voyeuristic orgy

I know the manager of the Ponderosa where the latest shooting took place. I worked for the Ponderosa in C’ville when I was in high school and the same guy owned both of them—and the same guy managed both of them. Glad it was not him who got shot, sorry for the guy who did get shot.

The whole sniper thing is upsetting but I find it more so with the media—as usual the media has turned the whole thing into a “bread and circuses” voyeuristic orgy. I turn on the TV to get the news and all that is on is sniper this and sniper that. I find the reporters so annoying and ratings driven that I end up getting my news from the ticker at the bottom of the screen and muting the idiots. They attempt to make hour-long dialogs and interviews about every fact. God forbid that one network talk about something as inane as the type of trees in the “wooded area” and the rest not do it—I REALLY DON’T CARE WHAT THE LATIN NAME OF THE TREES IS!

The media in America has gotten way out of hand. They turn everything into a spectator sport. It is the media that has driven the salaries of professional athletes into the stratosphere (anyone who disagrees with that should look at the average salary of a NBA, NFL, NHL or baseball player and the salaries of, say a soccer player in the US.) Then we had all the 24 hour financial channels pumping the markets—which lead to every Joe Schmo being an expert in the stock market and pumping the markets more. Just as there are athletes willing to stake steroids and cheat to get ahead there are unscrupulous people in the business world who are willing to lie, cheat and defraud the rest of the world to make money by making their company look better than it is. (We won’t even mention the fact that for more than a year while consumer confidence was high and the economy was still fine—not much growth, but stable, these idiots on the Finance channels screamed “Recession, recession!” 24 hours a day and somewhere along the line enough people hear it to believe it and WHAM! It’s called a self-fulfilling Prophecy look it up.) Anyway, the new fad this summer has grown out of the Enron/Tyco/WorldCom/Et al scandal meets reality TV. The voyeuristic coverage of the child abductions and shootings this summer was disgusting. You could not have the TV on for half and hour and not hear the same info 30 times.

I don’t know what you could do about any of this. I just can’t stand the media anymore. I don’t know what came first the media or the voyeuristic addiction to it that seams to have gripped most of American. I think that deep inside much of America is suffering an existential crisis and is trying to live vicariously through all the drama on TV and scripted drama just cannot compete with the news. If more people took up bungee jumping would all this still be a problem? Would CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News still have enough people willing to sit and drool over the next piece of “in-depth reporting” about everything and anything to support them?