The Boiling Frog
It is said, drop a frog in boiling water and he’ll jump right out but allow him to hang in the water as you turn up the heat gradually and he’ll succumb. Follow the Frog as it unearths political and societal struggles, trying to stay afloat and keep cool in a boiling brew.
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Wednesday, 13 January 2010
The Gasbags
While everyone has the right to turn off the boob tube, it still seems offensive to the senses that we must face the daily grind of “gasbags,” who have become self-appointed know-it-alls on TV. This new breed of television personality is perhaps the most annoying of all opportunists we have to suffer in today’s media-saturated world.
My guess is the roots of this go back to the O.J. Simpson saga, when the volume of TV exposure for any of the slugs associated with that assault to the senses gave them a claim to interpret daily events for the rest of us. Poor trial lawyer, Greta Van Susteren, now stares down at us every night interpreting the law. And how qualified was Kato Kaelin, who immediately hit the Hollywood late night circuit and launched a comedy career off of a grizzly murder? Yes, this is where “reality” became the juice to replace real news and serious drama.
Network executives, realizing how cheap it is to follow some jerk around with a camcorder rather than paying out loads to script writers, set designers, producers, directors, etc., saw gold in them thar idiots and launched a new profitable product that has forever changed the landscape of television programming. The “News” is now “Breaking News,” “Developing Story,” or “Just In.”
Fast-forward to 2010 – the era of on-air programming based on the “reality” model is at a fever pitch. The award for “most annoying,” has to go to Nancy Grace and her unapologetic abuse of victims suffering on TV to gain ratings around sordid tales. She screams in her promos, “Don’t make me issue a warrant,” when in fact, her building of a reality empire on the backs of distraught families caught at their most vulnerable moments should be worthy of her arrest. But the stakes are too high, when you can be the first to show the family mourning a lost child, the spouse of a murdered wife, the mother of a tortured boy and replay it night after night. “Cha-ching!”
The irony is that this assault on accepted behavior plays out over and over as these “reality news” stars rail against the loss of values while, at the same time, they themselves line their pockets by crossing the line. The self-righteousness is deafening and the result is a society less respectful, empathetic and humbled by the plight of others.
In fact, tragedy has become so popular that major personal events are tailor-made for the “gasbags” when they occur. To illustrate the point of how far the new breed will go to get a piece of a tragedy, let’s for a moment recall the frenzy surrounding the death of Michael Jackson. While we expected to see items on network news and a stampede of cable news and entertainment like “E” and “Access Hollywood,” the need to be associated with such a big tragedy drew everyone for a piece of the thriller.
You could see our homegrown political commentator, Donna Brazile, displaying her personal collection of Michael Jackson vinyl, as Wolf Blitzer took up the theme declaring, "If you’re listening to ‘Thriller’ ... you gotta move, right?"
Sports geek and Monday Night Football nerd analyst Tony Kornheiser had to weigh in with USA Today about Michael Jackson's passing, "In my lifetime there were three great icons...Frank Sinatra, there's Elvis Presley, and there's Michael Jackson." Sounds like football to me, right? And, why is this guy trying to tie someone with no sports background to a sports story?
The Cafferty File featured stories hawking, “Bizarre events follow death” and pitched viewers to log on to Cafferty’s blog, which may signal the height of bizarre hypocracy, sort of engineering exactly what he rails about. And, mind you, these examples were just CNN.
Every event took on a Jackson air, like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who spoke about the late "King of Pop" as he launched the city's swimming pool season at the Jackie Robinson Recreation Center. The mayor said he'll "always be listening" to Michael Jackson's music. Swimming pools and Jackson?
I never met Michael Jackson, and you can bet that most of the people who have tried to climb the ladder of attention around his death haven’t met the musical icon either. In fact, as I’ve tried to pull together this odd cast of opportunists, a list ranging from financial, sports, style, politics, world affairs and on and on jumped on the Jackson funeral cortege hoping to get a lift from his drop. A pack of jackals comes to mind.
And why would any of this matter to the “Boiling Frog?” This opening blog’s theme is all about what people will do today to get noticed – how fabrication of a story at any cost has numbed the masses to what is true, real and important. There is a loss of respect, morality, ethics and common sense that has become accepted behavior, without limits, when stepping over even sacred ground to gain fame and notice.
We have made commonplace what is absurd and in doing so allowed celebrity to extend to those who take aim at our values, sense of decency, fairness, and humanity. We have given fame to the likes of Jon & Kate plus Eight, who expose the frailty of their children for profit and gain. We fawn over Jerry Springer, who along with shock jocks on radio, build audience share at the expense of decency.
When we think we’ve seen it all, the theater of the absurd premieres with the “balloon boy.” Here in one act of “reality on steroids” you have an episode that says it all. To seek attention, two suburban parents use their children to construct a hoax. Like a school of fish after fresh cut bait, the airwaves fill with the story of a child suspended in a mylar balloon afloat over Denver. With echoes of the O.J. SUV chase, we watch as one network after the other suspends programming to watch and wait. One new anchor exclaims they are on delay to avoid live witness of the crash and (can’t say it) sad but inevitable conclusion. Another network ups the ante saying that their coverage is “live.” “Breaking News” alerts are on all networks and cable. Experts are brought in to makeshift sets, satellite trucks rush to follow the crippled craft carrying the doomed child. Weathermen start interpreting with their live boards the path of the craft and wind currents. A silver logo emerges of the craft and a top news anchor places the image on a map suggesting it is only a matter of time. Can anyone say cluster ____? Whatever the penalty for concocting the hoax, perhaps this little family in Colorado did more to expose the sickness of the media machine that will stop at nothing to capture you, arrest your senses, drain your emotions and play on your darkest fears. It is a cynical media that relishes these moments and excuses its excesses while exposing its talent pool as media monkeys.
So, who are the real culprits in this “reality” world? Where is the evil? Is it in the act or in glorifying and commodifying the unthinkable acts into marketable programs? Is it the death or is it the callous act of asking the unthinkable of the vulnerable in front of a world audience? How do you describe having lost your family? What will justice mean to you? Will it replace your loved one? This is the disrobing of feelings. This is the crippling of emotion. This is the unveiling of the dark side that gives accommodation to unthinkable acts.
Media sensationalism is a menacing sign of our times, a sign of a hyped up world where numbing of the senses causing indifference can lead to real tragedy. Those of us who click the remote control to find some real news lament that we don’t have access to anything but hyped-up stories designed to tantalize our senses. The pot is heating up when kids douse other kids with alcohol and set them ablaze, when youngsters go on murdering sprees, when intoxicated moms end family lives ablaze in car crashes. And when caddies saddle up to the cameras to speculate about lurid acts of famous golfers – all fast and loose. According to USA Today, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert said it all: “Everyone is talking about the Tiger Wood’s scandal and I would be shirking my responsibilities as a journalist if I didn’t also try to boost my ratings at his expense.”
This raw brand of personal reality extends to a rawer brand of political reality, where hundreds of millions are spent on absurd partisan political attacks or where privacy becomes the victim of a fearful world. In all of these cases reality has been blurred and the consequences are threatening. That’s called hot water and the frog is boiling.
My guess is the roots of this go back to the O.J. Simpson saga, when the volume of TV exposure for any of the slugs associated with that assault to the senses gave them a claim to interpret daily events for the rest of us. Poor trial lawyer, Greta Van Susteren, now stares down at us every night interpreting the law. And how qualified was Kato Kaelin, who immediately hit the Hollywood late night circuit and launched a comedy career off of a grizzly murder? Yes, this is where “reality” became the juice to replace real news and serious drama.
Network executives, realizing how cheap it is to follow some jerk around with a camcorder rather than paying out loads to script writers, set designers, producers, directors, etc., saw gold in them thar idiots and launched a new profitable product that has forever changed the landscape of television programming. The “News” is now “Breaking News,” “Developing Story,” or “Just In.”
Fast-forward to 2010 – the era of on-air programming based on the “reality” model is at a fever pitch. The award for “most annoying,” has to go to Nancy Grace and her unapologetic abuse of victims suffering on TV to gain ratings around sordid tales. She screams in her promos, “Don’t make me issue a warrant,” when in fact, her building of a reality empire on the backs of distraught families caught at their most vulnerable moments should be worthy of her arrest. But the stakes are too high, when you can be the first to show the family mourning a lost child, the spouse of a murdered wife, the mother of a tortured boy and replay it night after night. “Cha-ching!”
The irony is that this assault on accepted behavior plays out over and over as these “reality news” stars rail against the loss of values while, at the same time, they themselves line their pockets by crossing the line. The self-righteousness is deafening and the result is a society less respectful, empathetic and humbled by the plight of others.
In fact, tragedy has become so popular that major personal events are tailor-made for the “gasbags” when they occur. To illustrate the point of how far the new breed will go to get a piece of a tragedy, let’s for a moment recall the frenzy surrounding the death of Michael Jackson. While we expected to see items on network news and a stampede of cable news and entertainment like “E” and “Access Hollywood,” the need to be associated with such a big tragedy drew everyone for a piece of the thriller.
You could see our homegrown political commentator, Donna Brazile, displaying her personal collection of Michael Jackson vinyl, as Wolf Blitzer took up the theme declaring, "If you’re listening to ‘Thriller’ ... you gotta move, right?"
Sports geek and Monday Night Football nerd analyst Tony Kornheiser had to weigh in with USA Today about Michael Jackson's passing, "In my lifetime there were three great icons...Frank Sinatra, there's Elvis Presley, and there's Michael Jackson." Sounds like football to me, right? And, why is this guy trying to tie someone with no sports background to a sports story?
The Cafferty File featured stories hawking, “Bizarre events follow death” and pitched viewers to log on to Cafferty’s blog, which may signal the height of bizarre hypocracy, sort of engineering exactly what he rails about. And, mind you, these examples were just CNN.
Every event took on a Jackson air, like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who spoke about the late "King of Pop" as he launched the city's swimming pool season at the Jackie Robinson Recreation Center. The mayor said he'll "always be listening" to Michael Jackson's music. Swimming pools and Jackson?
I never met Michael Jackson, and you can bet that most of the people who have tried to climb the ladder of attention around his death haven’t met the musical icon either. In fact, as I’ve tried to pull together this odd cast of opportunists, a list ranging from financial, sports, style, politics, world affairs and on and on jumped on the Jackson funeral cortege hoping to get a lift from his drop. A pack of jackals comes to mind.
And why would any of this matter to the “Boiling Frog?” This opening blog’s theme is all about what people will do today to get noticed – how fabrication of a story at any cost has numbed the masses to what is true, real and important. There is a loss of respect, morality, ethics and common sense that has become accepted behavior, without limits, when stepping over even sacred ground to gain fame and notice.
We have made commonplace what is absurd and in doing so allowed celebrity to extend to those who take aim at our values, sense of decency, fairness, and humanity. We have given fame to the likes of Jon & Kate plus Eight, who expose the frailty of their children for profit and gain. We fawn over Jerry Springer, who along with shock jocks on radio, build audience share at the expense of decency.
When we think we’ve seen it all, the theater of the absurd premieres with the “balloon boy.” Here in one act of “reality on steroids” you have an episode that says it all. To seek attention, two suburban parents use their children to construct a hoax. Like a school of fish after fresh cut bait, the airwaves fill with the story of a child suspended in a mylar balloon afloat over Denver. With echoes of the O.J. SUV chase, we watch as one network after the other suspends programming to watch and wait. One new anchor exclaims they are on delay to avoid live witness of the crash and (can’t say it) sad but inevitable conclusion. Another network ups the ante saying that their coverage is “live.” “Breaking News” alerts are on all networks and cable. Experts are brought in to makeshift sets, satellite trucks rush to follow the crippled craft carrying the doomed child. Weathermen start interpreting with their live boards the path of the craft and wind currents. A silver logo emerges of the craft and a top news anchor places the image on a map suggesting it is only a matter of time. Can anyone say cluster ____? Whatever the penalty for concocting the hoax, perhaps this little family in Colorado did more to expose the sickness of the media machine that will stop at nothing to capture you, arrest your senses, drain your emotions and play on your darkest fears. It is a cynical media that relishes these moments and excuses its excesses while exposing its talent pool as media monkeys.
So, who are the real culprits in this “reality” world? Where is the evil? Is it in the act or in glorifying and commodifying the unthinkable acts into marketable programs? Is it the death or is it the callous act of asking the unthinkable of the vulnerable in front of a world audience? How do you describe having lost your family? What will justice mean to you? Will it replace your loved one? This is the disrobing of feelings. This is the crippling of emotion. This is the unveiling of the dark side that gives accommodation to unthinkable acts.
Media sensationalism is a menacing sign of our times, a sign of a hyped up world where numbing of the senses causing indifference can lead to real tragedy. Those of us who click the remote control to find some real news lament that we don’t have access to anything but hyped-up stories designed to tantalize our senses. The pot is heating up when kids douse other kids with alcohol and set them ablaze, when youngsters go on murdering sprees, when intoxicated moms end family lives ablaze in car crashes. And when caddies saddle up to the cameras to speculate about lurid acts of famous golfers – all fast and loose. According to USA Today, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert said it all: “Everyone is talking about the Tiger Wood’s scandal and I would be shirking my responsibilities as a journalist if I didn’t also try to boost my ratings at his expense.”
This raw brand of personal reality extends to a rawer brand of political reality, where hundreds of millions are spent on absurd partisan political attacks or where privacy becomes the victim of a fearful world. In all of these cases reality has been blurred and the consequences are threatening. That’s called hot water and the frog is boiling.
