The CNN anchor Anderson Cooper knows the 24-hour news cycle as well as
anyone, and last week, he lamented that the survivors of theHaiti earthquake would soon fall victim to that reality.“We all know what’s going to happen” in a week or two, he said to Dr.Sanjay Gupta,
the CNN medical correspondent and a practicing neurosurgeon. “People
are just going to lose interest in this as a story. They’re going to
stop watching.”Dr. Gupta answered, “In part, it’s up to you and up to us to make sure they don’t forget.”
Right.
I mean, what a load of shit. It’s the 24-hour news cycle! You’re helpless against it, major news organization! Hey, what can you do? You might as well just give up and go home, because there’s no way to change it. There’s no way around it. There’s no way under or over or fucking through it. Everybody’s gonna get sick of the story. And we will know this because everybody will say so. Hurr durrr drrr, what can you do?
Here’s what you can do: YOU CAN REFUSE TO LEAVE. If you don’t want to leave the story THEN DON’T LEAVE THE FUCKING STORY. God almighty, I get these people have bosses. I get not everybody can do whatever the fuck they want to do. But you really want to tell me that Anderson Fucking Cooper can’t say to whoever, “Listen, you fucking b-roll monkey, I’m not going anywhere” and they’d, I dunno, fire him? I doubt it. I sincerely, sincerely doubt it. And even if they did, you wanna believe his fine fine ass wouldn’t be snatched up by the next hungry network he ran across?
I realize I’m picking here on somebody who’s done some truly remarkable work the last couple of weeks. This isn’t just about Cooper, but he’s the best example here, acting like he has no choice. You know who has no choice? SOME GODDAMN HAITIAN ORPHAN BURIED UNDER 10 TONS OF CINDER BLOCKS. You have all the choices in the world compared to what’s going on around you. Media can set the agenda, they really can, but for so long they’ve relied on nobody calling them on the fact that they’re the masters of their fate that they think they can spew this shit and nobody will notice it’s just completely NOT TRUE.
The Haitian earthquake survivors “will soon fall victim to that reality?” What kind of passive shit is that? They fell victim to THE EARTH CAVING IN ON THEM, to the world quite literally collapsing. That’s their reality. Your reality is that you don’t stand up and fight for the stories you feel are important because it’s so much easier to just blame the 24-hour news cycle (that your network hadnopart in creating, natch), because if you can find someone to blame then you get to go home!
Mr. Cooper and Dr. Gupta decided over the weekend to stay in Haiti for another week.
“I can’t really imagine going home,” Mr. Cooper wrote onTwitter on Saturday morning. He expressed almost the same sentiment after Katrina.
Quit quitting and then pretending you got beat, goddamn. It’s insulting to your viewers. Never mind your sources.
A.