I laugh when people bray loudly to me about the decline of the news media, and the surge of celebrity news, because A) I know that the cult of personality you see replacing news these days is not an unwelcome media trend but a long-term, publicly underwritten, deliberate distraction from the real, ugly and undoctored news.
And B) I'm a career journalist who freelances on the fringes of the staggering media giant for good reason.
Yes, the public dutifully complains about the overexposed TomKat and Bradgelina power couples. But you know how it celebrates when reality is pre-empted by Britney's baldness.
Why? Because the reader is merely winking at the image-maker behind the media curtain replacing war coverage with Paris Hilton uncovered.
And don't just blame the weak-kneed industry leaders for the sharp shift from hard news to infotainment. They can see as well as you can that the reader does not demand quality reporting and news analysis anymore.
Today's overstimulated reader buys papers and watches newscasts with the largest percentages of celebrity news and pretty faces so he doesn't have to think about genocide in Darfur, or overhyped reports of WMD in Iraq, or anything really important.
And, no, it's not like those readers are just mindlessly distracted by the pretty people. The readers are nothing short of entrapping the bad boys and sex kittens in the public lens to eclipse an ugly reality.
There wasn't an attack of the 50-foot Anna Nicole Smith. The public made her a giant, and it's only a matter of time before they drag their next tragic beauty into the street.
Hopefully it won't be a fringe freelancer trying to conjure critical thinking skills.
The problem is that more britney doesn't mean less war, it means war and britney. That would make quite a picasso.
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