Why is the News Media Talking About Tiger Woods All Day Long
By
David Gottfried
I must concede that I ignore much of what passes for news. When I hear about the peccadillos, or supposedly major offenses, of Hollywood or Sports ignoramuses, I get bored. So and so got drunk. So and so had an affair. So and so wrote a tell all book discussing his ex-wife’s sexual kinkiness. That stuff makes me yawn. I don’t care about the “fun lives” of our screaming, beaming celebrities; I would rather have fun in my own life.
Before Woods’ auto accident of Feb 23, I had recently heard him discussed in the news. I don’t know what it was about as I was bored and did not listen, and by telling you that I don’t know what it was about, I aim to underscore my contempt for our “news” coverage.
Tiger Woods is a golfer and a very fine golfer at that. To my knowledge he has not sold weapons to Iran, has not been engaged in financial machinations which threatened to bring down the economy, and did not finance the Trump rioters. I don’t see why his personal life amounts to news. Perhaps he allegedly abused a woman. If he did, let me remind you of what I heard that arch feminist, Bella Abzug, say, in the Spring of 1980 when asked why she supported Ted Kennedy for president even though he was a womanizer. She said that all the guys in Washington do this and shtup (Yiddish for screw) plenty of girls they’re not married to. Bella said that they were only picking on Teddy because he was a liberal and supported abortion rights, which were more important than his personal life. .
Consider Rock Hudson and AIDS. In the Summer of 1985, the nation had a fit of Schadenfreude regarding Hudson’s demise from AIDS. People just couldn’t shut their traps. Everywhere I went, I heard old ladies babble, “Can you believe it, that dreamy man was a queer.” They sort of reminded me of T.S. Elliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,” which sported the curious line, “In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.”
In any event, by the autumn of 1985 the nation forgot about AIDS. The illness stayed forgotten. And then, in 1986, a very stupid female lawyer said to me, apropos of nothing, “I guess AIDS ain’t a problem anymore.” I asked her the basis for this ludicrous belief. She said, “Well, since Rock Hudson, I haven’t heard them talking about that stuff on the News.” Man, what a jackass. (Why should everyone be entitled to vote when everyone is stupid and their stupidity is amplified by the show biz, slick, stupid media.) In 1986, AIDS cases were soaring like a parabola on a Cartesian plane, i.e., if you graphed AIDS cases you could use the equation Y equals X squared. But the media, at the behest of moronic matrons like Tipper Gore, was wailing about bad language in rock music, praising Nancy Reagan for saying “just say no,” and the couch potatoes of America were steadily being lobotomized by a brain-dead diet of terrible “drama,” “comedy” and “music.”
Similarly, about ten years ago, a small New York Ferry boat crashed into the dock in Staten Island. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and a dozen other news stations flocked to the scene like buzzards poised to feast on dead meat. For about 48 hours the media discussed this 24/7, even though the casualties were limited and this had nothing to do with terrorism, and while they distracted us with their unseemly version of elementary school Show and Tell, the more important stuff -- the use of derivatives to seed the financial industry with more venom and bile, the de-industrialization of America fomented by our rentier economic policy, and the proliferation of more and more unsafe goods because of the castration of regulatory agencies -- was blithely, happily ignored.
The lords and ladies who decide on what to report knew it was so much more important to comment on which star had plastic surgery to get bigger boobs or who was a lesbian.
I hate Ted Cruz, but does it really matter if he went to Mexico while his Fellow Texans suffer. When are we going to grow up: A politician does not have to be in a PLACE to help people in that PLACE. FDR rarely left Washington DC (after all, he was paralyzed) but he did more for people all over this country than almost all of our political leaders. He did not fight poverty by putting on overalls and growing corn; he made Congress pass the Agricultural Adjustment ACT. He did not boost wages by personally spending millions of dollars on consumer goods; he made Congress pass the Wagner Act which gave workers the right to strike.
Ted Cruz could be in Mexico or China AND get plenty for the State of Texas by using his telephone to call big shots all over the nation and to persuade, pressure and coerce people to give Texas aid.
However, the Ted Cruz story had pictures of him in an airport wearing casual clothing fitting for a beach just as the Tiger Woods story gave us pictures of photogenic Tiger Woods. And to the media, pictures are everything. The most banal and meaningless news story will get plenty of coverage if it comes with hot pictures for the gossips in hair salons and barber shops and the most important news stories won’t get a shred of coverage if it doesn’t come with pics which allow the news junkies to get their cheap thrills by seeing blood and gore. For example, in 1983, the entire populace of the Syrian city of Hana, or about 5,000 people, were killed by the government because there were dissidents in the city. Only papers like the New York Times discussed it. Why? Because Syria didn’t let journalists roam around the country and take pictures. If there are no pictures, there is no news story for the infantile American assholes who watch television.
Do you think I am wrong in believing that most people get off on pain and misery? If so, answer this question: Why is it that when I saw “Shindler’s List,” half the people in the auditorium were happily eating ice cream. If they had a moral sensibility worthy of respect, they would have found it impossible to eat ice cream, e.g., when Mussolini attacked Ethiopia, my Grandmother – who didn’t go to college but was smarter than most of today’s kiddies with graduate degrees -- refused to eat.