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Fakery, gossip turning into news
(by Barbara Christian - November 04, 2009)
WINDOW ON MAIN STREET, BY BARBARA CHRISTIAN
Fakery, gossip turning into news
What is news and what is not used to be simple enough to define. Reporters and editors lived by such quaint and literal phrases as, "If it bleeds, it leads." It's not that easy anymore.
Somewhere along the way, gossip and entertainment, once the territory of Walter Winchell and Louella Parsons, crossed over to become news.
Take, for instance, Kate and Jon Gosselin. They could be members of the Chagrin Valley Jaycees had they not had eight children and their own reality show, "Kate and Jon Plus Eight."
They were "normal" until they allowed a TV crew into their home to record their daily life. But instead of the "Brady Bunch," viewers got something different when cameras kept rolling after things got ugly, and the family began to disintegrate, and viewers were forced to watch the "Gosselin Express."
I use the word "forced," because the duo and their problems were 24/7, even when you had no intention of following the sad saga. We could not change the channel, click the mouse or turn the page fast enough to avoid them.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Kate and Jon story would get more time, hits and ink than the first moon landing. It was water torture as the details of their split were dripped onto our foreheads one by one.
The Kate and Jon sideshow almost made us nostalgic for the days when Paris Hilton just got drunk and disorderly.
Yet no one we knows watches "Kate and Jon Plus Eight." So if I never watched it and you claim you didn't watch it, then who did? Are we that easily manipulated? That gullible? That embarrassed that we know the details of the Gosselins' sad lives we can't admit it? Apparently.
Recently, the great film critic Roger Ebert wrote about "The Yes Men Fix the World: All the News it's Fit to Fake." It's a documentary about a New York-based political action group "specializing hoaxes that embarrass corporations by dramatizing their evils and excess," Mr. Ebert noted.
These "Yes Men" are so good representing corporate types that they called a news conference and convinced news outlets, Fox News included, that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had reversed its stand on global warming. The U.S. Chamber doesn't support global warming.
Mr. Ebert also related how the "Yes Men" were taken seriously by an audience, including security experts, when they introduced Halliburton's new "Survia-Ball," a person-sized bomb shelter shaped like a beach ball.
The movie also showed the hoax men faking a BBC interview with a faux Dow Chemical spokesman announcing a multibillion-dollar payment to the victims of the 1985 explosion at its insecticide plant in Bhopal, India. Dow's stock price plunged at the news, Mr. Ebert wrote.
Why the bogus story? As a reminder that the company never paid a penny to the injured, those born with birth defects of the families of the dead.
So what does Kate and the "Yes Men" have to do with one another?
Let's review. Kate and Jon have turned their life into a fake cause, which resonates with a group of real people attracted to questionable news, while the "Yes Men" occupy fake lives to make resonate news about real causes detracted by questionable groups.
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