are we having fun yet?

Having just watched a particularly unedifying half-hour of Campbell Brown’s CNN show, I can attest that the media free-for-all surrounding campaign ‘08 is well captured by Victor Davis Hanson:

What is fascinating about the tingly-leg press is that they are exhibiting the very symptoms of arrested development and star-struck immaturity that they always accuse America in toto of suffering. The usual critique of the elite media is that we are a nation of mindless followers, who go from one fad to another, and value looks, youth, and pizzazz over substance.

But the current spectacle suggests something worse — that the press who claims they know better and are more sophisticated are, in fact, far more infantile than most Americans, and essentially Access Hollywood, People Magazine, and the National Enquirer dressed up with network logos and NY-DC bylines.

Dude, that’s what I’ve been sayin’ all along! But everybody knows it—if you’ve got a pulse and you watch even ten minutes of cable “news,” (which is pretty much the only “news” that exists on TV, since network “news” amounts to about 19 minutes per every 24 hours) you can’t possibly miss it.

It’s just how things are now, and the viewing audience is showing a lot of skepticism, as Rasmussen reported earlier this week. Television is an entertainment medium. All the information we get from it is dressed up in some kind of showbiz clothes. Our job as viewers is to try to figure out what we can trust and what we can’t trust.

Happy viewing!