aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, December 01, 2007

More marginalizing our media!

I did not watch the YouTube debates, Democrat or Republican, and I tend to view them as not much more than Big Media big-footing into our media - media made by and for the people and emphatically not rooted in our commercial television system - in an attempt to co-opt and cash-in on us.

Let’s be clear, the network, CNN, picked the questions and shoe-horned the show into its own tried tired and [not] true cable format.

So far, so be it. What can we do? It is what it is.

The part that pisses me off is the afterward where the public is blamed for the inanity of the questions. This kind of marginalizing our media is nothing new. You may know that I spent a dozen years as a marginal media magnate the director of a community television organization.

Here’s a young idealistic me in 1991 commenting on MTV’s take on our media. Just substitute “YouTube” every time they say “public access” and you will see that my message then is as true today as it ever was:

SEE ALSO: Entertainment Tonight in 1991 on wacky weird crazy kooks from cable hell. And so long as we’re on the topic of how our market-driven media defines the public, please remember the fallacy of the lowest common denominator.