Man vs. Media: The Rotting Corpse of Infotainment

by Andrew Bast

Anna  Nicole. Mega Millions. Lotto. Jake Plummer. Mitt Romney. Antonella Barba. Walter Reed Medical Center. Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton. Beyonce Knowles. Lindsay Lohan. Stephen Hawking. Anna Nicole Smith. Anna Nicole Smith. Anna Nicole Smith. Oh, and Charlotte Church pregnant. Anna Nicole Smith.

Well, you’re reading the New York Inquirer. How did you get here, and more, what were you looking for? Granted, it’s a shameless trick, sticking the top names in the news in the lead of an article simply to guarantee the attention of Google, Yahoo, and the major search engines. Shameless, but effective. And demonstrative. In recent years, the nature of news has changed, and in turn, news organizations have changed tactics, too.

Newspapers and a 30-minute nightly news broadcast once provided vital stories of the day to the American public. Such a narrow set of sources thus controlled the national discussion. Today, the case is anything but. Any cable television subscriber has access to scores of so-called "news" on 24-hour stations. Both newspapers and television news operations are migrating to the web.

A fourth-grader in algebra class could explain that the sheer number of minutes in a day dedicated to conveying information has, in the last decade, multiplied many times over.

Only, there’s one problem: there may be more news, but there’s a hell of a lot more bunk.

Perhaps it's all O.J.'s fault. That a news story captivated the nation was nothing new, it’s a phenomena dating back to the time of Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the 15th century. What came with O.J. was the endlessly exhaustive coverage of a grotesque murder. And with the coverage came a sanitizing effect, one that made way for analysis of the most absurd commentary, uhh, ahem, punditry. Now there are more seats in the peanut gallery than in the rest of the theater. And in the exhaustive coverage of the trial came a kind of comedy of facts, however stultifying.

The method has hardly faded over time. In fact, perhaps it has grown all the more gruesome. Take today's top story—the rotting corpse of Anna Nicole Smith. What news organization could possibly justify, on that story, the public's need to know? Surely, many news directors would argue that this is the story that people want to hear, but as Lowell Bergman has asked so wisely in his recent investigation for Frontline: is what people want to hear actually news?

And more, why the fascination with the rotting corpse of a former Playboy Playmate, and, at the same time, the widespread indifference to the thousands of corpses coming back in body bags from Iraq?

What, then, counts as news today? Infotainment is an appropriate buzzword, and rather self-explanatory. Thus, let it be hereby declared, the battle between Man and Media: that if the news media wants to have any relevance to the causes and concerns of humanity, which in themselves are ever so tenuous in this day and age, what counts as a news story needs to once again keep us awake at night, just not because it's a disgrace.