Soft News And Softer News
The video I've linked, which is actually from last week, shows a paparazzo asking Kristen Davis and Mario Batali for "celebrity reaction to the passing of Barbaro." Batali was unaware that the Kentucky Derby winner had died, but managed to think on his feet and call the horse's death a "tragedy."
So there you have it: Reaction to the death of a horse from people who have nothing whatsoever to do with that horse. Or horses at all. But one was on "Sex and the City." So there's that.
While we're talking soft news – and by news I mean, you know, "news" – let's talk about Peter Johnson's piece today, which uses news of the fourth hour of the "Today" show to make this point: "Softer segments, not just about pop-culture icons such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton but also covering fashion, decorating and health, are taking on increasingly important roles in mainstream media."
It's hard to say to what degree this is actually true – it seems to me soft news has been a part of the mainstream media for a long time. ("Entertainment Tonight" went on the air in 1981.) Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism is right to point out to Johnson that "[i]t's not as though a fourth hour is going to supplant a white-paper documentary on hunger in America in the middle of the morning." But it's still interesting, and depressing, to see just how soft, and dubious, we'll go.
To that end, I thought I'd mention an episode of the excellent Ricky Gervais show "Extras" that I saw over the weekend. In the episode, the British media turns a small incident in the life of Gervais' character Andy Millman into a full blown scandal. Millman had complained that a child sitting near him at a restaurant was making too much noise. The child, as it turned out, had Downs Syndrome. His mother told Millman he was being a jerk and left. End of story. And that turned into this:
"Coming up today: What made rising star Andy Millman punch a defenseless Downs Syndrome child and his elderly wheelchair bound mother in the face – Denise Robertson will be here to speculate. Plus, Rwanda revisited. Twelve years after the genocide, a harrowing report from 'Big Brother 2' winner Brian Dowling."