I’ve not had much time to watch TV the last few weeks, and I’ll wager you can tell how much that saddens me. Especially when I was walking through a living room last weekend and saw the previews for two of the last gasps of the reality TV craze, which were so completely odious my mind wiped them clean from memory, leaving only a mental Post-It Note: not watching TV is a good thing, it seems.
This means that, by and large, I missed the Michael Jackson trial, or, more appropriately, the media coverage of the Michael Jackson trial, except for those pithy, essential parts published in the inverted pyramid of the newspaper stories. That, in and of itself, is a good thing for my quality of life issues. But the aftermath has caused two things to flicker across my screen, seemingly unconnected, yet not:
First, there is this editorial from the Houston Chronicle, about supposed news anchors injecting their personal opinions about the then-impending verdict into the media. To be sure, Court TV’s Nancy Grace is a commentator, not an anchor, but the other perp, Fox News’ (oh what a surprise) Shepard Smith, has no such distinction on his side. The not-so-obvious flip side of this coin is an Associated Press story detailing a poll which shows the sampled Americans consider Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh to be journalists, but not Bob Woodward.
Good God, people get the popular media they deserve, don’t they?
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