If you were to be honest with yourself for a moment... if you woke up one
day and heard that Anthony Wiener, who is married, had flirted with several
other women online, would you really believe that this was an important
story that needed to be on the front page of every newspaper and online news
website in the country?
But you believe it now, don't you? Because it was on the front page of
every newspaper, top of the news on every broadcast, all over the web.
You believe that no story would be given such prominence by so many
different news organizations and media entities if it wasn't really and
truly important.
Or do you think for yourself?
No matter how many news organizations cover it, nor how many
gallons of ink are spilled on it, or how many photographs or videos or web
pages, or self-serious pundits using euphemisms, no matter, no matter, no
matter, the Anthony Weiner scandal is trivial and irrelevant and
unimportant.
The real story now is just how bad is the entertainment-news
industry in the U.S.? And the next real story is, is this really what
Americans want-- because they do tune in-- or is something they are having
shoved down their throats? The Anthony Wiener story might well begin
to seem important to some people because coverage of it is ubiquitous.
This story will die soon enough. Unlike Sarah Palin's enduring idiotic
appeal to every numbskulled dissident survivalist in the U.S.-- something
that appears to be trivial but isn't (we're talking about the
intellectual ability of a potential candidate for the highest office in the
land)-- this
never was a real story, there never was a real impact, and not even Fox News
can make a whole turd out this fart.
No crime was involved. No
political issues were involved. It's none of anybody's damn business.
Unemployment. The War in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq.
Global warming. Thousands killed in Syria. The government collapsing in Yemen. Spain
and Portugal going broke. Japan. Cancer.
AIDS.
The Anthony Wiener story is intended to amuse the illiterate, the sheep,
and the frigid-hysterics while the government and big corporations
continue to ensure the gradual impoverishment of the middle and lower
classes and continuation of disastrous foreign policies over there.
I am hugely disappointed in Jon Stewart. The story was funny for five
minutes, not 105. And it wasn't funny because a foolish young
politician made stupid decisions. The very, very funny part of the
story is Wolf Blitzer with a straight face pretending to be a journalist.
At least he got that right.
I was baffled, at first, by the amount of time Stewart was giving this
story. Wasn't he doing exactly what he frequently ridicules other media
organizations of doing? Tunnel vision. Flogging a trivial,
inane issue to death?
Mystery solved: Stewart is very touchy about some critics who claimed he
low-balled the issue on the first day because of his personal friendship
with Anthony Wiener-- not, they believed, because he was
rational. Those critics
successfully manipulated Jon Stewart and made him look like a fool as, on the
very next Daily Show, he
desperately tried to muster the hysterics to prove that he really, really
can't be tricked out like some CNN tart. He made the story the
centerpiece of three consecutive Daily shows, long after it stopped being
funny.
But then, that's about all you get on the news these days, including the
CBC up here in Canada. When it's not falling over itself to
drool over the royal wedding.
At the end of the June 8th "Daily Show", Stewart played a clip of a
reporter listing five or six important stories she had intended to cover and
then announcing that she would not be covering those stories because there
were new developments in the Anthony Weiner story.
My wife and I could never could figure out if the reporter was being
sarcastic or serious. It is so had to tell nowadays. But it was
utterly shameless of Stewart to play it because he was doing the same thing
or worse.
