Djelloul Marbrook

The media have a dark secret they’re not worried about in the least because they know you don’t want to hear it: the public is hopelessly addicted to cheap drama, to the modern equivalent of the penny-dreadful.

Every so often some goody-two-shoes kvetches that the media don’t give us enough positive stories. For a while there’s a spate of positivism, like a spoonful of castor oil, on the front page and the screen, but it soon gives way to the reliably bad news and our reliable revelry in it.

The good-news story is the media’s listless pro forma nod to criticism that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. They know our bread and butter is rotten news, nasty remarks, dirty deals, scandal, polarization, blather and the exquisite delights of ignorance.

So when we talk about a better world we’re talking about curing our addiction to theatrics, and we’re no more ready to go cold turkey when it comes to that than we’re willing to stop shopping at Wal-Mart because it’s a labor-busting plug-ugly Grendel.

That’s what the media love about us, our addiction to the very news we complain about. We love to read it, watch it, and complain about it. If the media gave us what we say we want—good news—we’d be so bored they’d have to close up shop.

Under the circumstances, having somebody more effective than Kofi Annan at the helm of the United Nations, having someone more truthful in the
White House, having someone sane running Iran and Venezuela might help a little bit, but what would we do for entertainment? How would we cope with all that sickeningly positive news?

Let’s face it, we’re the problem. We’re at the threshold of a big election and we’re talking about throwing all the rascals out, left and right, getting ourselves a real congress, taking matters into our hands, but we know darned well we’re going to elect more liars, more crooks, more ideologues, more of all those second-raters who keep getting our dander up, because we love them. And we love the media we say we hate because they keep us so permanently het up about the things we have no intention of changing.

We listen to all those men and women of the cloth—any old kind of cloth—talking about the good news that’s being suppressed, and we nod and clap and say hallelujah, knowing all that good news is happily where it should be, in the round file. But we sure do enjoy complaining about it being there.

Cold turkey would be having to read and hear and watch all that good news. We’d be clawing the mortar out of the walls if we couldn’t hear about all the dirt somebody did so-and-so the other day. Why else have the soaps been so popular all these years? They’re not exactly set in the world the preachers say we ought to have but for the media’s heedless disregard of truth in the search for dirt.

Donald Rumsfeld, he who always sounds so condescendingly plausible in the midst of the wreckage he’s wrought, is spending tax money to bring us the good news from Iraq, you know, all the news those bad guys in the press aren’t telling you. Maybe he’s not a cynic after all, maybe he really doesn’t know how much we love bad news. But the one thing he knows for sure is how to spend our money.

We’re all wallowing in the dirt. We rub it on, we eat it, we throw it, and if that weren’t the plain old terrible truth, we’d have exactly the media the preachers say we deserve, and we’d have it yesterday, because if you believe the media aren’t giving us exactly what we want, why you’d believe almost anything, wouldn’t you? You might even believe me, and then where would you be? Hmm?