The Marksman and the Media

I hate the media. I think there might be a good chance that during all of those nights that I spent watching news coverage, sitting alone in my room and drinking from the tap of a miniature keg of Heineken, I might have had a high-pitched, inaudible voice in the back of my head telling me that every news story has one side that everyone will know about within a week and one side that no one will ever know about. Some call this biased reporting. I think that I can agree with that, but only to a certain degree and only under certain circumstances. You see, the idea of biased reporting implies that the reporter is completely informed about the story within the report. I’m no media expert by any standard of measurement, but if I was told by a meteorologist that my morning commute was looking sunny and I arrive at my destination with cracks in my windshield from a sudden hailstorm, then one might say that I’ve bared witness to faulty reporting. This, in time, makes a person cynical. Ergo, I prefer to watch every news broadcast with a glass of fine wine and the same sense of insecurity that has, for the most part, been validated before the end of the week in which the news cast airs.

Let’s take the Michael Jackson 2005 child molestation case for example. When the trial began on January 31 of that year, almost every report on any network was predominantly weighted to demonize Jackson and prove his guilt. As it turned out (and as anyone that hasn’t been in a coma for the last five or six years can tell you) the “King of Pop” was acquitted on all charges. So what does this say about the media as a whole? It says that despite the plain of propaganda on which these reporters choose to report, they usually end up looking like what one could call “media vultures” due to the lack of information disclosed to the public. In the Jackson case, Jackson triumphed over media notoriety despite a constant barrage of slanderous attacks. Then what can we learn from this predicament? If you are an idiot and you are truly proud of the fact, then feel free to believe everything that you hear on the television.

The bloodhounds at Fox News label themselves as “fair and balanced” coverage. I might begrudgingly give them the “balanced” part, but definitely not the “fair.” For those that have taken the time to really appreciate cable programming, chances are you began flipping through the channels beginning at channel 2 and then proceeded to mindlessly and almost deliberately take in as many different programs from as many different networks as you possibly could in abbreviated half-second increments; that is, until you reached the Fox News channel, watched 22 minutes of whatever happened to be on, and finally turned your television off and retired to your bed where you wept in dismay and contemplated suicide. Fox News is the poster-child for everything that could be considered unfair. Aside from their eternal opposition to liberal agenda, reporters on this particular network capitalize on the misery and lament of the people. Everything is a downer. Nothing has ever or will ever be right. Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I guess I’ll go eat worms. Fox News is televised anguish. The most interesting part about it isn’t even that the reporters are always dull and seemingly unhappy, because generally they’re not. Usually, they are either abnormally angry (as in Lorena Bobbit angry, which might actually be borderline psychotic) or too upbeat to deliver the saddening stories that plague the world. In the end, everyone is miserable except for the newscasters and me. I watch Comedy Central.

I had a dream the other night. Well, it wasn’t exactly a dream and it wasn’t exactly night. It was more like a conscious thought closely followed by a plan that I already new I would never have enough motive or drive to carry out. But since I don’t want to find myself in prison because of this particular piece of writing (and seeing as I have probably written things that are much more likely to lead to my imprisonment), we’ll say that I had a dream the other night. In this dream, I was walking around with a sniper rifle picking off anchormen one by one until there was none left. Then I came home and looked into the mirror to see that I had turned into Mr. Rogers. This raises two important questions to me, the first being “Why the hell did I turn into Mr. Rogers?” That one will probably perplex me for the rest of my natural life. The second and more important of the questions is “If someone did, in fact, kill off all of the world’s reporters, who would know?” Obviously, if there were no news anchors to deliver the news, then there would be no news. And without any news, who would know about my senseless and pointless mass media massacre? For that matter, who would care? What would the world be like if we all lived in complete ignorance? That would be a scene to behold. Maybe everything would be better. Maybe ice cream would taste sweeter and McDonald’s food would be less fattening. Maybe doctors would find a cure for cancer (but probably not AIDS). Maybe Donald Trump’s hair would grow back. But if any of that stuff did happen, how would anybody be able to figure that out?

The truth is, the world probably is better without news and newscasters and, for that matter, any form of mass media. But we, as Americans, need all of that crap to get us through the monotony of everyday, 9 to 5, minimum wage life. Women need Lifetime. Men with hormonal imbalances need Spike. Miserable, potentially homicidal writers need Comedy Central. America needs “fair and balanced” news coverage. But nobody needs Fox News.