“Shocking outrage…” or not
February 21st, 2009
My wife watches those news commentary shows like Nancy Grace and (occasionally) Showbiz Tonight on CNN. I get exposed to them regularly, though I generally can’t stand them.
Through this exposure, I have managed to distill their content down to four words. One of these four words will be mentioned every two minutes for the length of the broadcast:
- shocking
- outrage
- bombshell
- breaking
What amazes me about these shows is their ability to stretch virtually nothing into an hour of commentary. Showbiz Tonight last night, for example, really had one main story — the picture of a beaten Rihanna leaked to the media.
They spent at least 20 minutes with a panel of commentators, discussing the image. Then they did something else for 10 minutes (“breaking news tonight…”), then they came back to this story, and essentially talked about the exact same thing for another 10 minutes. Then something else (“shocking revelations tonight…”) then back to the Rihanna picture, where they said absolutely nothing new.
But there was outrage, oh man, was there outrage. When breaking news like this reveals a shocking bombshell, what else could there be?
Postscript: I visited the site of Showbiz Tonight to get the URL for the hyperlink above. The main headline? “TONIGHT: Rihanna photo outrage!”