Just Tell Me What the Guy Said, Already

 ~  In the Land of the Blind, the Man with One Eye Shouldn't Drive a Car.  ~

            I hate it when the news reports on something offensive that some famous guy said.  Don’t get me wrong, I love it when Kanye West professes his hatred for Asian midgets as much as the next guy, but if he did say something like that, we wouldn’t know it from the news.  All we’d know is that Kanye West said something and that a bunch of very short Asian people are really mad about it.  This happens all the time. 

            The next time you hear a news snippet like this, listen to hear if the announcer actually mentions WHAT WAS SAID to touch off this “controversy” in the first place.  The next time you read about the anti-Quaker, but pro-Oats, comment made by Wilford Brimley made at some black tie dinner to raise awareness for Noisy Child Syndrome, scan the article to see if the reporter actually reports the story.  Nine times out of ten, you won’t find the comment, and that’s the meat of the story.  The rest is just condiments. 

            It’s the fallout from the thing that gets reported.  It’s the talking head back-and-forth between the uptight free speech advocate and the even-more-uptight anti-slander subgroup activist that gets reported.  A moderator will let two sides debate a topic for an hour without even mentioning the thing that everyone tuned in to find out.  And this isn’t the newscasters just doing their standard “tease the story” shtick where they tell us that they’re going to deliver this scandalous, gossipy tidbit of “news” four times, right before their commercial breaks, before reporting the story.  This is a different phenomenon.  I’m used to their teasing routine.  It’s annoying, but it’s just a producers’ trick to try and get you to keep watching.  The non-reporting reporting is a totally different idea, and one that I don’t understand.  Are they trying not to offend while telling us that someone said or did something offensive?  Am I wrong and it really IS the same teasing phenomenon without the payoff?  Is it all just corporate news cowardice? 

            It’s like buying a pack of baseball cards, opening the wrapping and finding only gum that hasn’t been fresh since the Great Depression, and no cards.  You bought the pack to get baseball cards.  You went to that website to find out what the founder of Google said about transvestite Mormons.  You tuned into cable news to learn what Kiefer Sutherland said about Trinidadian and Tobagonian women between the ages of seventeen and nineteen.  And yet…nothing.  I WANT to hear the offensive comment.  We all do.  Even the members of the angry, offended group want to hear the comment.  That’s what got them angry in the first place (well, normally those guys are always on the verge of anger and are just biding their time, but the comment was still their touchstone).

            I don’t think that it’s all a natural by-product of our current PC worldview, but it’s clearly tied into that somehow.  Eventually we’ll look back on political correctness like we now do the telegraph---a quaint, probably necessary, but wildly limited, means to a better end.  It will be an historical footnote, an asterisk in sociological textbooks, and the butt of jokes that aren’t nearly as funny twenty years later.  It’s a great trend for comedy writers, but not so good for office water cooler jokes.  I just hope that, in the future, our newscaster robots will be unafraid to report the actual news.  They’re robots.  And if the work of Arnold Schwarzenegger has taught us anything, it’s that robots will take over the world at some point.  So, at the very least, they’ll be able to be honest and tell us what XG517-0 said about rusty four-wheeled maidbots and why Rosie from The Jetsons is so pissed off about it.  They’re robots.  And they’re in charge.  Why would they need to lie to us?