The New Year is here, and all that jazz, so I just think I’ll say happy new year and move on from there. Hope everyone is doing well. If not, hope the new year gets better for you.
One of my usual places to find up to date news is Google News. I’ve found it to be quite informative, and I tend to read first the technology section, then the entertainment section, then business and then US News. Maybe I might read some of the other categories, but those are the main ones that interest me. However, it wasn’t until today that I started to notice something that’s been secretly bothering me for a long time. And that’s what gets included in Entertainment News.
When I read Entertainment, I’m interested in movie announcements, revelations of new music and the ocassional ridiculous scandal that tends to make me laugh. However, I”ve started to notice other pieces of news that are being included in this feed, and it’s just wrong. I’ll give you an example: James Holmes, the nutcase that shot up the midnight showing of the latest Batman movie, is having his hearing and the news wants to know what his defense will be. Why does this bother me? This is not entertainment news at all. I don’t care that he did his crime during a Batman screening. I don’t care that the media is excited and hyped about the case. THIS IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT NEWS. It is national news, or serious news. To put it under the entertainment umbrella is sending a signal out to every nutcase out there that if he wants his 15 minutes of entertainment fame, do something ridiculous, like kill a whole bunch of people during a movie screening.
Entertainment news needs to be held to actual entertainment stuff, not this kind of thing. The message the news is sending by this sort of thing is that we’re going to be entertained by whack jobs killing people in real life. This is why “news” people like Nancy Grace exist, and I so wish that they didn’t get a single moment of air time. We don’t need media celebrities trying to make a name for themselves by going crazy on the news and trying to gain attention, which is one reason why I refuse to watch anything Nancy Grace related. She’s exactly the kind of reason why we have this sort of thing turning in on an entertainment feed instead of simple news.
And that’s the problem today. News has become entertainment, which just fuels that old problem of watching the evening news and seeing that the lead story is a fire that affects less than 0.001 of the population. Fires are exciting, and you can watch things burn, which is why you rarely see a fire story in the newspaper (unless it burns half the city). It’s only exciting on television with pictures and footage.
This is why we’re now seeing Holmes as an entertainment story. Instead of CNN, Fox and the major networks covering this story and its impact on America, we’re now going to have E!, People, and the Celebrity Gossip talking about what clothes the killer was wearing, and why the prosecutor so shouldn’t have been wearing those shoes.
On another note, chances are pretty good this web site is going to be closed soon. I’ve discovered very few people are actually interacting with me and that most of my views appear to be from spammers trying to sell shit to people who do read my blog.