My Dissatisfaction with the Media

The media clearly doesn't know what it's talking about when it comes to the economy. They never did, but it's becoming painfully obvious. I've observed the following headlines/clips/quotes in the past week (note: may not be 100% accurate as I'm doing this from memory):

"Buffet's $5B investment in Goldman Sachs could pay off." Wowzers. The world's premiere investor puts a whopping five billion dollars into a single company's preferred stock and there's actually a chance one of the greatest financial geniuses of our time could MAKE money on such a deal? Jimminy-Gee Willikers!

"Buffet's $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs is good for Goldman Sachs." Thanks. No, really, thank YOU.

"It's as American as apple pie. McDonald's apple pie that is. 2,000 of them. That's how much 700 billion dollars would buy for every single American." All right, CNN. Several questions. How is that relevant? How is that a remotely good comparison? What does it have to do with the situation? Who's going to understand anything better than they did before that? Do enough people think in terms of thousands of tiny pies to make that an accessible analogy? And finally, how does the fact that money CAN purchase apple pies--though in this case the money in question won't--make the situation, the bailout plan, or even the sum more "American"? Lizmonster, I want an answer to at least that last one.

"Bush: U.S. in midst of serious financial crisis." I suppose the fact that this is news to the president makes it news, but I'm pretty sure even Bush was told to say it was a crisis before tonight, when that headline was posted. If you don't have anything productive to say, don't say anything at all.

Which actually brings me to another disturbing media trend: celebrity news. I've noticed a lot more celebrity news creeping into my regular news, in part because most of the real news is economic, and not enough reporters think they can fake looking like they know something about economics. So we get celebrity gossip, which I suppose might also be a marketing decision to make readers feel better ("I don't understand any of these current event headlines, but I totally get that Lindsay Lohan's dad is pissed off his daughter's dating a lesbian stripper.")

Yeah, I figured I'd mention Lindsay Lohan, since her name seems to generate a lot of hits for me. Maybe I should work the word "nude" into this post too. Hey look at that, just did. Anyway, the following celebrity news is almost equally stunning:

From the FRONT PAGE of USA Today: "America loves New York" (actual headline). Now, it turns out they meant America the actress (from the show Ugly Betty), who is apparently filming there and seems to find most aspects of the city acceptable or better. Front page? Really? You couldn't just show a graph of corporate credit spreads to treasuries or a cartoon of Hank Paulson's old Wall Street buddies leaving a bag of flaming poo on his front porch in the middle of the night (you could depict them snickering behind bushes as the bathrobe-clad Treasury Secretary yells at no one in particular--I seriously think this would be a great political cartoon, by the way).

Also, yes, Lindsay Lohan is having a homosexual relationship with a stripper. I expect this to make the news, because it's (a) Lindsay Lohan (b) a stripper and (c) another gay celebrity. But Lindsay Lohan's dad (whose name I couldn't conjure if my life depended on it) is getting as much coverage as the celebrity would get under normal circumstances. First, who cares, and second, how is it news that overprotective fathers might not be thrilled about their daughters dating lesbian strippers.

In other gay celebrity news, American Idol runner up Clay Aiken has announced that he's a gay father--claiming he didn't want his 8-month old son to grow up with a father who wasn't completely honest. Thanks for the update, Clay, but everyone knew you were a gay father from the minute they found out you were a father.

And in further celebrity news, Sarah Palin has met with several world leaders, and is planning on meeting several more, for a total of 9 this week at the UN. This brings the total number of foreign leaders with whom she's exchanged a few words up to 9, and the total number of Americans with more foreign policy experience than she has down to several million.