US media and politics today - a concise image

This screenshot is from Yahoo! News ENTERTAINMENT. It says a lot about both our political and media culture in the US right now.



Yahoo! News ENTERTAINMENT section 06-14-2011

When the story about the Republican candidates' debate was the feature, it made the point even more dramatically. I didn't get a screenshot of that. And Democrats can't help but indulge a tiny bit of schadenfreude that "freak show" appears prominently next to the story about the debate.
But still, it's very much of an illustration of how little distinction between "news" and "entertainment" our national media make these days. And this is online news, not "legacy media."

To quote once again from Gov. Jerry Brown's inaugural address this year: "Without the trust of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle; and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void."

That's the dilemma we're up against, in California and the country.

Tags: establishment press, jerry brown, mainstream media, mainstream press