Jul
8
Written by:
7/8/2010 7:50 AM
Thanks to the magic of television, we know that
Lindsay Lohan is going to jail. We know that she is upset about going to jail.
We know she had an expletive painted on her fingernail during her court hearing.
We know who she is whether we want to or not, because her 90-day jail sentence
merited coverage by national broadcast news outlets.
There were tearful images of the 24-year-old woman, who rates such high-level
media coverage because she’s a national security risk. Or perhaps a weapon of
mass destruction. Maybe she is a war being fought by American citizens on
foreign soil. I heard she’s the next Dalai Lama.
The “Today” show featured an in-depth report on Miss Lohan that included indecipherable
close-ups of her nastified fingernail. We learned from NBC’s legal analyst that
the fingernailed judge gave the young lady a somewhat harsh sentence. A shocker
indeed, especially for someone who’s been drunk in public for a decade. Anyone else would be sponging up tarballs in a orange jumpsuit, but that’s
because they are not Nobel Prize-winning geneticists.
The follow-up coverage on “Today” pegged out the silly meter with NBC-logoed
screen-grabs of Lohan’s tweets. Twitter, after all, is a hotbed of Mensans. Then
the feature piece: “Lindsay in Lock Up: What Will Jail Time Be Like for Lohan?”
It launched with an interview of a felonious stock broker who now “counsels
people on how to survive jail time” because South Africa already has a
president.
“She will be confined and that will be very, very difficult,” this expert said,
clarifying everything.
Several other such individuals who became experts by writing books were
interviewed by Meredith Viera, herself robbed of an Emmy nomination-robbed-for playing it straight through the
entire eight-minute piece. Viera’s will stand as one of the most extraordinary
demonstrations of television acting ever captured on an enormously expensive
high-definition studio camera.
To be fair or something like it, “Today” isn’t exactly a “news” show, even if
the piece was presented as such. Brian Williams cut right to the chase later on
the more serious “Nightly News,” which covered the event because Lohan is a
Russian spy posing as Queen Elizabeth to infiltrate Research in Motion on
behalf of Motorola.
The extensive media coverage given this sorry spectacle says a lot about the news
business in the United States of Celebrities. Gossip sells defective Toyotas
better than images of brain-injured Americans returning from deployments in
Afghanistan. Everyone watches stories about drug-addled magazine people, and
they don’t incite one or another domestic extremist group into ranting about
journalistic bias. Lindsay Lohan is a zero-risk story; a no-brainer that adds
absolutely nothing to the public discourse for which news is constitutionally
protected.
Unless she is the world’s leading expert on biological warfare. Or a deadly Al-Qaeda-trained assassin posing as a drunken floozy. Maybe she’s the Avatar master
of all four elements, a Yaqui mystic or the ring-bearer. She could hold the key
to eternal life, or be a necromancer.
More likely she’s just a kid in trouble that makes for decent ratings. Too bad
for everyone.
3 comment(s) so far...
McAdams On: What’s On TV
Your comments are right on! It is time the American Broadcast industry take a long hard look at what it has become: tabloid press, irrelevant. No wonder more and more people are turning off the tube and finding other pastimes.
By on
7/10/2010 12:47 AM
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McAdams On: What’s On TV
I was excited to read about the History Channels foray into the world of 3D ... their first 3D TV episode on THE UNIVERSE show airs this week on DirecTV... great to see 3D being used for exciting science programs... thanks to a new and affordable 3D Camera rig for professional filmmakers which means indie producers and TV producers will now be able to develop great content for 3D channels... read all about it at http://bit.ly/ptd3d
By on
7/27/2010 2:16 PM
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McAdams On: What’s On TV
Amen. In the words of Walt Kelly's Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
By on
7/8/2010 4:10 PM
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