There's a reason this video has gotten 3,185,875 views (and counting)
Now here's a guy who understands the decadence of our mainstream media when it comes to their relentless persecution of our leading cultural innovators:
[Note to fellow Blue Voicers: Don't vote me off the island for this one! Just keep reading.]
Apparently, it's one of the most popular videos on YouTube today. I would have scripted it a bit differently, but it works. (It's about a pop singer with a charming Southern accent.)
Actually, I've been following Britney's career since the "Oops, I did it again" days because I actually did think that she had a more enduring appeal than, say, Debbie Gibson, if anybody remembers her. One of my favorite folk singers - I won't embarrass the person by giving the name - that I was talking to after a concert and who knew I professed to be a Britney fan went on at some length about how nobody would remember who she was in two years. That was, I think, five or six years ago.
I started to have some real sympathy for her soon after she became famous when the Christian fundamentalists started trashing her for being, oh, female and sexy or something to that effect.
Since in her early years of fame she was talking up her Southern Baptist background, you would think that they would appreciate the free publicity. But you would be wrong. I think what really pissed them off was when they heard that in her audition at Jive Records, she sang "Jesus Loves Me". (I'm not making this up!)
But the attention that she gets, and the kind of attention she gets, does say something about the state of our media environment in the United States. For instance, Al Gore includes the Britney coverage in his description of the dysfunction of the American Establishment media in his The Assault on Reason (2007), where he writes:
It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001,1 had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.
At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess - an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time. ...
Like JonBenet Ramsey, O.J. has recently been back at the center of another fit of obsessive-compulsive news, when his hypothetical non-confession wasn't published and his interview on television wasn't aired. This particular explosion of "news" was truncated only when a former television sitcom star used racial insults in a comedy club. And before that we focused on the "Runaway Bride" in Georgia. And before that there was the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy. And of course we can't forget Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole. Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch and married Katie Holmes, who gave birth to Suri. And Russell Crowe apparently threw a telephone at a hotel concierge. ...
And while American television watchers were collectively devoting a hundred million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. (my emphasis)
Not only is the coverage of celebrity stories (many of them little more than gossip) being promoted to the point that it squeezes out important news that will affect our lives for decades.
But it's worth thinking about how that coverage comes across. Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby - who was Al Gore's college roommate - has talked about the recent coverage of the substance-abuse issues that Britney and Lindsay Lohan have recently encountered. For instance, in this 07/23/07 post, he quotes with approval a New York Times reviewer on Lohan's movie with Jane Fonda:
But the movie really belongs to Ms. Fonda and Ms. Lohan, actresses whose formidable skill is often underestimated and overshadowed by off-screen notoriety. Ms. Lohan in particular has been subjected recently to the prurient, punitive gaze of an Internet gossip culture that takes special delight in the humiliation of young women with shaky discipline and an appetite for fun. (apparently Somerby's emphasis)
And Somerby comments:
“Special delight in the humiliation of young women” is all over cable, of course. But it galls us when we’re asked to buy it each night as part of a liberal news package.
The "liberal news package" he's referring to here is Keith Olbermann's Countdown.
Olobermann has been one of the most effective liberal voices on television on issues like the Iraq War. Wonky Muse linked to one of his more memorable contributions a couple of days ago.
I don't watch his full program enough to judge how correct Somerby is in this assessment:
... we’re not giant fans of Countdown. We think Olbermann tends to overstate what he knows and sometimes simply misleads his audience. ... Beyond that, we think his insistence on mocking young blonde women makes him one of cable’s worst players on gender issues.
I should mention that he made these comments in the midst of praising one of Olbermann's push-backs against Republican treason-baiting.
Maybe this was in the back of my mind when I did catch the tail end of one of his programs, I think it was sometime last month. I don't remember a lot of the details. But he had some celebrity-gossip twerp on talking about Britney, and the guy was basically just making a bunch of snarky comments of the kind that a college frat boy might think were clever. As I recall, the guy made some smart-ass remark about how she never gets home from partying until her sons are awake in the morning.
And Olbermann was just giving him softball questions to let him spout this silly stuff. And I was thinking as I watched it, if this program is supposed to be real journalism, shouldn't Olbermann be asking him if comments like that were factually true.
Maybe more important, if he's going to be covering something like this, shouldn't he maybe try to get the subject of his report on camera? Instead of some dork who learned all he ever needed to know in the frat house?
Seriously, I was thinking as I watched that, that it really detracts from the seriousness with which viewers can take his show. For anyone who remembers Walter Cronkite's newscasts, can you imagine him doing something that worthless? I mean, Olbermann's supposed hero Edward R. Murrow sometimes interviewed celebrities. But I'll bet that he didn't run drivel like that.
And I do think Somerby is right that you don't have to listen too carefully to a lot of these type reports to hear a real meanness the reporting. Including that guy on Olbermann. As the excellent film Walk The Line about Johnny Cash showed, drug abuse for performers is not particularly funny, on the whole.
Which brings me back to the YouTube video. I'm not sure how tongue-in-cheek this guy was being. But that's really the point he's making. And maybe that's part of why his video seems to be resonating with a lot of YouTube users.
I'll close by saying that one of the other Blue Voicers turned me on to the WeSmirch.com site, where you can get the latest celebrity gossip 24/7.
