn't. I thought there would be a sort of return to our journalistic base camp of trying to report more about things that are important, perhaps at the expense of things that are interesting, like celebrity news.
Not that I needed to point it out, but the US media has gone completely back into frivilous bullshit coverage mode, with Brad/Jen/Angelina, Cruise/Holmes, the non-epidemic of missing white girls, and now shark attacks dominating the headlines. I'd say that perhaps it's a sign and some massive terror attack was coming to shock them back into doing their jobs... but if they can largely ignore the ongoing civil war in Iraq, it would take the Empire State Building in flames to wake them up.
Besides, it's easy to blame the media, but they're just chasing ratings, and they know that no one watches the serious, hard news coverage of international events. For the average 'Merkin, that stuff's depressing and confusing, and anyway, maybe something happened today involving Michael Jackson, or another lady skipped out before her wedding? Better turn on the teevee, just in case.
