a very tired refrain

How many times have we heard this?:

celebrity culture is a cancer, a poltergeist to be exorcised because it makes distraction and trivia overwhelmingly powerful against things we need to think about. During June 2005, CNN, FOXNews, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, and CBS ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they did about the genocide in Darfur. I long for the day when the last salivating pundit is strangled with the entrails of the last vapid cinematic glamourpuss.

Why do otherwise intelligent people believe that if only we weren’t so distracted by tabloid culture, if only the “national conversation” were more elevated, if only people really knew what’s going on in the world, we’d all be out there fighting the good fight instead of looking for ever cooler gadgets, ever more exotic ways to spend our leisure time (and I do include blogging), or whatever it is that we really like to do.

It’s a nonsensical argument, way past its prime. I don’t mean to pick on the person who said it, so I won’t link it. If I had time, I could find ten other quotes just like it, from every point on the political spectrum. This isn’t a political thing. It’s not a partisan thing. It’s a cultural thing. “Everyone” has agreed on it ever since it was floated: that the crap on TV rots our collective American brain. No one has ever been able to prove that it’s true. It’s an over-ripe idea. Rotten.

Human beings seek distraction. We may even be hard-wired for it.

That’s the central thesis of this blog: that important information–i.e., “news”–gets transmitted to people despite the showbiz packaging.

More about this–a lot more–another time. Meanwhile, here is a related post–something that might also serve as an “about this blog.”