NO CURE FOR MADNESS

For a week straight the tabloid newspapers in New York have featured on their front pages and bold headlines a prominent baseball player's divorce and the role in his marital breakup played by an aging blonde show business bimbo. Aren't there a couple of wars being waged, a presidential campaign conducted and a bunch of domestic crises occurring? Isn't the soaring price of gasoline worth a headline or two? The collapse of mortgage lenders managing 30 trillion dollars and imperiling countless homeowners? Or how about the Vice President flexing his muscles to get expert sworn testimony given before a Senate hearing stricken from the record like this was the old Soviet Union attempting to rewrite not only history, but current events? That one went down with barely a mention, never mind a hue and cry or even a whimper.

What's gives? Are our reporters so numb from bad news and a world gone mad that they leap on a sensational celebrity divorce like flies on what flies like to leap on? Isn't that nobody's business but the people getting divorced and the aging bimbo? And aren't regular journalists stepping on the toes of the 9,000 gossip publications and TV magazine shows whose only job is to cover these tawdry affairs so that people can enjoy the suffering of the wealthy? What about those buffoons? Why are newspapers taking the bread out of their children's mouths? Even dimwit leeches have to make a living.

And do reporters really want to go that route? Do they spend years in journalism school and paying their dues in the City Room in order to become the next Pat O'Brien? Now there's a guy who has completely transcended his status as a leech reporting on the misbehavior of celebrities by becoming a pretty monstrous celebrity himself, a real rootin-'tootin' sexual deviant, substance abuser and all around out-of-control wild man. Talk about blurring the lines! He's sort of like a scientist who morphs into one of his own lab rats. So what exactly is Pat O'Brien now? Can anyone definitively define his role? A guy famous for reporting on famous screw-ups who becomes a famous screw-up himself. You tell me what he is. There is no frame of reference in all the millennia of human experience to figure that one out.

There was a time when young reporters looked for serious stories, looking up to people like Jack Anderson and Woodward and Bernstein, serious journalists pursuing important stories. What happened? Well, for one, there was an earnest young reporter many years ago named Geraldo Rivera who broke an important story about heinous abuses being committed in New York State's mental hospital on Staten Island called Willowbrook, and actually followed it up with thoughtful and comprehensive coverage. The story was solid, journalistic and made a huge national and international impact that led to fundamental changes in a corrupt and underfunded system, a classic case of the power for good that thorough journalism can be. So what's this young reporter's next move? He goes and morphs into, well, Geraldo Rivera, enough said there. Journalism hasn't been the same since.

And neither has America. The next thing we know, we have a White House that dictates what the news stories are by handing reporters something called "talking points" (?) and every news broadcast and newspaper are discussing the same stories in the verbatim words of the White House press office the next day. What? Doesn't anybody in that field feel like doing their own damned job anymore? No laws were passed requiring this to go on, no coup has replaced the United States government with a tin-pot dictatorship that censors and controls the press. No, people just got mentally and intellectually lazy and very confused about what is and is not news reporting, even the journalists. The fact that a great many people believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim who refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance because a five-second blurb on TV or the internet says so speaks volumes about this growing collective insanity. Let's just hope this madness doesn't infect other professions, like doctors, otherwise we're all going to be getting lipo-suction and nose jobs to cure major diseases.