To whom it may concern:
I’ve finally decided to take the advice Peter Finch gave in his inspired performance as a demented anchorman in the film “Network.” I’m sticking my head out the window to say I’m mad as hell and I’m not taking it anymore. Furthermore, I’m going so far as to admit that I am the reason for the madness. I’m to blame for all the public hysteria. I am the media.
As a freelance cameraman in New York City I’m a hired gun for any TV producer with a story to sell, and believe you me there are plenty of folks working for the networks wishing to sell you a story. These stories are sometimes termed “news events.” They purport to document a kind of reality. I do not ask whether each story is informational or enlightening or tasteful or relevant or truthful. If I am available, I’ll shoot it. All I ask in return is payment for services rendered. I have a mouth to feed. I have bills to pay.
The producers I work for don’t ask these questions either. They have jobs too, and they want to keep them. What they want to know is their budget and their deadline. With their allotted time and money each attempts to titillate you more than his or her rivals, working for all those other networks vying for your discretionary time.
A producer once asked me to videotape a man being led by the FBI from his criminal booking to a jail cell. The man was handcuffed and paraded in front of my camera for what’s termed the “perp walk” in video news parlance. The FBI waited with their human freak-show until I was ready. It was never explained what crime the man was alleged to have committed, and I didn’t ask. As he was led past my lens he called me a vulture. I put his guilty puss on TV while the producer held a light on him. Producers have bills to pay too.
The people at the networks (folks just like you and me) can come up with no better way to keep your attention than to inundate you with tales of the horrific. If something terrible does not happen today in your city, they will scour the state. If your state does not provide the suitably grotesque, they’ll scour the country. And if this country does not provide a story hideous enough for your appetite, they will tap a satellite and discover some remote corner of the globe where something just awful will testify to the fact that your precious world is coming apart at the seams. These people are desperate. The technology isn’t cheap. You should see the bills they get.
If we miss the carnage as it happens, we may provide you with a “dramatic reenactment.” Sometimes we indulge in a little artistic license to enhance the story line. If this isn’t enough to foot the bill (it’s just huge, let me tell you) there are more people like us who will invent stories that seem real but are just hocus pocus designed to tickle your fancy. The stories mainly involve lots of destruction and evil men lurking in places that look frighteningly close to home. We have gotten quite good at making imaginary things look real, so much so that you have become frightened and confused as to what’s really out there. Just what is happening? You are all flocking to the mayhem like lemmings. It pays the bills.
You seem to love to watch bad guys, so we give them to you in bus loads; sneering, scowling, brawling, upending fruit carts, ruining luxury automobiles in droves. We used to give your demons names like Lefty and Rocko. We had them sell bootleg liquor, hang out of fast cars and shoot Tommy guns into the night. Interestingly enough they’re the good guys now. They sponsor sporting events like the Super Bowl. They help subsidize your cable bill.
Now we make the bad guys dark and muscular, and call them Tyrone and Miguel. We have them sell drugs and ride around in fast boats and shoot automatic weapons into the night. Where has our imagination gone? Who’s got the time? The bills keep piling up.
These new bad guys seem much more menacing. The old white guys have become too laughable, with their paunches and their tax dodges and their in-house investigations. What a hoot. How about that wacky Worldcom deal, huh? Was that a bill, or what? That didn’t scare anybody. Might make a good sitcom, though.
The most frightened people of all seem to be the politicians. This is ironic because we hired them to be smarter than us, to protect us from our own imaginations, but the idea backfired. Every election they’re afraid we won’t re-hire them if the perception is they’ve failed to protect us. They are so afraid they’ll lose their jobs they run around sponsoring “get tough” laws, financing star war toys, and pursuing terrorists to the ends of the earth, while promising in the presence of these immense expenditures to lower everyone’s tax bill. How can they do all this? Their own brand of hocus pocus, of course.
It finally took some words from a character that isn’t real to wake me up. Maybe those old white guys aren’t so funny after all. While they have us all running around like chickens with our heads cut off, they’ve got those politicians, more old white guys, protecting us from our own shadows. While busy checking behind the curtain for signs of Tyrone, we’re getting our pockets picked by guys named... Newt?? It’s the great American snow job, and in the process we’ve run up the Mother Of All Bills.
So I’m just not going to take it any more. As soon as I’m done here I’m going to submit this to some suitable forum, and then I’m going to clean up my desk. My desk right here... Jesus, would you look at all these bills.
