A Running Commentary

It was an overseas flight. The 14-hour kind. Long enough to exhaust my first two in-fight movie choices and still leave 5 hours to kill. Thus, I found myself watching “Man Of The Year”, the film in which Robin Williams’ Jon-Stewart-meets-Bill-Maher TV personality answers the call of the people and runs for president.

Mild humor ensues.

Somewhere early on in the film someone interjects that, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘more and more people are turning from traditional news outlets to comedy mock-shows for their news’. A light went off. Maybe that’s why I hate all canned evening news programs. The news of the day nicely watered down and served on the rocks with media shtick and a twist of human interest. Anderson Cooper’s iPhone tie-ins and trite pop culture references letting me know I am the target market. Now I knew what I’d been missing. I needed to stop watching Brian Williams’ forehead as he reads the teleprompter, tune out Wolf Blitzer’s math-teacher beard and start watching Comedy Central!

So I tried.

But aside from an occasional interesting interview or comment, these shows do about as much for building my positive engagement in the political process as reading The Onion. Are their people out there who don’t know that this President doesn’t speak clearly? Make fun of everything that everyone does certainly feeds my raging sarcasm and cynicism but what good does that do me or anyone else?

Who birthed this media monster and how does one kill it? I think it is eating my country.