Apocalypse Now

You can scarcely open a newspaper these days, or turn on the television, without despairing at the trivialization of news and views. You are not even safe in your car while driving to work as motor mouth RJs feast on trivia and further assault your senses. Indeed, media’s obsession with trivia is assuming gargantuan proportions. Let me offer a couple of recent examples:

·         A Belgian lass at a fashion do in Delhi has her blue outfit slipping temporarily, sending the media corps into paroxysms of delight. The photographs dominate front pages of newspapers battering into submission  images of the uprising in Lhasa. Reporters ask: Was the skin show deliberate? There are other conspiracy theories to consider: for instance, what happened to the decision to ask models to wear nipple tapes? The Belgian model evidently wore none. Did the fashion frat learn nothing from Carol Gracias and her, well, slip-up in 2006? Perhaps the fraternity did not want to learn from the past, speculate some news channels, sending designers into convulsions of barely disguised rage. And, finally, they trot out the bare history of wardrobe malfunction. Whose dress slipped when and where to reveal a tit or whose zipper gave way when and how to reveal a shapely  derriere? All that is left for the media is to give us a quiz on the subject. but before doing so make sure you aren’t aren’t experiencing a wardrobe malfunction yourself. Simply put, check your zipper.

·         The Indian cricket team returns from Australia after a rare triumph and we get minute-by-account accounts on news channels of their journey from the airport to the stadium. Reporters grin into the camera and give us delectable pieces of information to chew on—what the hotel chefs are cooking for the triumphant team members, what the security arrangements along the driving route are, et al. OB vans swarm their way into the residential lane where a 19-year-old fast Delhi fast bowler lives and thrust their microphones into the faces of family members, asking them to tell us what food their ward would have missed most in Australia. The deifying of the cricketers inevitably transforms rapidly as the Indian team is bowled out for 76 by South Africa in Ahmedabad. The media verdict is swift, resolute and unambiguous: these overpampered cricketers are too busy making big bucks, endorsing products and shaking a leg with sexy models to concentrate on the art of batting.

·          Of course, there are happenings that I am sure send newsrooms in modern-day media outfits into waves of orgasmic delight. The judgement in journalist Shivani Bhatnagar’s murder case had all the elements of sleaze to dominate news in the media, both print and electronic. There were three phases to the story: events leading up to judgement day, the judgement itself and, finally, the post-mortems. All of which qualified as “breaking news” on news channels and full-page retrospectives in broadsheets. Ditto the murder of an allegedly adulterous wife by her techie husband in Bangalore. Or the ‘expose’ of boyfriends making blue films by filming their girlfriends on the sly.

News and entertainment have clearly become inseparable. Media moghul Rupert Murdoch changed the rules of the game in Britain in the 1980s by ‘tabloidising’ mainstream press and stating that news s entertainment. No one, in the world’s richest media baron’s scheme of things, is interested in sad, depressing news about wars and accidents. Nor is anyone interested in news about people breaking new ground and doing great service to humanity. Forget that. Report rapes and murders in salacious detail, Print gory pictures. Write about the love life of celebrities. Employ paparazzi for peephole photographs of adulterous celebrities caught in the act. Beat the competition at any cost and be the first out with the news. That’s the Holy Grail of modern-day media.

Time was when topless models were confined to Page 3. Now they stare back at you from the front pages. Apocalyptic times these. I recently found an eloquent report in a US magazine that's along similar lines. Here goes:

Media obsession with trivial hurts our nation

In the words of British author and psychotherapist Terry Birchmore, the "dumbing down" phenomenon that has swept through Britain and America in the past few decades has "created a culture that is less sophisticated, complicated, tasteful, or thoughtful than that of the past, and has created a public or audience who have declined in taste, intelligence, and discriminatory powers." 

Perhaps the issue is more front-and-center for me than it is for most, since I teach English at a rural Missouri high school and am confronted every day with our culture's degradation of taste and knowledge. Are you aware, my fellow Missourians, of just how difficult it is these days for a public school teacher to hit upon an object of common cultural knowledge in order to illustrate a point for students? Such references are a daily necessity in the classroom, but in my five years of teaching I've found that I simply can't expect my students to know much of anything about anything, not even — and here's the rub — about pop cultural stuff!

It's not that they don't know the names of the actors and singers and other celebrities who populate their sliver-thin slice of cultural awareness. But I've been shocked to discover just how thin and fleeting that slice really is. Even names like Stephen King, Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg are increasingly foreign to them. So do you care to guess what's happened to the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Cary Grant and Orson Welles? Quite simply, there's no room for them in the mind of a teen whose sensibility has been shaped by a corporate-controlled popular culture devoted to hard-selling celebrities-of-the-moment like Anna Nicole Smith and Johnny Knoxville.

And please don't ask me about the recent class period when I handed out a worksheet containing a reference to Davy Crockett and was astonished to find that fully half the class — all of them juniors and seniors — couldn't remember who he was or why he was famous.

In his 1985 book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," media and culture critic Neil Postman wrote, "When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility." The trends that led him to write those words have only intensified in the two decades since. Case in point: the current media feeding frenzy over Anna Nicole Smith, which is possibly the most vapid such frenzy that our national news media have ever had the audacity to promote.

Culture-death, indeed. Welcome to the new Dark Age.

"Anti-hero: A main character in a dramatic or narrative work who is characterized by a lack of traditional heroic qualities, such as idealism or courage."

Consider what occupies and diverts our attention from substantive matters: Anna Nicole Smith; Britney Spears; the astronaut gone wild, Lisa Nowak; the sleeping, dating, marital and divorce arrangements of film stars. It is all about the base, the tawdry and the anti-heroic. Today's heroes are cartoon characters and those (Superman, Batman, etc.) are from another era in which real heroes mattered.

Some blame television networks, especially cable, for our increasingly prurient interests. In recent days, TV has climbed into the septic tank with so many of the rest of us and delivered not what we need ("eat your vegetables, dear, they are good for you"), but what we seemingly cannot get enough of ("never mind the vegetables; eat your dessert"). TV wouldn't be obsessing with it if we didn't demand it.

USA Today reported on a Pew Poll that found most Americans believe the media overdo celebrity news, but they watch it anyway. Sixty-one percent say they think the media overplayed the death of Anna Nicole Smith, but 11 percent said they followed it as closely as the 2008 presidential campaign (13 percent) or the Super Bowl (11 percent).

Can you name the last person you heard about who behaved in a classic heroic manner? How about our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan? The media ignore their heroism, even when they are awarded medals for bravery. When the word "hero" is used at all, it is generally to label someone who is simply doing his job or her duty.

There's little time to explore heroism among a people who prefer to indulge themselves in stories about a Qantas flight attendant having sex in the airplane lavatory with actor Ralph Fiennes, or Bridget Moynahan of ABC's "Six Degrees" announcing that she is pregnant with the child of ex-boyfriend and New England Patriot All-Pro quarterback Tom Brady. Who gets married before having children these days? And what difference does it make in our "anything goes" culture?

Politically, heroism disappeared around the time of Harry Truman, with brief reappearances during the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Now, everything is poll-tested and "leaders" follow the opinions and base instincts of those they should be persuading to follow them. Today, when one speaks of "vision," they are usually referring to Lasik eye surgery.

There is little sign any of this is about to end. Last week, ABC drew 9 million viewers to "The Outsiders," a prime time program about a group of Arizona polygamists. Commenting on the appeal of such a show, correspondent John Quinones said, "I guess (it's) the voyeuristic appeal." It's true — we are a nation of gawkers.

To some extent this has always been so, but television has made gawking easier and the objects of gawking more accessible. This indulgence in the base and banal has had a corrosive effect on our collective spirit. It also lowers our defenses against those who would destroy us.

It isn't as if we haven't been warned about self-indulgence in secular and sacred writings. In his "Republic," Plato has Socrates describe the effect on the soul of grace and gracelessness in the material culture: "Our aim is to prevent our Guards being reared among images of vice — as it were in a pasturage of poisonous herbs where, cropping and grazing in abundance every day, they little by little and all unawares build up one huge accumulation of evil in their soul.

Rather, we must seek out craftsmen with a talent for capturing what is lovely and graceful, so that our young, dwelling as it were in a salubrious region, will receive benefit from everything about them. Like a breeze bringing health from wholesome places, the impact of works of beauty on eye or ear will imperceptibly from childhood on, guide them to likeness, to friendship, to concord with the beauty of reason."

You won't find such "craftsmen" on television. Better to turn it off, or get rid of this unfriendly guest, than to allow for the creation of another generation of antiheroes and gawkers.