by Dave Barry
The Media Is The Mess-Up
Perking Up The News
One swell thing about the United States is that newspapers can print whatever stories they want. Another one is that nobody has to read them.
In the United States, the press is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” No, wait, that’s the Ten Commandments. Anyway, whatever the Constitution says about the press, we Americans should be darned glad it says it. In the Soviet Union, the press is controlled by the official news agency, Tass, which is always giving out highly amusing versions of world events:
MOSCOW—Tass, the official Soviet news agency, announced today that Soviet troops have entered Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Iran, Albania, Mongolia, Egypt, Norway, and Saskatchewan at the request of liberation movements fighting the western capitalist colonialist Zionist hegemony of running-dog pipe-carrying widow-stabbing baby-eating lackeys of United States imperialism. Tass said the Soviet forces will ride around in nuclear-powered tanks until the various countries are safe from the threat of further oppression.
I imagine the Russian people regard Tass as a major chuckle. I bet they can’t wait to see the paper each day, so they can read what isn’t going on in the rest of the world. In fact, this is the big advantage their system has over ours: since the Russian government always lies, the people can safely assume that the opposite of whatever Tass says is true. Over here, things are more complicated. Our government lies a lot, too, but it can’t force the newspapers to print the lies accurately. From time to time the reporters try to get at the truth, and once in a great while they succeed. So you can be fairly sure you’re reading lies, but, unlike the Russians, you can never really count on it. The only reliable parts of American newspapers are horoscopes, weather forecasts, and economic outlooks, which are all consistently false.
Another problem with American newspapers is that they are positively obsessed with boring issues. Take the Helsinki Accords. You don’t care about the Helsinki Accords, and neither does any other normal person. You can go into every bar and shopping center in America, and you will never once hear anyone say: “Hey, how about them Helsinki Accords?” But newspapers will drone on and on about them at the slightest provocation.
Newspapers are also inordinately fond of writing about statements by presidential press secretaries. No presidential press secretary in the history of the United States has ever said anything newsworthy. I mean, his whole job is to make sure nobody has the vaguest idea what the President is thinking. Nevertheless, every morning dozens of Washington reporters troop into the press secretary’s office and write down everything he says:
PRESS SECRETARY: I wish to correct the accounts that appeared in some newspapers yesterday quoting me as stating that the President’s mood is one of Restrained Optimism. I did not state that. I stated that the President’s mood is one of Guarded Optimism.
REPORTER: Does this represent a change in the President’s mood?
PRESS SECRETARY: It does not represent a change from yesterday. The President has been in a consistently Guardedly Optimistic mood for two days now.
Now at this point, your average citizen would be asleep. But the Washington reporters think this stuff is dynamite. They’re wetting their pants over the President’s mood. They all go roaring out to find some presidential aide, who tells them, in strictest confidence, that despite what the press secretary would have them believe, the President’s mood is actually one of Hopeful Caution.
The next day all the papers run page-one presidential-mood stories long enough to choke Brahma bulls. The reporters read them. The President’s aides read them. Everybody else, including the President, turns directly to the sports section.
I think British newspapers have a much better approach. They ignore the official actions of the government, which hasn’t done anything in forty years anyway, and focus on something readers can respond to: sex. If you read the headlines in British newspapers, you get the impression that everybody in the government, with the possible exception of the Queen, is a pervert:
EIGHT MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT ARRESTED IN BED WITH NEWTS, CALLIOPE
This is the kind of story you can sink your teeth into, so to speak. I’d like to see American newspapers try the same sort of thing on the Reagan administration. Let’s face it: the Reagan administration is full of really boring-looking guys, guys who have investment portfolios and matching pen-and-pencil sets. If the newspapers write about what these guys say, the entire country will be asleep in a matter of weeks. People will be nodding off at work, in their cars, at the controls of commercial airliners. The country will collapse. The newspapers should see it as their duty to print stories about high-level sex. They wouldn’t even have to lie:
WASHINGTON—AN in-depth examination of the statements of Vice President George Bush reveals he has never publicly denied having spent two weeks in a motel with a lawn tractor.
Imagine seeing that in, say, the New York Times. It would turn the country around. People would start to care about public affairs again.
Junkyard Journalism
I bet you don’t read the National Enquirer or any of the other publications sold at supermarket check-out counters. I bet you think these publications are written for people with the intellectual depth of shrubs, people who need detailed, written instructions to put their shoes on correctly.
Well, you’re missing a lot. I have taken to reading check-out-counter publications, and I have picked up scads of useful information. For example, a recent Enquirer issue contains a story headlined “Whatever Happened to the Cast of ‘The Flying Nun’?” Now here is a vital story most of the so-called big-time newspapers didn’t have the guts to print. I mean, while the New York Times and the Washington Post were frittering away their space on stories about Alexander Haig, millions of people all over America were tossing and turning at night, wondering what happened to the cast of “The Flying Nun.” All over the country, you’d see little knots of people huddling together and asking each other: “Remember Marge Redmond, who played Sister Jacqueline in ‘The Flying Nun’? Whatever happened to her?”
Well, the Enquirer has the answer. Somehow, an Enquirer reporter got Marge’s agent to reveal that Marge has appeared in commercials for Tide, Bravo, Betty Crocker, and Ajax. “But,” adds the agent, “she is perhaps best known as Sara Tucker of Sara Tucker’s Inn on the Cool Whip commercials.”
I, for one, was stunned by this revelation. Believe it or not, I had never made the connection between Sister Jacqueline and Sara Tucker. Now, of course, it seems obvious: only an actress skilled enough to perform in “The Flying Nun” would be able to convincingly portray a woman who is so deranged that she puts huge globs of Cool Whip on her desserts at what is supposed to be a good restaurant. But without the Enquirer I would never have known.
And without the National Examiner, which is like the Enquirer except it uses even smaller words, I would never have found out that
40 VAMPIRES ROAM NORTH AMERICA
This extremely scientific story reports on the research of Dr. Stephen Kaplan, a parapsychologist who founded the Vampire Research Center. I got the impression that Dr. Kaplan is the Vampire Research Center, but the story never makes this clear. It also doesn’t say where he got his degree in parapsychology, but we can safely assume it was someplace like Harvard.
Anyway, Dr. Kaplan sent questionnaires to people who requested mail from the center, and forty responded that, yes indeed, they are vampires. In a way, this cheered me up. I mean, I always thought of vampires as evil, uncooperative persons of Central European descent who never even file income tax returns, and here we have forty of them who cheerfully fill out questionnaires for the Vampire Research Center.
Dr. Kaplan, who (surprise!) plans to write a book about vampires, believes there are lots more vampires around. “This probably represents the tip of the vampire iceberg,” he told the Examiner, which knows a good metaphor when it hears
one. If Dr. Kaplan is correct, I imagine that before long we’ll have a federal law requiring large companies to hire a certain percentage of vampires. They have been discriminated against long enough.
Here are some more stories you missed: “Bingo Can Restore the Will to Live On,” “$50 Operation to Restore Virginity....,” “A Machine Chewed Up My Legs,” “Cancer Ruins Sex,” “Dead Man Thanks Killer” and “34 Years in a Haunted House.” The last one is about a Massachusetts man and woman whose house is occupied by a ghost that does terrifying things, such as caressing the woman’s brow with ghostly fingers when she’s reading. By way of proof, the article is accompanied by an actual photograph of the woman reading.
Check-out-counter publications also perform valuable services for their readers. The Examiner has a psychic named Maria who uses her incredible psychic ability to answer baffling questions, such as “Dear Maria: A man I am dating keeps asking me to spank him. What should I do?” To which Maria replies: “Dump him. He’s nuts.” And some people have the nerve to claim that psychics are frauds.
But the best part of check-out-counter publications is the advertisements. They can make you rich. I, for one, never realized how much money you can make stuffing envelopes, but according to the ads in the Enquirer and the Examiner, the sky is the limit. I mean, people are willing to pay you thousands of dollars a week to stuff envelopes. I figure there must be a catch. For one thing, they never tell you what you have to stuff the envelopes with. Maybe it’s poison spiders. That would explain the high pay.
Another ad I saw in the Examiner just intrigues me. The headline says: JESUS IS HERE. Now I am going to quote very carefully from the ad, because otherwise you won’t believe me:
Tired of money-mad ministers and physicians? Free, drugless urine cures all ills, increases energy and intelligence and is prescribed in the Bible ... Due to its Ammuno-genetic qualities, urine is the only antidote for nuclear radiation ... If you are not fully convinced that the course heralds the Second Coming of Christ, return it in perfect condition for a full refund ...
The course costs seventy-five dollars; otherwise I would have sent for it already. I am very curious about it, and even more curious about the person who wrote it. I strongly suspect he’s one of the people who responded to Dr. Kaplan’s vampire survey.
Bring Back Captain Video
If we’re ever going to return the United States to its glory days (August 14 and 15, 1955) we’re going to have to do something about television. This country has been going downhill ever since they took the Ed Sullivan show off the air, and I say we should bring it back. Some of you may argue that Ed Sullivan is dead, but I don’t see how that would affect his judgment or delivery in the slightest. Ed knew talent when he saw it. He discovered such acts as the little dogs that wore dresses and walked around on their hind legs for twenty or thirty minutes while the audience, whose average IQ could not have been higher than eighteen, roared with laughter. That was entertainment. If we had Ed Sullivan back, we wouldn’t spend Sunday evenings being depressed by “60 Minutes”:
“Good evening, I’m Mike Wallace. Tonight on ‘60 Minutes’ we will explain why the Earth will be covered with a sheet of ice eight miles thick within the next fifteen years; we talk to a government researcher who has discovered that, because of a manufacturing defect, 93 percent of the refrigerators in the United States could explode at the slightest touch; and Andy Rooney will take an amusing look at whisk brooms.”
Another show we could do without is “Phil Donahue”:
“Hi, and welcome to the Phil Donahue show. My guest today is Wesley Snate, who was convicted in 1979 of charges that he bludgeoned roughly three hundred Los Angeles-area French poodles to death. Mr. Snate has written a very sensitive and moving book about his experience, entitled They Deserved It, and I have invited him on the show so I can ask him many sensitive and insightful questions so our viewing audience will gain a deeper understanding of dog bludgeoners and perhaps buy his book.”
The trouble with Phil’s approach is that, with all his tiptoeing around, he hardly ever gets around to the really depraved stuff everybody is tuned in to hear. For sheer depravity, Phil’s show can’t hold a candle to the old “Queen for a Day” show, in which deranged housewives competed to see who had the most miserable life:
FIRST CONTESTANT: My husband had a stroke and he lost his job and our house got repossessed so we had to live under a sheet of plywood in the supermarket parking lot but when it got cold our kids got tuberculosis except the youngest who got kidney disease so we built a fire under there to keep warm but the plywood caught fire and burned up my insulin and all our clothes so I had to wrap the kids in discarded plastic garbage bags which is giving them a rash.
SECOND CONTESTANT: Well, I have cancer, of course, and my husband was hit by a truck which gave him amnesia and he wandered off and I haven’t seen him since which would be okay except he had just withdrawn our life savings so we could pay for an operation for little Theodora who has lost the use of her fingers because of rat bites and can’t tend little Buford’s iron lung when I’m out picking through the garbage for supper.
THIRD CONTESTANT: Well my problem is that ... arghhhhh. (The third contestant keels over and dies.)
Then the audience would applaud each contestant, and the one who got the most applause would win an Amana freezer. It was a terrific show.
We’re also going to have to do something about children’s television. Today’s children watch shows like “Sesame Street,” which teaches them that the world is full of friendly interracial adults and cute puppets and letters that form recognizable patterns. This is, of course, a pack of lies. When I was a kid, in New York, my friends and I watched shows like “Captain Video,” which taught us that the world was full of evil forces trying to destroy the earth, which turns out to be absolutely correct.
“Captain Video” consisted of five episodes a week, no one of which cost more than eleven dollars to produce. The episodes always took place in Captain Video’s spaceship. It was an extremely low budget spaceship. For ex ample, Captain Video’s radio was a regular telephone handset, except he held it as if it were a microphone and talked into the listening end.
In a typical episode, Captain Video’s spaceship would be under attack by an evil alien warlord who had a robot named Tobor (get it?). The evil alien would order Tobor, who was played by a stagehand wearing cardboard boxes wrapped in aluminum foil, to attack. “Kill, Tobor, kill,” he would say, and the stagehand would go lumbering toward Captain Video. Just when he got close, Captain Video would come up with this brilliant idea: he would say “Go back, Tobor, go back.” Then the stagehand would start lumbering toward the evil alien. Then there would be some commercials. Then the alien would say “Kill, Tobor, kill,” again, and the stagehand would start toward Captain Video again, and Captain Video would say “Go back, Tobor, go back” again, and there would be more commercials, and before you knew it the half hour had just flown by. Kids today don’t get that kind of drama.
They also don’t get Meaningful Social Lessons, the kind we got from shows about cowboys and Indians. These shows taught us that not all Indians were savage killers. For example, Tonto was a good Indian. As I recall, all the others were savage killers.
In Depth, But Shallowly
If you want to take your mind off the troubles of the real world, you should watch local TV news shows. I know of no better way to escape reality except perhaps heavy drinking.
Local TV news programs have given a whole new definition to the word news. To most people, news means information about events that affect a lot of people. On local TV news shows, news means anything that you can take a picture of, especially if a local TV News Personality can stead in front of it. This is why they are so fond of car accidents, burning buildings, and crowds: these are good for standing in front of. On the other hand, local TV news shows tend to avoid stories about things that local TV News Personalities cannot stand in front of, such as budgets and taxes an
d the economy. If you want to get a local TV news show to do a story on the budget, your best bet is to involve it in a car crash.
I travel around the country a lot, and as far as I can tell, virtually all local TV news shows follow the same format. First you hear some exciting music, the kind you hear in space movies, while the screen shows local TV News Personalities standing in front of various News Events. Then you hear the announcer:
ANNOUNCER: From the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News Studios, this is the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News, featuring Anchorman Wilson Westbrook, Co-Anchorperson Stella Snape, Minority-Group Member James Edwards, Genial Sports Personality Jim Johnson, Humorous Weatherperson Dr. Reed Stevens, and Norm Perkins on drums. And now, here’s Wilson Westbrook.
WESTBROOK: Good evening. Tonight from the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness news studios we have actual color film of a burning building, actual color film of two cars after they ran into each other, actual color film of the front of a building in which one person shot another person, actual color film of another burning building, and special reports on roller-skating and child abuse. But for the big story tonight, we go to City Hall, where On-the-Spot reporter Reese Kernel is standing live.
KERNEL: I am standing here live in front of City Hall being televised by the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News minicam with Mayor Bryce Hallbread.
MAYOR: That’s “Hallwood.” KERNEL: What?