I mean, seriously, what is this "Presidental candidate" thing; I want to vote for who runs the media! Fuck all this governmental bullshit, it's the corporations that run everything.
Seriously, forget the President; I want to vote for the guys who get to collect billions while shitting down the necks of the general populace. I want to vote for the guy who gets to shove the absolute lowest common denominator down the throats of the population and then hire some talking head to complain about it.
Want to vote for the media? Want to control what we report?
Since I work in media and have for five years, I'll give you a secret ...
IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, DON'T FUCKING READ/WATCH IT!
If people were not so fucking glued to the set over stories of celebrity divorce, Britney going bonkers, Terry Schiavo, Cheney's hunting accident, the Edison Chen sex photo scandal or any of the other pointless fucking stories of the last few years,
we would not cover these!
The only person you have to blame is yourself for showing us that this is the news you want!
We try and cover a town hall meeting. We try and cover changes in local government. We try to cover pollution in your nearby river. What do you do? You yawn, go to sleep and change the channel to Wheel of Fortune. Is it any wonder that America is ripping the middle east the fuck apart and declaring all kinds of people to be terrorists, but no one even knows the difference between Suni and Shia Islam aside from "one is associated with the evildoers"?
I watch stories go across the desk or come in from the wire all the time. They are simplified to oblivion for you lazy lard buckets. The history behind the event is completely omitted because
you have shown
us that you do not have the attention span to digest it.
I would LOVE to make every story a history lesson. I would LOVE for people to fully grasp the connections that make it important. But that doesn't fit into the bubble of your 6:00
action news hour.
Media is a business. We sell news. To stay in business, we have to find ways to package it where you will consume it like crack. News conglomerates blow billions of dollars studying what you like.
The verdict is in: you love the Doritos of news.
The cheesy, oily shit that is incredibly bad for you and keeps you too full, fat and fucking tired to ingest anything healthy that you actually need.
Sure, you can go on and on about how each conglomerate has its own political leanings. Fine. But you know what? If you guys actually wanted news about Ralph Nader, Bob Barr or Cynthia McKinney, we would be packaging and selling that. But you don't give a fuck what they have to say. You have shown us that already, and we report and cover accordingly.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to put together a story about a "mundane" topic in a way where you take anything away from it? If you are a good and
lucky reporter, you
might be allowed 300 words. Three hundred words is not much unless you are reporting in fucking haiku.
A Wednesday meeting,
Man spoke about a tax hike,
And no one liked it.
I can't tell you how many times I was told by a superior, "There is no way we are going to run 600 words about [blank]." So what goes away? The background. The context. My painstaking research to make sure you, the reader, understand why raising those extra animals is causing desertification and why that will ruin the new paint job on all the homes in the city and carry dirt all over with the prevailing winds. That shit is stripped down to one or two sentences that, more often than not, are dumbed down, distorted and fail to convey the gravity or a topic.
Good job consumers. Since no one is buying news, we have to sell more ads and sack more reporters. Ads take up page space -- space where news stories cannot go. And the more people get their news from the Internet and drop their subscriptions, the less advertisers are willing to pay. Media is scrambling to find a way to survive when no one is paying for it. You can call it an outdated business model, but that doesn't change the fact that someone has to find a solution or your news will continue to suffer and dwindle.
It's a fantastic race to the bottom, and I can't wait to see what happens when we get there.
In the mean time,
you have no one to blame but yourself that only Obama and McCain are given air time and paper commentary. You know there are actually laws mandating equal air time made available for presidential candidates -- I wonder why these laws never apply to third party candidates, who are year after year forcibly barred by police from entering the debates?
