The News Cycle: Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

05-31-2011 • OfTwoMinds.com/blog

The full quote from Macbeth (Act V, Scene V): It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Every "news event" is terribly important, until a few hours later it is unimportant. This is a form of madness, a madness which goes unrecognized in the crazed, turbulent flood of "news." To be sure, a handful of people within the Mainstream Media (which now includes the Web aggregators such as HuffPo/AOL) do labor away at an honest account, but these reports are either buried beneath an avalanche of dross or they are touted (briefly, of course), as the Media's Potemkin Village: you see, we really are doing good journalism here. The ugly truth is the Mainstream Media now depends on adverts aimed at the top 10% of the populace for its survival. It's all well and good to talk about journalism, blah blah blah, but I've got a kid in private school and a mortgage, and the last thing this "news organization" needs is to undermine the advertisers by calling the entire Status Quo into question. Simply put, the top 10% of households are the ones paying the media's bills. Their consumption of goodies accounts for 40% of the entire U.S. economy, and so advertising rather naturally skews to serve their desires and aspirations. The debt-serfs and tax donkeys below (I raise my hand here) may have aspirations to the lux life, but with the home ATM shut down, costs for essentials floating ever higher and earnings in decline, their discretionary income approximates a shovel full of snow dumped on Death Valley asphalt in July.