We Make the News

What strikes me most about the O'Reily scandal is not the delicious hypocrisy. Neither is it the hilarity of the falafel comment. What gets me is the fact that the sensationalism of the news, like a strain of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, has finally made it all the way up the food chain. We're not talking the salacious predicaments of OJ or Bill Clinton (people the news media spent too much time talking about). Now we have CNN and MSNBC covering a competing network's anchorperson. The news cycle has fully collapsed. There's no more representational space. The 24-hour networks are three points on a twirling merry-go-round. (Dan Rather doesn't count as that concerned something other than a studio soap opera.) I'm polemicizing, yes, but I think this story marks a watershed of media self-reflexivity and a certain cult of celebrity. I also want to point out the idea that the figurehead of a large corporate media outfit has replaced the figurehead of a nation as the out-of-control alpha-male who must be chastened. This leads me to think that a certain velvet revolution has transpired under our noses.