The entire TV media apparatus goes into periodic frenzies. As one story wears down they will collectively be on the hunt for another, sometimes latching onto bizarre, meaingless events like a mutated deer tick, not release their suckers until said subject is devoid of all content, relevance, or life. And then they’ll go on for another week or two before giving up the ghost.
So I think it would be an amazing idea if someone were to collect a history of these media frenzies over the past 10 or 15 years and make some sort of chart or list out of them, maybe even with pretty pictures and dates. Stories which were mostly being ignored at the time could be detailed for bonus points. It could actually be a pretty big project, maybe even an entire website. It would require either someone with really good memory or one of those nice media search tools. Or just google and a lot of patience.
Failing that, we could try to remember as much as possible in this thread…
A very basic example of what I’m talking about:
OJ Simpson.
…
Elian Gonzalez.
Columbine shootings.
…
9/11.
…
That guy who killed his wife and said he was fishing on Xmas.
Terry Schiavo.
Someone was killed on a cruiseship.
OMG Michael Jackson is a freak, let’s watch him walk into court all day.
Insert missing white girl of the month here.
Anna Nicole is dead and wait until you hear…
FLASH: Anna Nicole slept with multiple men.
Britney Spears doesn’t wear panties. Cite inside.
Imus said a bad thing.
Duke guys are actually innocent. Let’s pretend to talk about racial justice.
Virginia Tech shootings.
Paris Hilton got a DUI or ten.
Paris Hilton is going to jail.
Not really.
Yes really.
You’ll notice that being on the list doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a pointless fluff piece. It’s very likely that the media will treat any subject as shallowly as possible regardless of its importance, but it isn’t required to be completely irrelevant. The only requirement is near complete media saturation.
These things kill 8 people out of 5 billion in the world and there’s people from the CDC on TV talking about the possibility of pandemics, and people go out to buy masks and bottled water.
Still remember a poster a couple years back when bird flu started talking about how his brother was a doctor, and the bird flu thing had him really scared, and it was a good idea to buy masks. I laugh in the face of irrational fear.
I’ve always thought that reporters just keep reusing the same “KILLER DISEASE!” stories over and over again, only updating the name of the disease and the location.
I don’t know that 9/11 or OK City can really be classified as “media frenzies” because they were actual long-term stories about actual nationally and internationally important events. Media frenzies are missing/murdered blonde girls and shark attacks.
A nationally famous radio evangelist vanishes from Los Angeles beach in broad daylight! Tearful crowds holding weeklong vigils, praying for her safe return! A million-dollar ransom note with threats of white slavery! Her miraculous appearance in the Arizona desert with tales of chloroform, kidnapping and torture in a Mexican shack! Then … scandal! The mounting evidence that she’d run off to have a lovers’ tryst with a married man!
Oh, here’s another one - Annie Oakley’s “cocaine addiction arrest,” engineered by William Randolph Hearst. And her campaign to sue him for libel, where she won 54 out of 55 suits against his papers.