In response to a March CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll:
Here is a question about the actor, Charlie Sheen. As you may know, he frequently has used the word “winning” when talking about himself. Based on what you know about his recent behavior, would you say that Charlie Sheen has mostly been winning or mostly been losing in the past few weeks?
It’s hard to believe so many of the US people consistently vote against their own interests, support foreign invasions justified by unsupportable evidence, can’t name both their senators, and don’t know shit about Africa except that they’re pretty sure President Obama was born there when we’ve got such a stellar fucking media.
Okay, I’ll bite: why does the fact that major U.S. media continue to cover Charlie Sheen and ask stupid poll questions about him necessarily speak poorly of U.S. media? How does the decidedly public, intensely odd meltdown of the star of a massively popular television show not qualify as pretty legitimately newsworthy?
Am I missing something here? Since when has any mainstream news organization’s mission been only To Report Very Seriously On Very Serious Events Happening In The World Seriously? And anyway, blame CNN for illiteracy and the decline of American civics all you want — as if our news media were the cause rather than an effect — but maybe this is just what media looks like when you give the people what they want.
