Just when you think you've seen and heard it all...

By Randa Wag­ner, Editor -

The other morn­ing when I logged onto msnbc.com to check what went on overnight in the world, I was bowled over by a head­line and pic­ture that dom­i­nated the news site – over and above the REAL news. There before me was what looked like a red, orange and yel­low mosaic of George Zim­mer­man, the man accused of shoot­ing Trayvon Mar­tin, with the headline:

“Artist cre­ates Zim­mer­man por­trait with Skittles”

Say what? THIS is NEWS? What the …?

I thought my jaw was going to hit the floor. I couldn’t believe msnbc would give prime real estate on their site to a story about a man who had noth­ing bet­ter to do with his time than glue Skit­tles to a piece of ply­wood and var­nish them. The thou­sands of can­dies did look just like Mr. Zim­mer­man, but that’s not the point.

Why would some­one even think of doing some­thing so –weird– and then let­ting the national news know about it?

The Den­ver ‘artist’ said he made the 3-by-4-foot por­trait as ‘a sym­bol of what hap­pens when you let fear rule your life.’ He used more than 12,000 Skit­tles — the candy that 17-year-old Trayvon Mar­tin was allegedly car­ry­ing when he was shot. The por­trait is hang­ing at Red­Line Gallery in Denver.

The media is so out of sync with real­ity and what’s really impor­tant in life, it’s almost embar­rass­ing to work in the field. When I open a news site, I’m not inter­ested in find­ing out what overly risque out­fit Bey­once wore in pub­lic, who Kim Karshadian’s boyfriend-of-the-hour is or what the rest of her whacked-out fam­ily is doing.

But that’s the garbage that ‘head­lines’ right up there along­side war threats, hunger in Soma­lia and earth­quakes. There ought to be three cat­e­gories on every news site: REAL News, Sports, and TRASH and GOSSIP. That would make it much eas­ier for those who want real infor­ma­tion to find what they are look­ing for.

It will never hap­pen though. Why? Because of human nature and the media’s skill in rec­og­niz­ing it. Every news site wants you to come to their loca­tion first and, hope­fully, stay there. Their spon­sors — the com­pa­nies that pay the bills by putting their ads on the site — are count­ing on it. So the news folks have to think of ways to make their site more appeal­ing to draw the viewer there.

Sure bets are any sto­ries or tid­bits that smack of sex, dis­as­ters, bru­tal crime and the utterly absurd. For much of the world, that’s what the eye is drawn to first. Our cul­ture has been so per­me­ated with this stuff, it’s very hard not to look. That’s why those idi­otic “Obama says Refi­nance Your Home Now’ ad boxes con­tain mov­ing clips of things that have NOTHING to do with refi­nanc­ing your home: dogs rid­ing in open cars, women danc­ing in an office, a cou­ple smooching in a park, etc. It makes you look — so you just might click on the box hop­ing to see more of the pic­ture but, alas, it was only a tease to make you look, and now the pop-up box won’t go away.

Rep­utable sites now allow ads of almost-nude women in provoca­tive poses beck­on­ing the viewer to “date sin­gle women in your area NOW” (you can bet the women in your area DON’T look like that, either); ads that are clearly scams (car insur­ance for $1 a year!); and “You’ve won! You’re our 1,000,000th viewer — this is no joke! Click here.” Go ahead, click there — you’ll never get that pop up box to go away with­out pro­fes­sional tech­ni­cal help (it con­tains a virus). Chil­dren are using the inter­net daily now, and see this garbage. They will grow up think­ing “A shock­ing trick gets rid of wrin­kles fast” ­is nor­mal news to guide their lives by.

My point is, the fact that what should be ‘top of the line’ media out­fits lower them­selves to accept the sleazy sto­ries and ads that belong in the ‘rag’ mag­a­zines at the check­out counter. It’s all because of — you guessed it — money. It’s one big cir­cle of rev­enue, and the reader is part of it.

Years ago a per­son went to ‘adult’ stores to look at pic­tures and movies of undressed peo­ple doing naughty things. They read the gos­sip mag­a­zines to find out who was sleep­ing with who this week in Hol­ly­wood, if the aliens were invad­ing, or if some­one spent six months of their life build­ing a tem­ple out of soda cans. When they wanted news, they read the news­pa­per or watched the evening news on tele­vi­sion. Same with sports. Every­thing was sep­a­rated neatly and you didn’t have to waste your time with what you weren’t inter­ested in.

Those sim­pler times are gone. There’s nowhere to escape the fluff, obscen­ity and mind­less non­sense of today’s media com­pe­ti­tion to get your atten­tion. They use what sells, and what sells today is a sad tes­ta­ment to the direc­tion the world, in gen­eral, has cho­sen to go.

Think it can’t get worse? Think you’ve seen every­thing? I remem­ber my par­ents’ reac­tion to the Rolling Stones, the Hip­pies in the 60s, and the threat of the Cold War. The world they knew was fad­ing away and being replaced by this wild, loud soci­ety filled with rebel­lious­ness and loose morals. Peo­ple were los­ing touch with what really mat­tered in life and only wanted to be enter­tained, fed and catered to, no mat­ter the cost.

The folks knew how it would all end up; and here we are. Spend­ing time we’ll never get back glu­ing candy to ply­wood, protest­ing against the gov­ern­ment by destroy­ing our own towns, and twit­ter­ing all day on our I-pods. What a fine bunch we turned out to be.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Apr 19 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.