I’m not the first blogger to link to Chicha’s devastating takedown of The Swan, but just in case you haven’t read it yet, do so at once:
Other shows have had equally shallow and enraging premises–remember Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? But the premise always drew equally shallow and enraging contestants, while the contestants on The Swan don’t seem shallow so much as insecure and clueless. The show itself is the villain, the only target for our hatred. But the question is, is The Swan purposefully loathsome, or just deeply hypocritical?…
The answer is yes.
Speaking of reality TV, Tom Shales, the Washington Post‘s TV critic, also “reviews” broadcast news coverage, and his comments
on Condoleezza’s Rice testimony are worth pondering:
If it were to be viewed as a battle, or a sporting event, or a contest — and of course that would be wrong — then Condoleezza Rice won it. Indeed, the national security adviser did so well and seemed so firmly in command of the situation yesterday, when she testified under oath before the 9/11 commission, that one had to wonder why the White House spent so much time and energy trying to keep her from having to appear….
I’ve long had mixed feelings about this kind of reviewing, but I’m also well aware that in a world where most people get their news by watching TV, every occurrence is a performance, and to ignore that fact is to disregard the nature of reality in the age of information.
As it happens, I had lunch with a Washington Post editor the same day Shales’ piece appeared, and I asked him, “The only thing I can’t figure out is this: why didn’t the Post start it up front instead of in the Style section?”
“Because it was an opinion piece,” he replied.
So it was–and so what? I don’t see the Post on paper, so I don’t know what was on its front page last Friday, but my guess is that Shales’ piece was far more to the point of the day’s events than at least some of the news stories deemed worthy of page-one placement. Is there really so great a difference between unabashed opinion journalism and the “news analysis” (sometimes labeled as such, sometimes not) regularly published on the front pages of most major papers? Bloggers don’t think so–which I suspect is one of the reasons why their audience is growing daily, while the readership of newspapers continues to shrink.