Blaming It On the Media

THERE IS A NEW GAME IN TOWN, or rather, a new version of an old one. What was once called "shoot the messenger", is now called "blame it on the media". When we were young, we comforted ourselves with the wizened visages of distinguished intellectuals like Walter Cronkite. As we aged, we traded in Cronkite for thirty year old blonde babes with Ivy League credentials and cleavage. Either we did this because we were losing our minds, and becoming increasingly libidinous, and wanted to, or because our corporate masters told us that we wanted to. Our grainy pixel-laden black and whites became high definition, complexion busting flat screened full color behemoths, three networks ballooned into hundreds, and we no longer left the comfort of our couches to change from the banal to the banal. And, in the post nineteen eighty world of economic decline, we became cynical and angry, and began looking for scapegoats outside ourselves. It is useless trying to explain that America's media are neither pro liberal nor pro conservative, but pro profit, pro seduction, pro sensation, pro advertising revenue and ratings. The problem simply must be, that damned liberal media, which somehow eeks out a profit behind the backs of conservative billionaire owners and a conservative society. Nothing in America is trusted less or blamed more than the media for all our maladies, including empirical science and reasoned discourse. As we spend more and more of our time in front of what was once and should still be called "the boob tube", our hatred of it and seduction by it increases, and, as we well know, we always blame whatever is closest at hand. We despise the heroine even as we inject ourselves with it, unable to escape it, and we condemn the dealer whom we summoned to bring it to us. We are lied to, misled, disrespected, and bored by the insufferable content of the media, but we keep coming back.