Our Fascination with the Celebrities

Over the past five years, I have had to endure absolutely pointless news broadcasts concerning the lives of celebrities. CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and especially FOX all are guilty of broadcasting these pointless stories of the fall from grace of people like OJ Simpson and Britney Spears.

Things like Dar fur and Iraq, Lebanon, Burma, and Afghanistan have all taken a back seat to this stories that serve no purpose other than to further help destroy a life that needs no help in being destroyed in the first place. Just look particularly at the downfall of Britney.

Of course, the news companies believe tht their main audiences are bored house wives who have nothing better to do than watch this garbage. While the stories do gain some eyeballs, it does nothing for the average highly intellectual person who want to sit down and relax after a day of work and get a bit of news. Or maybe I am wxing nostalgic to the lost era of the 1950's to 1970's.

But we continue on. While I don't think celebrities deserve special treatment, you have to wonder where we draw the line. When does a situation become a Lady Di situation in which people are hurt, maimed or even killed. The over zealousness of the paparazzi is well known. And while this was only driven in the past by tabloid papers which most people didn't read, we are now forced to watch it as part of our evening news casts.

What would Walter Cronkite, Ed Bradley or Edwin Murrow have done? I dont think that for a minute that they would have even considered announcing anything like this. They would have laughed and said "find me a real story". CNN even fired announcer Aaron Brown, a well respected news caster for not being dramatic enough last year. Now his replacement, Anderson Cooper, does nothing but spend way too much time on these garbage stories. Their new statement is that they do "Distinctive Reporting" but the only thing distinctive is the self serving crap that these stations are putting out as "News".

And so I say to these big news companies. Get the garbage stories off the news and give us the real stories. Start focusing on the things that really matter and the stories that are worthy of our time.