Want to get smashed in 30 minutes? Then pull up a bottle of tequila and the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and take a shot whenever Brian says any of the following words or phrases: "Massive", "As Always" or "Our very own." I guarantee you will not be able to walk a straight line at the end of this exercise.
[UPDATE - 3/23] - I've actually noticed that ever since I posted this, Brian seems to be using these phrases a lot less. I wonder if maybe someone at NBC reads my blog? :-)
I can no longer watch network news without getting physically ill, even with no alcohol involved. The choice of stories they present and how extensively they milk a given disaster is only outshamed by how they rape nuance while feigning a lack of bias presenting two polarized sides of a manufactured false dichotomy on any given pushbutton issue.
ReplyDeleteThere must be a neurochemical or evolutionary basis (addiction?) that makes "normal" people watch the news to get their fill of schadenfreude, fear, and anxiety over the newest upsetting breaking (non-)news, which sends them back to the same "news" oligarchy for more upsetting "news" -- until their attention span runs out a few weeks down the road. I don't really understand it rationally.
The disaster(s) in Japan are genuinely disheartening but watching too many of these real-life disaster videos seems like borderline voyeurism. How can you watch that stuff without crying or becoming genuinely disheartened? And if I, for example, were to grow desensitized to this Japanese quadruple-decker apocalypse does that make me slightly pathological?
But hey, if everybody does it (voyeurishly watches disasters on network news, drives gas guzzling cars, talks on a cellphone while driving -- despiting the facts showing that it is as dangerous as DUI, drinks weight-gain-inducing HFCS-laden soda, etc.) then it's totally OK, right?