What Passes for News in the U S of E

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need any more news about Tiger Woods and his “situation.”  I already know enough.  More than enough, actually.

I’m in the camp that believes even celebrities are entitled to some privacy.  But in the United States of Entertainment there was no way Tiger was going to get a pass.  No, I’m not suggesting the lamestream media should have ignored the story.  That would be asking way too much.  But playing it down would have been just fine with me.

But there’s no way that was going to happen.  Not in the U S of E.

Still, why the lurid fascination in some parts of the media with such an unimportant story?  Why the all-too-happy devotion to getting out such uncomfortable information.? In a word – YOU.

Okay, maybe not you, but rather you, as in You the Public.  You the public get off easy way too much of the time.  They call it the boob tube.  Yeah, and what does that make all those  people watching – the ones who can’t get enough about what Tiger did to whom, or what Lindsay is up to, or whether Brittney was wearing underwear when she got out of the car? What does that make the public that eats this stuff up?  Here’s a hint:  BOOBS!

The media, mainly cable television, puts this stuff on because they know the public cares more about trysts and panties than wars and nukes. They know that a big chunk of the public cares more about Tiger’s voicemail messages than about Iran, Iraq and North Korea – combined.

I know, I know:  I’m coming off as some highbrow elitist.  Au contraire.  I just think we’ve become a cheesy culture, which is something that will happen after years of being fed a steady diet of crappy information.

But every cloud has a silver lining, or so the saying goes, and so here’s my suggestion on how to turn this lemon into lemonade – excuse the mixed metaphors.  Who’s driving the Tiger Woods story?  TMZ and the Enquirer, two news outfits that get there first, stay the longest, and break lots of stories (like the John Edwards sex scandal, which the Enquirer got to before anyone else).  Instead of covering stuff like that, let these tabloid journalists loose on some really important news -- like global warming and the health care bill.

If those TMZ and Enquirer reporters were as aggressive on the global warming story as they were on the Tiger Woods story, we would have heard about those disgraceful climate-gate emails a long time ago.  And we would have questioned the legitimacy of the “man is causing global warming and it’s going to kill all of us any day now” story a long time ago, too.

What’s really in the healthcare bill?  I don’t know.  But I might if those bulldogs over at TMZ went through all 12 million pages and told us what’s really in the fine print.

One more thing:  if you didn’t get the “au contraire” joke four paragraphs up, too bad.  It was really funny.