Sick have been my days of late.
My feeble body has fallen to the insidious germs that lurk in dark
places —
places like the Emerald newsroom. It seems like someone is always sick,
and
this zero patient infects the rest of us. Do we journalists lead a
particularly sickly lifestyle? It is a stressful job (not so much for
me) and
the hours are odd. But its the damn computers that spread the plague.
All
those infected fingers leaving their mark on the keyboard that I will
need to
use. It makes me shudder to think about it.
The only good thing about being sick is the license it gives to
watch
absurd amounts of television. I tried to watch the whole Michael
Jackson
special on Thursday but found myself changing the channel because it
was just
too painful. That prick Limey journalist (who the heck is he, by the
way?)
made
the King of Pop look like a mental patient. As he roamed around some
store in
Vegas pointing at all the (horribly tacky) things he had bought or was
going
to buy, it was like watching a three-year-old. The same was true when
Jackson
was filmed climbing his “Giving Tree.”
It all felt so patronizing, and that’s where I take issue. MJ is no
Tim
Normal, but the special treated him in a demeaning manner. Jackson
somehow
brought this on himself by allowing the reporter access at all, but we
as the
public have no right to demand the kind of information we do about his
personal life.
And then there was friggin’ Barbara Walters at the beginning and end
of
every commercial break making some remark or other, even though she
didn’t
do a
damn thing except probably pony up the dough to air this thing in the
states.
I’ll spare you any unoriginal quips about what right she has to talk
about
someone’s face looking odd.
But seriously, some 29 million watched this thing. I write
“info-tainment,”
which is a sin in journalistic circles, and this disgusted me. What
does that
say?