Excess

If you remember the early days after the Haiti earthquake there were tragic stories about planes being waved off from landing at the very limited airstrip in Port-au-Prince in Haiti because the tower was down. So desperately needed supplies of medicine and planes packed with specialists in rescue and emergency medicine were not getting in.

So only a trickle came in. And who made up this trickle? From Rebecca Solnit at Tomgram:

Within days, the networks, CNN, and Fox had more or less transferred their news operations (already slimmed down by years of attrition) onto the island. CNN’s Anderson Cooper made it first on Wednesday morning. Katie flew in later that day. By the time Diane made it out ofKabul and into Port-au-Prince, Brian had already long since hit “the tarmac.” (All but Anderson were gone again by the weekend.) Along with them, in a situation in which resources were nearly nonexistent, went at least 44 CNN correspondents, producers, and technicians, a crew of 25 from Fox, and undoubtedly similar contingents from CBS, NBC, and ABC. Other than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Los Angeles Times, this was “the biggest U.S. television news deployment to an international crisis since the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami” -- at a cost that can only have been obscene.

There is something obscene about big news networks elbowing aside relief aid in order to fly in the $30 million/year "anchor" news faces to "host" a thirty minute news show. But that is the reality. We live in a bizarro world where pain and suffering are used as backdrops by overpaid fat cats to put on a sob story about suffering. I for one am tired of seeing obscenely rich people "tell" me the news. I am also really tired of overpaid "news" personalities using suffering to sell commercials on a TV channel.

I get most of my real news from third hand from people who pass on what they know. I don't get anything useful from the big expensive "personalities" hired to front a news organization.

Newspapers are failing. And as the above indicated, even the TV "news" groups are being pared down. That would worry me if I thought that these bloated budgets were delivering real news. But I'm cynical. I don't think they deliver much more than an audience for advertisers. I think the reason why "news" doesn't sell is because people have caught on that the "news" is no more than fishwrap and that the real "fish" being delivered is an audience to a commercial advertiser.