Re: More Media overkill - so what?

[Donna Halper <dlh@donnahalper.com>]

Phyllis wrote--
>still, I am not surprised OR bothered by the fact that the media has made a
>big deal out of it.   

At the risk of being misunderstood, let me say again that I have no quarrel
with newscasts, be they radio or TV, doing tributes to such a great pop icon
as Sinatra.  My problem is that celebrity news is lazy journalism-- it's
easier to do interviews with fans of Seinfeld or people who knew Frank
Sinatra than it is to cover so-called 'hard news', stories that require a
bit more work than calling a publicist or attending a press conference.  I
believe that there is a time and a place for 'soft news', but to me, it
seems to have taken over entire newscasts way too often, as TV shows are
used to generate news stories ("tonight, you saw Andy on NYPD Blue battling
prostate cancer, a struggle faced by  a number of men in greater Boston, and
we'll interview one of them tonight...")-- that sort of story.  Again, it's
not a terrible sin to use your own shows as fodder for news stories, but
there is so much going on out there that never gets covered, while the
celebrity features seem to take up more and more of the newscast... and
that's just MY opinion, with no disrespect intended to Frank, even if he did
hate women...      

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