Jon Stewart Fodder
We had CNN on at my house this morning, just before I left to go to the office. They were camped out at the airport (in Houston, I think) in order to get the shot of Lisa Marie Nowak, the crazy homicidal astronaut lady, do a perp walk from the plane to the police car. Yes, CNN had a reporter and camera crew waiting at the airport so we could see the crazy astronaut lady walk about 20 feet across a runway. This, of course, set me into full rant mode. Thank goodness they were there for that! Clearly the most important news of the hour. It's not like there's a war on, or grave environmental threats, or nuclear proliferation, or anything else to worry about.
(Just as a point of clarity: I don’t condemn the whole storyline outright. It is indeed a startling, shocking story, so I can understand why it is news, in a general sense. While it isn’t necessarily the better angels of our nature that find such a sordid tale compelling, it is pretty near a universal failing, and I won’t be a hypocrite on this, and so I won’t join the inevitable tut-tutting of a certain elitist class of social critic that is bound to emerge, predictably, from the woodwork. But it is this particular “event” that is so ridiculous. The woman got off a plane. Completely significance free. Absurd. CNN, at long last, have you no shame!?)
But the thing that caught my ear was this: I happened to be still in the room when the actual "event" occurred, and I heard the CNN reporter make a comment along the lines of, "well, a number of the people standing around here are wondering why they've been standing around for some time, just to see this few seconds of a woman getting off a plane." Yes, yes, it's the people who are foolishly standing around for this trivial "event." I'm sure the CNN camera crew had nothing to do with it. If that particular clip doesn't make it onto The Daily Show tonight, I'll be disappointed. But isn't this sort of candor a potential CLM, for a news channel reporter? Surely pointing out the idiocy of the entire enterprise live on the air has to be a major faux pas, perhaps just short of blurting out obscenities.
(Just as a point of clarity: I don’t condemn the whole storyline outright. It is indeed a startling, shocking story, so I can understand why it is news, in a general sense. While it isn’t necessarily the better angels of our nature that find such a sordid tale compelling, it is pretty near a universal failing, and I won’t be a hypocrite on this, and so I won’t join the inevitable tut-tutting of a certain elitist class of social critic that is bound to emerge, predictably, from the woodwork. But it is this particular “event” that is so ridiculous. The woman got off a plane. Completely significance free. Absurd. CNN, at long last, have you no shame!?)
But the thing that caught my ear was this: I happened to be still in the room when the actual "event" occurred, and I heard the CNN reporter make a comment along the lines of, "well, a number of the people standing around here are wondering why they've been standing around for some time, just to see this few seconds of a woman getting off a plane." Yes, yes, it's the people who are foolishly standing around for this trivial "event." I'm sure the CNN camera crew had nothing to do with it. If that particular clip doesn't make it onto The Daily Show tonight, I'll be disappointed. But isn't this sort of candor a potential CLM, for a news channel reporter? Surely pointing out the idiocy of the entire enterprise live on the air has to be a major faux pas, perhaps just short of blurting out obscenities.
posted by wRONgainey at 11:22 AM
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