It’s the end of the academic year, a very busy time, so I haven’t been to the gym as often as I used to go. Yesterday, I finally finished my pre-finals grading, got to the gym, and saw two TV sets right in front if me. One was showing the CNN newscast and the other one was offering the Fox News newscast. But this wasn’t easy to determine at a first glance because both channels were showing old footage of Monica Lewinsky.
After I got over my Rip Van Winklean shock of seeing this dead horse beaten on the news yet again, I wondered if my gym had purchased the Lewinsky segment and was showing it obsessively on an endless loop. The “news” about Lewinsky was that there was no news (shocking, I know). Lewinsky seems to have made a statement about nothing in particular, and this breaking news of international importance was yet again offered to the viewers in lieu of actual news.
And do you know what it means that this non-story gets such a massive coverage? That the majority of viewers is interested in these inane newscasts and wants to keep seeing them. And that’s really scary.
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