deadissue.com

With the Iraqi government taking historic steps towards carving out a peaceful future and Congress in session, a hot topic of conversation across the country is the runaway bride of John Mason and whether he’s a fool for wanting her back. To say that cable news jumped the shark with this latest obsession would be a lie, as it’s definitely happen already. What we’re witnessing now is the kind of transformation the talk show arena experienced years ago. One day America was watching Phil Donaghue facilitate a discussion on postpartum depression, when a network executive or two came up with the idea of pushing the envelope with an edgy, in your face format. Soon the social issues were scraped and replaced instead with cheating transvestite crackheads pulling off each other’s wigs on the Jerry Springer show.

Network suits were responsible for this, as they are the current state of 24-hour ‘news’ in our country. The metamorphosis that took place with the talk shows is happening to drive-thru news right before our eyes, and like everything in the ratings vacuum, they’ll eventually go too far and be forced to stop wasting our time. How soon before this happens will eventually come down to a matter of taste. And while disgust is an emotion America can now feel collectively on cue, unfortunately it’s the ‘drive-thru news’ outlets that generally light this fire within us. With this being the case, outside influences will have to serve as the proverbial bucket of ice water. Something’s got to give, because the difference between Jerry Springer and you’re average cable news talking head is he doesn’t insult our intelligence by pretending his show is something that it’s not.

Surely there are times and places for quenching our thirst for bad behavior, and like mixing politics and religion, combining the Jerry Springer show and news is a bad idea. What it does is provide comfort to those of us who make our own mistakes and want to feel better about ourselves. Remembering that bad decision to spend four hundred bucks on an idea to get rich selling Amway products doesn’t feel so bad after seeing an entrepreneur/car thief get their face smashed to the pavement on an episode of Cops. Just like the relief an unhappily married couple feels seeing a woman who faked her death and ran away rather than walk down the aisle. The difference though, is that Cops comes on the channel that also shows reruns of Married With Children, whereas the hours of in-depth segments concerning the runaway bride are sandwiched between acts of Congress and updates on the war in Iraq.

Truth being, the 24-hour news channels have an opportunity to actually inform us of what’s going on in government. The hours of airtime are ripe for interviews with legislators and the bills they’re intending on passing. Instead we get the same hack ‘experts’ who are called up and handed points of view to holler at one another concerning an issue that more than likely is of little to no consequence in the grand scheme. The business is now defined by a never-ending mining operation for stories that can get people talking about anything other than government. Unfortunately, relevance has been in market decline, and the runaway bride is just another example.