In the company of friends on New Year's Eve I asked if I was wrong to think that our national media was acting reprehensibly in reporting on Tiger Woods' personal life. What business is it of anyone's what he does, I asked? He's not paid by tax dollars, he's not accountable to the people, what right does the media have to humiliate him by reporting on the sordid details of his dalliances with women other than his wife? What right do they have to humiliate Woods' wife and children by exposing their husband and father as a sex-addicted philanderer?
Someone in the group replied that that's just what those people do, they see it as their mission in life to destroy people's reputations and lives by publicizing personal details about them to a public which is only too eager to revel in the scandal and to make them the butt of jokes and mockery. The media feeds our, and their, basest instincts, and we lap it up like a cat at the milk bowl. It makes some in the media, and many of their subscribers, feel better to know that other people are no better, and maybe a lot worse, than they are. It confers a feeling of moral superiority on the viewer and reader to see the famous and the popular brought low.
Woods' behavior, as awful as it was, is none of the media's business and none of our business. Eliot Spitzer's was. Mark Sanford's was. Max Baucus' was. John Edwards' was. Bill Clinton's was. These are people who were, in one way or another, misbehaving on the public's dime. Woods wasn't. The media have no more right to probe into his life than they had the right to malign Joe the Plumber or embarrass Sarah Palin's daughter.
There are so many stories that need to be reported, but the media, at least the left-leaning media, ignores them in favor of satisfying their fixation on trying to uncover dirt on whoever they think they may be able to destroy. Compared to the reporting on Tiger Woods how many stories have appeared on the nightly news explaining exactly what's in the health care bills? How many accounts have been written in newspapers about President Obama's "safe schools czar," the execrable Kevin Jennings? How much reporting has there been in the dominant media on the fraudulent manipulation of data, and the attempt to silence opposition, by global warming climatologists?
When did journalists abandon the idea that their profession, their calling, was to inform and edify the American public about things that really matter? When did news media professionals begin to think that their responsibility was not to educate but to titillate and gossip? It seems that many journalists no longer aspire to expose corruption in high places. Rather they give the impression that their dream story would be to report that Tiger Woods' latest mistress was Sarah Palin's daughter and that their tryst took place at Dick Cheney's ranch.
That, it too often seems, is too many journalists' idea of a blockbuster story.
RLC
