Our Idiot Culture (standard:Editorials, 1687 words)
Author: J P St. Jullian	Added: Jul 23 2002	Views/Reads: 3838/2349	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
The American Media - What would we do without them?

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have already allowed, the creation of what truly deserves to be called 
an idiot culture.  Not an idiot sub-culture, mind you, (which 
practically every society already has just beneath the surface and can 
be great fun when viewed satirecally), but our American culture itself. 
Just look around you, everywhere.  Talk shows abound.  Just about 
anyone with a gift of gab and a little acting talent can get one.  The 
weird and the stupid, the coarse and the barbaric, the vain and 
materialistic are fast becoming our social norms, and in many, many 
instances, even our cultural ideals! 

Don't get me wrong here, I really don't mean to attack popular culture.
It's just that I believe good journalism is a great part of popular 
culture.  The difference is that good journalism stretches itself and 
truly makes the effort to properly inform its consumers, all its 
consumers.  It doesn't simply appeal to the lowest common denominator.  
Good journalism offers expressions of thought and feelings which 
requires some brain work from those who consume it.  If  we ever sink 
into a so-called “popular” journalism that offers expressions of 
thought and feelings but doesn't require any brain work from its 
consumers, then I fear that good journalism may be dying, and will soon 
be dead and buried.  You don't have to be Einstein to see what is 
happening today and has been happening for the last 30 odd years.  Good 
journalism is being overrun  by the lowest form of popular 
culture-----lack of information, disinformation, misinformation, and a 
total contempt for the truth.  That is a shame because in the long run, 
and whether the public realize it or not, truth is the reality of most 
people's lives. 

Media is everywhere.  Everywhere we look, it stares back at us.  There
is no escaping it short of moving to the wilds of Alaska where your 
nearest neighbor is 100 miles away, or leaving the planet.  Ordinary 
citizens are being stuffed daily with garbage by talk shows, as well as 
shows like Hard Copy,  Howard Stern, and local newscasters who do 
special segments on hype (I remember once Donahue interviewed a 
diapered man with a pacifier in his mouth). 

This sort of thing is trash journalism.  What's more, it was on an NBC
owned and operated network.  There's more.  What of those people who 
come on Sally Jesse Rafael , Ricky Lake, and Jenny Jones to air their 
dirty laundry?  We have crossdressers, transsexuals, skinheads, lawyers 
for serial killers, girls sleeping with mommie's boyfriend and vice 
versa, women having affairs with their husbands brother or his best 
friend and vice-versa.  Who owns these stations?  They are owned by the 
networks, the Washington Post Company, dozens of major national 
newspapers who also happen to own television stations, the Times 
Mirror, the New York Times, among others.  Then to go back a few years, 
when we thought things couldn't get any worse, the hood ornament of all 
the tabloids at that time appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair.  Who 
was it? None other than Ivana Trump.  One could argue at that time that 
the ex Mrs. Donald Trump was probably the single greatest creation of 
our idiot culture yet, but she has been outdone.  Who owns Vanity Fair? 
 Conde Nast/Newhouse/Random House, who have went public saying that 
they are really in touch with American culture and their seriousness 
about gathering the truth. 

On the day that Nelson Mandela returned to Soweto after his release from
27 years of incarceration for no particular provable crime, many of the 
so called “responsible” newspapers in this country were devoting their 
front pages to the divorce of Donald and Ivana Trump.  That means that 
our mainstream press is more influenced by a netherworld of trash than 
by timely, quality real life news.  Why?  It's simple.  No one in 
America was interested enough in the Mandela situation because it 
wouldn't sell products, or boost ratings, or increase sales at 
newsstands.  It wasn't calculated as something the people wanted, and 
it wasn't bankable. 

What should be the biggest news story of all today is the true condition
of America.  Our political system is in deep do do, and we are 
witnessing a serious breakdown of the social harmony and common 
interest that has previously allowed democracy to build and progress.  
I believe that the invention of the talk-show nation is a part of that 
breakdown. These days when you come across good journalism it is the 
exception rather than the rule.  But in our society today, good 
journalism requires courage from its reporter, and that is a scarce 
commodity in our mass media.  There are many assumptions in this 
country about race, economics, the fate of our cities etc.  These need 
to be challenged.  Next to race, the story of our contemporary American 
media is the greatest of uncovered stories today.  Someone should start 
asking the same questions about the press and the media that are asked 
about other powerful institutions in our society and government.  We 
should ask questions about who is served, about standards used, about 
self-interest and its eclipse of the public interest and the interest 
of truth.  The truth be known, the media is probably the most powerful 
of all American institutions today.  They are squandering their power 
and ignoring their obligations to the public.  They have abdicated 
their responsibility, and the consequence of this abdication is the 
spectacle, and the triumph, of our emerging idiot culture. 


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