Hush Hush, keep it down now...

I don't want to talk about these things, but I really want to complain.

I am having a crisis. There's some stuff going on in the media right now which I desperately want to treat with sarcasm and disdain, because these are things that have only received national attention because the media decided they should. Some of these issues are matters of batshit crazy people practicing poor personal responsibility, some are matters of irrelevant people being granted some form of misdirected relevancy by a lost flock. The thing is, people like this are getting off on getting media attention, and the media keeps giving it to them. I want to rail and rant about these issues in a cathartic flurry of acerbic wit and wordplay... but I can't. If I did, I would become part of the problem.

It's like the old problem of the loud mouthed white elephant in the room. You can try NOT to think about the loud mouthed elephant in the room, but the very act of trying NOT to do it, makes it so. (And yes, let he who has wisdom hear who this loud mouthed elephant may be.) I don't want to give more (admittedly non-consequential) press to a drug addicted loud mouthed elephant past being able to play a useful role in modern American political discourse; however, even by stating that I end up talking about it. I can't rail against the utter hypocrisy of the elephant being the standard bearer of conservative values in this country given his past and current actions. It would just be grist for the mill.

I watch CNN while doing my treadmill/bike/elliptical in the mornings. Every morning for the last two months I have had to watch twenty straight minutes of.... well, again, I don't want to actually talk about someone who has had far too much attention given her overused womb already. This sad, sick individual is only being enabled by news programs standing in line to demonstrate how sad and sick she is. The individual needs to institutionalized and the litter given to good parents while the news programs exploiting the situation talk about important things like the economy, our various wars, and just exactly what is being passed in legislation, and whether or not it will fix any of the big problems.

These are just a couple of examples. How many of these people do we see, struggling with weight loss? Marrying into a cult? Selling their shoes, snot, or kidney stones on eBay? Why do we care?

So, here I am speechless. I can only implore the media to stop covering trivialities, and the audience to stop asking them to do so. See? That's the real problem- why does the media push these dipshits? Because we ask them to! Their ratings soar when folks like these show up in an interview. Magazines sell when these people are on the covers. News sites treating these people with disdain, while still giving them publicity, get lots of hits. Put the magazine down, turn off the tv, and if you're online, email your aunt and tell her hi instead. If you need drama, watch a soap opera- I want news to be covered in news. I'm tired of seeing the Fnords...