Prince Harry, we are your cousins once removed. Some would say twice, but 1812 was just a big misunderstanding; please don’t take it the wrong way. We have fallen on hard times, struggling, now, under an unstable, corrupt, puppet of a foreign power. Brexit a hundred-thousand times over is ravaging the homeland of your prospective bride. Imagine what a royal wedding, barging into these circumstances (and don’t take that the wrong way), would do to an over-matched news media and a weary public.
By news media, I mean, here, cable, network, and local broadcast news. Social media is overtaking the supremacy of television, but the tube dies hard. And though print reporters are doing yeoman’s work, a substantial number of our electorate wouldn’t read if they got paid for it. (I estimate that number to be roughly equal to our President’s second-place, popular-vote total.)
For us, then, a royal wedding would be disastrous (but don’t take that the wrong way). The media is so anxious for any excuse to look away that you might accomplish, for him, Trump’s second highest aspiration: an object so shinny that the press will get lost chasing it – in other words, a royal wedding. That puts us in a lose-lose position.
We get a break from professors and prosecutors and lawyers trying to make sense of the current chaos, but we will be subjected, with insipid repetition, to back-stories and in-laws and little children dressed like adults.
We get a break from speculating whether illiterate, confused, and often dangerous tweets are sophistry or pathology, but we must endure weeks of fawning over rings and dresses and uniforms and protocol.
We get a break from daily briefings and press conferences consisting solely of lies, but we will be exposed to numbingly unrelatable pomp and ceremony.
By the time the worst happens and the wedding itself is inescapable on our televisions (and don’t take that the wrong way), our media will be settling into a vegetative, saccharine state, and we will be dangerously anesthetized.
Thomas Jefferson (and please don’t take that stuff in the Declaration of Independence the wrong way) said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” For years, television viewers got only 30 minutes of anti-ignorance training a day from network news shows – if they bothered to change the channel from pro-wrestling. Subtract commercials, openings, closings, and teasers, and they were down to about 20 minutes a day.
Then, in response to an outbreak of mass hysteria about depressing news shows, rather than inspire people to become more involved to change the world that the news reflects, the networks went with “good-news stories”: pointless, treacle-laden stories that belonged on any show but the news. We lost another 3 to 5 minutes of news, a loss that continues and grows to this day. Can you not see the danger a royal wedding poses?
The most horrific aspect of American news of all types is the man-in-the-street interview, manifested inescapably on local news shows but, more and more, on network and cable news as well. It requires no trained reporters. Just go up to someone standing around and ask, “How did you feel when you heard that a man’s head spontaneously exploded?” This journalistic malfeasance fills air time without the hard, expensive work of tracking down and checking facts. Why advance yet another depressing news story when the “human interest” aspect obviates the need to communicate anything informative?
I fear that a royal wedding would be the end of what little news media we still have (and please don’t take that the wrong way). Once they breath unpolluted air, again, the news media will not return. MSNBC will become the “All Prison Everyday” network. CNN will air only stories about strange, old men going places and eating things. The networks will put on 30-minutes of kittens and puppies and bunnies while local news will be weather, traffic, and brief interviews with random passers-by about topics ripped from Sea World, Coney Island, or Ark Encounter promotions.
We pulled your ass out of two world wars (don’t take that the wrong way), and all we ask in return is that you put off the wedding until after the next election. Get a little apartment just off the castle and wait it out. Of course, should Don the Con realize his highest aspiration and there will be no further elections, then knock yourself out. Tie the knot.