Keep your dirty laundry

We can do the innuendo
We can dance and sing
When it's said and done, we haven't told you a thing
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry

— Last verse from Don Henley's 1981 hit Dirty Laundry

As I was driving home this afternoon, a song came on the radio that I hadn't heard in a while — a song that topped the Billboard charts in 1981 and is one of my favorite social commentary songs: Don Henley's Dirty Laundry.

The song, which is about the shallowness of local TV news, struck a particular chord with me because I'd just read an Associated Press article by Jocelyn Noveck in the newspaper this morning about the stupid media frenzy surrounding Charlie Sheen's erratic behavior and his ouster from the CBS comedy Two and a Half Men.

The article quoted from several columnists who have criticized the news networks for harping on Sheen's every word, including Jeff Jarvis, Julie Moos, and Aaron Barnhart. And then it juxtaposed their perspective with this passage:

"Not at all," said ABC's Andrea Canning, when asked by media critic Howard Kurtz on CNN Sunday whether she'd had any hesitation about her extensive interview with Sheen for "20/20," which generated huge ratings. "I don't know if you can really stop the train once people are this interested in it."

And no, she replied when asked if now, the actor had had enough air time. "You know, I still think he has some things to say," she said.

Translation: We're going to ride this fake story for as long as we can, until people are so absolutely sick and tired of it that it won't bring in ratings anymore.

If our brain-dead traditional media spent more time and energy covering our country's dizzying array of economic, health, and environmental challenges (not to mention our dealings with other countries) we might be better informed as a citizenry about the challenges we collectively face. But instead of offering substantive coverage about meaningful topics, they serve up this tripe.

Charlie Sheen's ravings may be fascinating to rubbernecks, but his escapades are not news and should not be covered as a "news" story.

In our view, the coverage Sheen is getting isn't just excessive. It's unfounded.

If the people who work at ABC, CNN, CBS, and NBC had any self-respect, they'd keep this prattle out of their newscasts and newsmagazines.

But it seems they can't help themselves. They're more interested in generating revenue for their parent media conglomerates than fulfilling any journalistic responsibility they might have once professed to care about.

"News" to Les Moonves, Rupert Murdoch, Bob Iger, and Jeffrey Bewkes (the CEOs of CBS, "News" Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, and Time Warner, respectively) is just another form of entertainment.

Celebrity gossip doesn't actually have the deep appeal that the likes of Andrea Canning think it does. In 2007, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press released a survey in which almost ninety percent of respondents agreed that celebrity scandals receive too much coverage. We're not generally fond of polls here at NPI, but ninety/ten is a pretty big split, and reflects our own insights.

In the same survey, fifty four percent of respondents identified our brain-dead traditional media as the culprit behind excessive coverage of celebrities.

Are people who watch this stuff to blame, to some extent? Sure... but they're not the ones making the decisions about what to cover. They're consuming what's being produced. As any motorist who has waited to get past a car collision on the highway can attest, morbid curiosity often gets the better of people.

To quote Don Henley, singing from the perspective of the Andrea Cannings who have jobs in television, "Just give me something, something I can use/People love it when you lose, they love dirty laundry."

Here's our message for Andrea Canning and her celebrity blather-obsessed colleagues: Keep your dirty laundry. We don't want to constantly hear about Lindsay's substance abuse or Britney's legal troubles.

Nor do we desire a blow-by-blow account of Charlie Sheen's verbal abuse of the cast and crew of Two and a Half Men.

What we do want is in-depth coverage of the issues that matter. Start providing that, and you'll win back at least a little of the respect that you've lost.