After watching my Lakers lose again tonight (talk about ugly), I decided to lazily flip through the channels. I was hoping to stumble across something entertaining but not too engaging -- something that would provide a nice Friday night vacation for my restless mind.
To my horror, what I came across was the rotting corpse of TV news. Like a zombie that rises up from the grave, there was John Stossel on 20/20 doing a "Desperate Housewives" tie-in piece. Flip flip flip. Is that the smell of human flesh? Ah, it's Candy Crowley on CNN doing a "report" on "Blogger Moms." Where is Bruce Campbell when you need him?
After the flip: More Swingers, Zombies, and Bloggers (oh my!)
Nevertheless, being the type of person who possesses a morbid curiosity (it's not enough for me to know the world is going to hell in a hand basket because of Bush and the Neocons, I want to know what kind of basket, what neck of hell precisely...), I decided to watch a little of both segments and report back to you.
I'll start with John Stossel. Remember when he was a consumer advocate, anti-establishment kind of guy who would have acted indignant over a corporate network exerting pressure on its news division to run a puff piece on one of its hit shows? No? Me neither. Like Dennis Miller before him, Stossel has swallowed the conservative line so wholly and so suddenly (and become a raving hack in the process) that his former self seems like an illusion -- it shimmers in your mind's eye, but you can't ever seem to grasp it.
Well, tonight he began his 20/20 special entitled "What Makes Wives Desperate" (taped on the set of "Desperate Housewives" -- wowee!!!) with a steaming piece of reportage on swingers. That's right -- according to ABC News, the most pressing issue of the day is: group sex!! Now, perhaps I'm wrong (and I don't want to offend anyone here who's paused in the midst of their group orgy to read this diary) but, really, who gives a shit about couples that swing?
Apparently John Stossel does, because he really laid the wood to these swingers (pun not originally intended, but I'm leaving it in just to be cheeky). First he told them what they were doing was immoral. Then he told them it would ruin their marriage. Then he mentioned they'd probably all get diseases. Meanwhile, his guests, a motley band of middle-age, middle-management love-handled wife-swappers who you do not want to picture naked, were trying to get a word in edgewise in between Stossel's sneering voiceover. Everyone they know practices safe sex, they said. Their marriages are happy, partly because of the swinging. And they don't consider it immoral.
Now, I'm not going to evaluate their claims here -- this diary is not entitled "Screw Swing States, Let's Swing Partners!" -- but the point is that John Stossel wouldn't even listen to the people he was interviewing. He kept coming back to, "Well, that's what they say, but let me introduce this only tangentially related, anecdotal story that will make you rethink these couples' first hand accounts."
As strange as this analogy might sound, the whole exchange reminded me of the way the Right handles every kind of debate. From welfare to tort reform, gay marriage to national defense -- the MO is the same. Don't look at these facts or these testimonials, they say -- let's look at this one outrageous case or hypothetical scenario instead. Let's focus on that, folks. Maybe welfare has helped some impoverished unfortunates, but there's this African-American Welfare Queen that's having 182 babies with 182 different fathers on your dollar, ladies and gentleman. What do you think about that? And lawsuits? People sue over coffee being hot. That's right, friends, a few of these cases are warranted, but most are completely frivolous and only involve the temperature of beverages. No, what's really important is defending marriage from the onslaught of gaydom. Divorce? Bah, that's not nearly as dangerous as gay marriage. And national defense? Well so what if Kerry served in the military -- didn't he once say we need to work with France? He'll sign the whole country over to those Frenchies, reverse the whole Louisiana Purchase...
You get the picture. Stossel even tried to strike fear into his viewers by telling them that they "better watch out when planning [their] family vacations because [they] might end up at a swingers resort." According to Stossel, viewers need to look for the super-secret code words for swinging: "clothing optional," "adult fun," and "swinging lifestyle" (Is someone really out there saying, "phew, I'm glad he told me -- I was just about to unwittingly book my whole family into a clothing optional, adult fun oriented swinging lifestyle hotel in South Beach -- boy, would my wife have been pissed!").
And even though every marriage counselor ABC spoke with seemed to come to the consensus that swinging wasn't that big a deal and that "consenting adults will do what consenting adults will do," Stossel wouldn't stop lambasting his guests. Then 20/20 cut back to the set of "Desperate Housewives" and I flipped away (feeling, I might add, a little dirty).
I soon found myself on CNN (I often click over there out of habit without remembering that, as far as rotting corpses, TV news, etc. goes, CNN is the Re-animator). Not to be outdone in hackery, Candy Crowley was pontificating about "Blogger Moms" -- they're housewives by day, bloggers by night! My god, surely not!
But yes...apparently, CNN's has taken Kos and Atrios' advice and decided that political blogging isn't much of a story in and of itself -- so instead they're going to focus on personal blogs (close your eyes and imagine Candy Crowley intoning as seriously as possible, "The bra wire beneath my breast just broke").
To make a long story short (too late), I decided to run from the stinking corpse of journalism (oh no, Judith Miller's on Hardball and she's eating human brains) and come "blog" with you about swingers and blogger moms so you wouldn't have to wonder what you missed on TV tonight...