Saturday, December 28, 2002

clone clowns rant

NPR had an inordinately long piece on the big announcement today about the alleged first human clone: The First Human Clone? I figure it must be a slow news day or something since an announcement by a lunatic fringe group, with no proof or even one shred of evidence, generally doesn't command more than a passing glance by a news editor. Yep, must be a slow news day. No hard-hitting analysis of what's going on in North Korea and why Bushie isn't threatening to blow them off the face of the earth like he is Iraq (could it be NK has no oil? Hmm.), no reports on the strike in Venezuela and the impact it's having, no media analysis of the Iraqi weapons report (guess we're relying on the gub'mint to give us the truth about what it says), nothing much about the real impact of the unemployment extension cutoff, which will affect several hundred thousand people ... nope, a good 20 minutes devoted to some dippy cult. Embarassing fluff. Definitely what I want to spend my pledge dollars on, right ...

Actually, now that I think about it, NPR has been very fluffy lately: a long piece on a guy who wrote an book on the anthropology of the rich, another too long piece on a book of photographs of girls at self-conscious points in their lives, etc. etc. It's not that I object to NPR covering these topics -- I love quirkiness and trivia and things like that -- it's just that 20 minutes is entirely too long to devote to weightless topics. Especially when the journalists covering them are, ah, less than incisive. I think the dippiest was the long piece on how states ranked on some charitable giving scale put together by some organization. The scale wasn't even indexed, so it means nothing. A guilt trip I suppose, just when people are worrying about how they're going to pay for heating and food and health insurance for their kids when their unemployment extension runs out.
posted by lee on 12/28/02 at 04:38 AM

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