April 12, 2007--Guilty Pleasures: Glued to the Tube

When sick in bed with the flu, the only thing worse than the hacking cough is daytime TV. Unable to read or do e-mails because of the fever, what else is there to do but turn to the tube? That describes me during the past four days. But wasn’t I lucky that there was so much Breaking News.

After enduring Live with Regis and Kelly and incapable of watching more than an hour or two of the Soaps, I had no choice but to turn to the cable news channels. Expecting endless discussions about the unfolding scandal in the Justice Department, but with little choice—it was either this or waiting for Joan Rivers to show up on the Home Shopping Network—I was perversely happy that that other scandal involving Don Imus pushed that to the side and I knew that immersing myself in that would help get me through the morning.

I also quickly learned that the afternoon would prove to be even more diverting because, after my next after-lunch medication, all three networks were announcing that they would cut to the Bahamas for live coverage of the court hearing that would settle once and for all who was the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby. What a one-two. It doesn’t get much better than concurrent coverage of two stories of this kind. Even before the next dose of Z-Pack, I could feel my symptoms abating.

The next day, I found myself still riveted to the split-screen where on one side various media folks and rights advocates were tearing themselves and each other apart over Imus’ racist/sexist comments (and in many cases their own participation on his show) while on the other side of the screen Imus himself was shown to be engaged in a series of torturous apologies. Just as I was feeling my way into the meaning and implications of all of this and how it might or might not help race relations to have a full airing of the issues surfaced by his cruel joke, the TV screen lit up with more Breaking News—at 2:30 in the afternoon, the attorney general of the state of North Carolina would be holding a news conference about the Duke lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting an “exotic dancer.”

So it was clear that the theme for the day was to be race, with a strong emphasis in sex. An unbeatable combination for a sick shut in. I was beginning to think that maybe the flu wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

During sick-day three, the ripples from the Imus “incident” were approaching tsunami proportions when it was reported that sponsors such as Staples and GM were suspending all advertising on MSNBC, the TV outlet for Imus In the Morning, and from that alone it was clear to me, in spite of my fever, that it would be only a matter of time before they would fire him. Just as I was contemplating that possibility and its implications, the cable channels cut to still other Breaking News--at the Pentagon Defense Secretary Robert Gates was announcing that regular army troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan from now on would be required to serve for “no more that 15 months at a time” before being rotated home for a year of “dwell time,” rather than the 12 months in combat that was the deal when they volunteered.

But just as the implications of that were sinking into my over-heated brain, the news channels began to include stories and gossip about something else—whether or not Sanjaya was going to be voted off American Idol later that evening. Now I must confess that I not only knew who he was but, again desperate about what to do with myself the night before, I had for the first time watched a full episode of Idol and thought Sanjaya had actually done a pretty good job with Bésame Mucho. And, though I hadn’t text-message in my vote, I hoped America would keep him in the competition.

While waiting to see how things worked out for Sanjaya, I shut off the TV for a while to think about all of this and maybe even take a nap.

The Anna Nichole Smith business seemed familiar—Anna Nichole was a perfect choice to be turned into a pseudo-celebrity, someone famous for being famous. For years she has been paraded around as a quintessential gold digger who got a besotted a 90 year-old billionaire to marry her and then conveniently up and die, leaving all his money to her. While loving that part of the story the public was then titillated by the court battles that ensued—all the way to the Supreme Court where there was all sorts of snickering about how justices such as Scalia and, especially, Thomas, would handle her, so to speak. And then it got even better when she gained and lost 100 pounds, got pregnant, had her first born drop dead in her hospital room, and then she herself OD’d. So the fascination with her I understood.

I also got the lacrosse team story. Though even if what was claimed in fact had happened, as horrendous as that would have been, considering the competition among horrid situations that the news media might have pounced on, they chose this one to elevate because it combines the irresistible, intoxicating mix of sex and race and class and privilege. Here were a bunch of rich, spoiled, white, frat-boy jocks with nothing better to do than hire and then assault a lower-class black woman who was just trying to make her way in an unfair world by working part time as an exotic dancer. A perfect tabloid story.

The Imus situation is more complicated. His show is an unlikely combination of serious political dialogue and adolescent locker-room humor. His audience is so vast and loyal that journalists and politicians as diverse and exulted as John Kerry, John McCain, Dick Cheney, Joe Bidden, Frank Rich, and Tim Russert, to name just a few, have been frequent and comfortable guests on his show that intersperses interviews with them with course jokes that through the decades have offended Catholics, Jews, Evangelicals, women, fat people, homosexuals, Hispanics, and African-Americans. Who have I forgotten?

Everyone knows this is his show, including those who eagerly appear on it and especially NBC and CBS executives who have profited so greatly. So for the president of NBC to have said last night that though he has listened to the show for years, last week was the first time that he heard Imus say anything racially offensive suggests he is either deaf or a liar. Ditto for the media and political elite who have forever looked the other way. And then for the Rev. Al Sharpton to be leading the moral outrage is another outrage when he launched his own career by tearing New York City apart along racial lines by committing a literal felony in the Tawana Brawley case, a felony for which he has never apologized.

The situation with the Bush administration changing the deal with the brave young people who are risking their lives in the army is also business as usual and replete with its own hypocrisy. Secretary Gates announced this bait-and-switch policy as a way to bring “predictability” to the soldiers and their families—rather than the “uncertainty” of not knowing if the 12 month deal they signed up for would or would not be honored, now they will know for certain that it won’t be. They will know for sure that they too have been lied to.

But let’s get back to the good stuff—American Idol. Blame it on the medication but I confess to having tuned into last night’s show to see what the fates had in store for Sanjaya. No surprise, in contrast to all the Breaking News, this was the only place where I there was no hypocrisy to be found. It was clear that though Sanjaya may not be the best singer, many feel he is the worst, he is the star. Everyone realizes this. The producers may be concerned if he wins it would undermine the “credibility” of the show, whatever credibility means in this context, the one thing they know how to do is count and the numbers say that a good part of their audience tunes in to follow the Sanjaya saga. So they shamelessly promote him and make sure he doesn’t perform until all the others have, and they don’t reveal his fate until the last moment so the audience will hang in for the full hour. And they are certain never to interrupt with Breaking News.

One more confession—I have listened to Imus In the Morning for years and although I write lots of letters to the NY Times and Congress, I have never written to Imus to urge him to cut out the sexist-racist stuff. And I can’t blame that on the flu or the antibiotics.