Of America's Being "Captivated" by the Nancy Guthrie Saga

We see it again and again. The national news media picks up some relatively minor story involving some crime that, while horrible for those personally involved, it would ordinarily not treat as a story of more than local interest because the story happened to involve someone who was nationally famous, or at least nationally famous-adjacent, and covers it all day everyday ad nauseam as that news media insists that the country is "captivated" by the story, can't get enough, that indeed the media themselves are captive to the overwhelming interest of the country in following the story.

It is, of course, a pack of very stupid lies, the truth the absolute inverse of what they say, the public captive to the media's feigned obsession, just as it was back when it was "All O.J. Simpson, All the Time." Speaking for myself, I was already sick of hearing about Simpson when he was fleeing the cops in that White Bronco mere days after the murders of his ex-wife and her lover, and, already that deeply disgusted by what I had seen of the not-so-bold new age of tabloid TV and infotainment that bespoke a country watching itself having a nervous breakdown in that way that gave the cultural life of the 1990s its particular quality, as I watched the Bronco slow to a halt what I was thinking is "We're never going to hear the end of this @#!%&*! story, are we?" And indeed we didn't, no matter how much many of us didn't care to hear anymore as the media talked endlessly about how "captivated" we all were all the way down to the tale's ignominious, justice-for-sale, race card-playing conclusion, with the press repeating the not just false but idiotic line when Mr. Simpson recently passed away, saying again and again how "captivated" we all were as, with rare exception, only people like me with no more than our unread little blogs for a platform, called out the lie, to no effect whatsoever.

As it happens I remember only so much about the bigger context prevailing amid the Simpson coverage. Certainly I remember that this was a time in which, rather more than now, there was acknowledgment of the country's economic and social pain amid deindustrialization and other troubles, and that in early 1994 Bill Clinton's characteristically shameless betrayal of his promises to do something about them was already apparent and infuriating much of the public, but I don't recall whether there was a particular subject on the national mind that they were trying to change. By contrast there certainly was one when the news media shifted into its "All Nancy Guthrie, All the Time" mode. Those who can remember the events of four months back should be able to appreciate full well that this was an especially blatant and stupid case of changing the subject the way the media always does when public anger is rising over an issue--the resolutely anti-democratic press we have loyal to its mission not of informing public opinion but managing that opinion. Thus did the news become "All Nancy Guthrie, All the Time" after the intensification of the protests against ICE in the wake of the shootings of Renée Good and Alexi Pretti, and the "change of subject" deflect public attention from the actions of ICE, the protests and everything to do with them, such that even though nothing changed, they have not commanded anything like the same level of notice, let alone concern, since. And then they went on giving us "All Nancy Guthrie, All the Time" amid the march to war with Iran that should have rated a good deal more mention than it did in the mainstream press, only those alternative outlets that the centrist champions of the mainstream endlessly denigrate, vilify, slight, even attempting to tell the public what it needed to know about a story that really affects their lives. Then after the war was on, it was only in those outlets that the public got anything other than the mushroom treatment (or worse) in which the mainstream media specializes, and to the lowest expectations about which it lived down as the war proceeded--and continues to live down to said expectations, to this very day, as that war rages on, with said media shamelessly banging the drums no matter what the public thinks of the matter, because, again, it is the audience captive to the media, not the other way around.

It's bad out there. Really bad. And with the Ellisons and their like-minded Silicon Valley cohorts striving to make themselves Kings of All Media every sign points to things getting worse that way, not just where their personal writ reigns supreme (as it does over at CBS, a news outlet whose online presence can these days seem to be devoted to promoting the Daily Mail-like tabloid racist filth that is the dishonestly named "Free Press"), but across a news media landscape that has done nothing but prove me wrong when I thought it hit rock bottom again and again until our arrival at this terrifying point in time.