Let’s be honest. We are an impressionable species. Someone says to you, “You look great” and you feel a little better about yourself. Someone else says to you, “Whoa! Did you take a bite out of a Hot Garbage salad? Your breath is dancing!” and you nervously raise your palm to your face, exhale, and check the validity of the observation. In short, we let the outside world define us. But no friend, no matter how brutally honest they are, has the sway of the current incarnation of the media. The Media not only tells us who we are but what we should believe to be important, valid, and pertinent. Today’s infotainment-news is a good indicator of what’s wrong with the way we interpret and navigate our society. The qualifications of most news worthy stories include: Controversy Factor, Sexiness, and Consumer-Attention-Grabbing-Rating.  Unfortunately for the sake of most popular media, I feel the last criteria to be considered is a tie between Factual Basis, Perspective and Relevance.

News should and used to serve as the vegetable to our TV show/Movie main course and our Gossip desert. With the advent of the Internet we gained a constant stream of snacks to eat (which is great when you’re busy and don’t have time to eat real meals). But, if we’re too busy to plan a full, well-balanced meal, we’re probably also to busy to go to the grocery store and pick out the smart ingredients and we’re certainly too busy to be bothered getting them half price by clipping coupons from Sunday’s paper. So we turn to Popeye’s or Hungry Man frozen dinners. To meet our demands and our busy lives, the news, which was the boring-not-so-fun-tasting-essential part of our meal, has forgone its purpose and has started serving up pizza instead of string beans. We’re consuming tons more information (and food coincidently!) but we’re not getting the sustenance.

Who wouldn’t want pizza instead news? We love pizza.

We also love exaggeration. We love drama and we love to see people in so called “high society” crash and burn – like Icarus, son of Daedalus, who flew to close to the sun against his father’s warning. I like to think that before the accident the exchange between father and son went something like this.

Daedalus: (Played by Sam Jackson) Dammit Boy! I told you to stop flying so damn high!

Icarus: (Played by Robert Pattinson) Lay off. I’m already bovered (read: “bothered” with British accent)

Daedalus: You what?

Icarus: Bove…never mind! I’m so affected! I’m going it alone!

He then flies higher, bursts into flame and crashes into the sea leaving his father to fly alone.

Daedalus: Damn glittering fool! Should have listened to my bad ass!

He flies away.

Greek mythology dates back centuries, the tales are some of the most well known even in our modern society.  Just like the news, this myth was used to inform people, to warn kids to heed the advice of their fathers. The Odyssey taught husbands if they leave their wife at home, dudes are going to come out of the woodwork and hit on her. Oedipus? Don’t do your mom, IT’S WRONG!!!! (Sad to think there was a time when that was a lesson we had to learn…) Funny how these myths, like the news, helped shape a vision of us. Fiction does seem to make the advice sexier, don’t you think? Fiction sugarcoats a moral for its listeners and because we love sugar and we love gossip, put the two together and you’ve got a recipe for a helluva ripsnorter. If dinner should have some semblance of balance, and should definitely include vegetables, so should our consumption of Media. The news used to be our vegetables and now the news is as nutritious as a Snickers bar.

Let’s look at more Greek myths, shall we?

In ancient Greece, Gods who were worshipped weren’t without flaw. They had very human frailties and part of praising them and their myths was to tell all parts of their story even the not so flattering parts. The Gods could be heroic and divine but a lot of the time came across looking like complete stupid heads. The Greek myths were just an early version of TMZ and Olympus was its Jersey Shore. Take the family Zeus. The family Zeus was a hot mess. Zeus was into some weird bestiality freaky stuff and was sleeping around behind his wife Hera’s back. She was pissed at him cause he kept having these half-God kids all the time with human women (who btw he would seduce in the form of swans, fish, deer or whatever animal he could think of. Which can only make me think this story was told to drill the lesson: Don’t do animals! IT’S WRONG!!!!). The fact that Hera was an awful stepmother to Hercules only made matters worse for the family. Hercules was an amazing athlete he had all the major sandal deals and a bunch of toga endorsements all of which went away when Hera spiked his energy drink with the wrong kind of steroids sending him into drunken fit of rage. The next day, The Thebes Times reported how Hercules was arrested after being found passed out face down in a pile of horse manure in the massive stables of Augeas. The charge? Double homicide, the bodies of his wife and child were found murdered at his crib. (Don’t get mad at me for going dark, that’s how the story goes.)

Our fascination with the Gods is no different today only instead of Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes we’ve got Tiger Woods and “Bradjelina.”  Who in their own way do kind of serve as modern day fertility deities. Don’t believe me? Remember Octo-Mom? Yea, makes me nauseous too. She manipulated her face to look like Angelina Jolie and had eight babies. (Say that sentence a few times to yourself and I swear one you’ll start to have a nosebleed.)

We’re constantly bombarded with gossip that picks apart and exposes the wild and crazy escapades of today’s celebrity aristocracy. Why? Oh I don’t know, I suppose it makes us fell better about ourselves… Hell, I can’t lie; laughing at an over-exposed hot-mess of a person does make you think you got it together. But, like a sugar high it quickly vanishes, dropping your blood glucose levels to dangerous proportions leaving you a quivering pathetic shell in need of another quick fix. And here’s where I start thinking about vegetables again. Gossip isn’t giving me the vitamins and minerals I need so what will? How about real journalism and news? Will that help? It might. It might inform me about something going both inside my community and outside of it. It might teach me new things about new people and new ways of thinking, all of which give me better insight into myself! My New Self!  The self who’s more proactive about what he eats and the way he eats, and the relationships he makes and holds and his role in his very own community! The self that’s so extremely well informed about the politics and legal matters that he’s able to be a watchdog against those who would take advantage of the weak, poor, uneducated, mal-nutritioned citizens of the world. This self forms groups, he organizes, he rallies, he petitions, he speaks out against the multi-headed hydra of lies and deceit! He’s BECOME OUR NEW MYTHIC HERO!!! GREGG SON OF LOUGANIS!!!! Let us worship him and wait…

(*Panting* Give me a sec…)

Damn, I thought I was on to something.

Anyways, possibly a more realistic outcome of real journalism and real news would be that all of us would become just a little more informed. Just a little. And that, I believe, would be a major improvement. I don’t expect people to go cold turkey on all the media junk food. I just want you to cut down on the junk and to start ingesting some real food in its place. If you can’t find it at your local grocery (news channel), find a good farmers’ market/public radio/TV station/website. I hate to sound like your mom, but we spoke the other day and we’re both worried about you. We want you to take better care of yourself and call more.

The news is the way it is in part because people don’t want to be bored or depressed by what’s going on in the world. We want it to be fast, sexy, big, bright, and useless.  We want to turn our brains off when we get home, and we want to be distracted from the everyday. When I, on occasion, happen upon a CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, local news program, a news report is the last thing I feel I get. It really is like junk food. I enjoy the first bite (because it often resembles a scene from Armageddon or Independence Day) and then I’m just eating for the sake of eating and I’m not getting actual nutrients at all, just the same repetitive bite after bite. After the fleeting interest, I realize that what I’m watching is stupid. They cover the Health Care Reform Bill and only interview the people who want to repeal it as opposed to actually explaining what this means, and helping us move forward. Or they cover Snowpocalypse in NYC and make it seem like the most pressing, immediate, dangerous, world-ending event ever recorded in the history of man. They give interviews to the people who are being interviewed on every other channel instead of finding a new, equally important story, and they think that asking us to follow them on Twitter is really going to make them better journalists.

We are what we eat and if you eat crap you become crap.