Those hoary old signs of the apocalypse are so yesterday.
Forget the blood up to the necks of the horses and the plagues and storms; this month, Victoria became the Swine Flu capital of the world, Gordon Ramsay called Tracy Grimshaw a pig woman, Tracy Grimshaw called Gordon Ramsay a bully, David Carradine was killed by a secret society of martial arts assassins and June Dally Watkins had a "dramatic confrontation" with Clare Werbeloff.
I know all of this because I somehow managed (I hear the humans call it "holidays") to watch commercial network news over the past few weeks, not something I would usually do. And with that under my belt I can now say with the certainty of the Collins-and-Swanston-Streets boombox preacher man that the end times are upon us. Play everyone off, keyboard cat.
Look, I'm not one of those people who says "I haven't watched a commercial network for ages" accompanied by the sort of expression that can only be developed through years of intensive soy chai latte consumption and listening to nothing but npr.org and limited edition Icelandic mix-tapes. Regular readers of
Tube Ray Army would be all too aware of my willingness to jump in the deep end of the commercial television cesspool and wade around without a safety rope.
I know there's a time and a place for all god's televisual creatures - I just prefer to get my news from other, less hysterical sources.
Take Swine Flu, for instance. Newspapers tell me that most politicians and bureaucrats are sanguine about the outbreak; "survivors" report that the symptoms aren't much worse than our boring old seasonal influenza (which I might remind you kills around a thousand of us each year - yes, kills). Everyone seems alert but unalarmed. I Survived Swine Flu And All I Got Was This Lousy Packet Of Solprin.
Not so in the parallel universe of network news, where our fine state is now a cesspool of germs. According to the rapidly looping stock footage, Melbourne has become populated by mask-wearing zombies and Tullamarine is overrun by the psychedelic amoeba art of thermal scanners. Confused-looking rugby players and school children are being corralled at the airport (before, presumably, being taken out the back and shot).
Judging by the news' take on Victoria's new international rep as Swine Flu central, people would just as soon buy a ticket to suck on dirt in the back room of a Mexican shanty without running water than they would follow a big ball of red string (or whatever other latest naïf motif our tourism geniuses have devised) into the heart of Me!bourne's laneway district. Yes, Swine Flu has left Victoria's tourism industry in tatters. Literally no one will ever come here again, ever.
And what of Ms Chk-Chk Boom, the steely-eyed party girl whose lust for fame made Madonna look retiring and whose made-up testimony began what could possibly be the stupidest fortnight in Australian broadcast news history? In newspaper world (even the tabloids), she's wrapped around last week's fish-and-chips. On television, she lived and breathed!
A Current Affair must have had Werbeloff on a retainer; in just over a week we had her dramatic apology, her dramatic interview, and her dramatic new haircut. And then there was that aforementioned dramatic confrontation with June Dally Watkins (itself interspersed with yet more dramatic interviews with Werbeloff, apparently conducted in a broom closet).
Because the Nine network are so hip to this new media fandangle, I can but link to the vid:
(Feeling stupider? Good, you're getting closer...)
This dramatic confrontation occurred immediately after storied journalistic ethicist Grimshaw berated Ramsay for being a bully, which in turn prompted our evidently extremely busy Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to take time out from commenting on
The Chaser to comment on the Ramsay-vs.-Grimshaw stoush.
So then, in addition to the mask-wearing zombies Melbourne was already overrun with, television news crews stalked up and down Southbank hoping for a sighting of Ramsay out for a jog and another sound bite. Soon our town will be populated by nothing other than germ-phobics and cameramen, locked in a symbiotic waltz of empty hysteria.
Is swearing worse than sneezing on your fellow commuters? Is a pig woman more insidious than pig germs? Is a 48-hour wog more troubling than a fat wog shouting at a skinny wog? If they fall in the woods and there are no cameras around, do they make a "chk-chk boom" sound? After spending a week or so marinating in the deeply stupid rhetoric of network news, I couldn't tell you - I can't brain today; I have the dumb.
You see, the combination of these stories and the networks' handling of them has done something far more injurious to Victoria's reputation than the Swine Flu outbreak: it has reduced the collective IQ of the state by about fifty points.
In fact, early reports suggest Victoria has the highest rate of media-related brain drain in the world. That story and more, tonight at 6pm.