At Time‘s Swampland blog, Joe Klein offers some media criticism (er, “media culture” criticism):
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.A certain newsmagazine–hint: not this one–has put Populist Rage on its cover this week and features a series of essays, several quite good, about all the fury churning out there in pitchfork land. I suppose that there is a fair amount of anger about…
…[Y]es, people are “angry” at Wall Street. They are also “angry” at Octomom. I wonder if the depth and quality of those two rages differ–or is this all just a television show?
…[M]ost of the anger we see and hear comes from people who are paid to be angry, on cue, on cable television–as opposed to people with actual grievacnes. Suddenly, the White House press corps goes barking mad over the AIG Bonuses. It is said that the bonuses are an aspect of the bust that the “public” can understand; in truth, the bonuses are an aspect of the bust that reporters can understand…
If you want to be angry about something, get pissed at a media culture that goes beserk about bonuses one week and forgets all about them the next. And be worried, quite worried, about a society for whom anger is a form of entertainment.
