On the off chance you haven't heard, Brett Favre retired from football on Tuesday. As a football fan, I can say that the game will be worse without him and that the state of Wisconsin will miss him immeasurably. That being said, did his retirement really require OVER 4 HOURS of continuous coverage on ESPN? Did it really need to be one of the lead stories on the evening news? The short answer is simply no. The long answer is actually yes.
Let me explain. A while back, news media (especially the cable news networks) noticed that their ratings seemed to spike whenever they talked about something that A, people had some familiarity with, B, had some level of shock value, C, involved a celebrity, and/or D, didn't make people feel stupid. It's sort of like Fry said in an episode of Futurama: "Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared." For the most part, this is 100% true regarding the populace in general, and the networks picked up on it. So, rather than research and air important stories (say, something regarding the rebuilding of New Orleans, or bringing to light the abysmal constitution of the American health care system), "serious" journalists bring us such wonders as "Britney's Latest Meltdown" or "Paris's Night in Jail" or my personal favorite, "Is Anna Nicole Smith Still Dead?"
However, I can't really blame the news networks for noticing a trend and capitalizing on it. All told, they're still part of a business, and they'd be stupid to ignore something that fills their coffers. No, the blame for this lies solely on the American public. We see this tripe on a daily basis...and we take it, we feed on it, we gorge ourselves on what is the cotton candy of information (easy to swallow, no real substance). No one calls them out for burying us under so much unnecessary garbage that we don't see the things happening in the world around us. No one questions the decisions made because no one has the information needed to comprehend those decisions, and no one cares enough to find the info on their own; they're too busy with "George Clooney's Latest Lady: Will He Finally Settle?" In a world where there are so many things we should be concerned about, so many things that should matter to us, why are so many people so very ignorant when it comes to the important stuff?
There are some people out there who want as much information as possible. Yours truly tries to read at least three newspapers every day and reads both Time and Newsweek on Sundays, and I still consider myself somewhat ignorant (in part because one of those newspapers is the school paper, and there aren't words for how dreadful that is). There are documentary filmmakers who dig and dig on some of these issues, brining as much to light as possible, and they should be commended for it. Only thing is, the vast majority of people never hear about any of those films, and many of the ones they do hear about get pushed aside as being "politically driven." That's another interesting topic, the concept that anything can be given political motives unless it shows no preference in any way, but that belongs in another column.
So to expand on my long answer from the beginning, yes, the networks do need to spend that much time on a relatively trivial subject because it sells, and they know that people aren't going to ask them to put the same kind of emphasis on the important things. Should they spend that much time? Hell no. Until the public develops a thirst for knowledge, though, those of us who want meaty issues will have to dig through "Rosie and Donald's Latest Spat" for real news.
