Read this first:
The diabolical transformation of journalism into entertainment seems to be complete. In a 219-word blog article, 103 words are quoted. Remember what you were taught in freshman comp classes about using long quotes to take up space? That leaves a mere 116 words for reporting. And it all leads to Twitter feeds poking fun of the subject of the blog article. It’s the Jon Stewart model. Dress yourself up as a news anchor, read the news, and tell jokes about it. All without irony and all with a super-seriousness that belies the laughter caused. What is made fun of becomes political thought and eventually political action. The generation now in their late-20s/early 30s has been raised on hollow irony and the comingled world of journalism and entertainment is the fruits of that vapidity.
You can argue Jon Stewart is merely a manifestation of those who watch him, or a manifestation of what they believe in. It’s the TV as a mirror idea. But although that may be true, perhaps it’s not a mirror at all, but a conversation. But a slightly off conversation because what this means is that Joe Liberal 30 Something turns on his TV and watches a guy who’s dressed as a news anchor and sits behind a news anchor desk and formats his show like a TV news show, and even though JL30S knows on some level that he’s watching fiction, that what JS is saying isn’t the exact truth and that it’s a funny show and that it’s satire and that in some ways it tells the news, bc there is no TV news that I know of that isn’t a show, entertainment, that somehow the idea and the tone and the flippant use of occurrences and circumstances or facts seeps into the public consciousness and as any student of human group behavior will tell you, the human animal is very apeish when it comes to behavioral actions. So there’s this sick anemic snarky let’s-tear-down-everything and just be happy mentality seeping into the National Conversation via social media in unprecedented ways. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Really. I’ve got that attitude. But the sinister side to that attitude is that everything sucks, and while that may be true, there are things that suck in order to make other things better. There’s always a loser, and though it’s human nature to make that happen as little as possible to oneself, there’s something else to trying to make the world a better place and not realizing that sometimes when you make one thing better, you make another worse. Burdens don’t disappear; they shift. And in admitting that, we lose connections to things like shame and hurt and unfulfilled longing and fear and loss, all things that tear us apart inside and which by nature we shun and run away from and do our best to make our road a smooth one, and that though we’ve changed feeling shamed to shamed-to-be-feeling, these things are real and require our utmost attention, our honest attention. It’s Know Thyself. It’s honesty.
Bellicose Blatherings 
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