PEORIA -- Another death, this time of Walter Cronkite, and more TV overkill.
Sure I liked WC, and I watched one network show about his career, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann show Countdown on Friday. That was enough.
Alas, Countdown was interrupted in mid-story, an interesting piece about how a conservative think tank was selling its influence to the highest bidder, apparently UPS, after being turned down by Fed-Ex.
Who knew that the omnipresent think tanks with their policy papers and experts ready to be interviewed were actually just crass PR machines. They don't really believe the drivel they espouse, apparently. Maybe that's a relief. Anyway I wanted to see the end of that segment, but instead got WC's career.
Well, that was enough. But the Rachel Maddow Show that follows Olbermann also had an hour-long show on WC. I changed the channel.
Obviously the networks put these shows together in advance of WC's death -- a creepy thought but standard procedure in the news biz. Gotta be first, you know.
I'm not the only one annoyed by the wallpaper coverage of celebrity deaths (Michael Jackson immediately comes to mind).
Randy Fritz also has incisive commentary on his blog about how these deaths squeeze out everything else for days.
Isn't it odd how people are more interested in Michael Jackson than in their own government as it debates huge issues such as health care that affects everyone in the US, war/terrorism and global warming. Thirty-one million people watched the funeral.
31,000,000.
So people are interested, at least in MJ. And the mass media gives the public what it wants, even if it's not good for them or relevant to their actual lives.
But Walter Cronkite?
Bring on the exposes about Republican sex scandals. Now that's amusing. Hypocrisy will always get a laugh.
-- Elaine Hopkins
Comment 7/19/09: Burton Raabe wrote:
When celebrity death elegies are in full swing, I always think"How many troops were killed today and what was their story?"
But it looks like we are headed for endless war again.
Comments