The Addicts

We've been treated in the last week or so to a couple of eerily similar episodes of media behavior, although they'd seem on the surface to be from, at least, different asteroids: the Paris Hilton feeding frenzy and the coverage of the early Presidential campaigns. In the case of Hilton-mania, some of the very reporters and anchors covering the story were engaging simultaneously in what the political reporters only do after the election is safely over: publicly bemoan the job they were doing. Everybody saw at least one anchor or reporter act sardonically superior to the very Hilton story they were spending hours on. Meanwhile, the political media were covering the debates the very same way they criticized themselves for covering the last Presidential race, and the one before that: attention to image and horse race, with no attention to substance. Paul Krugman made the latter case in a New York Times op-ed last week, bemoaning the lack of after the fact fact-checking by the media following any of the debates. But what ties the two behaviors together, I think, is that they both reflect the way addicts act: sometimes they regret their behavior after the fact, sometimes even in the middle of the behavior, but it doesn't change the behavior. We should know by now that, as abashed as TV's Hilton-maniacs would like to seem, as embarrassed as political reporters are, at after-election seminars, by the superficiality of their coverage, the behavior doesn't change. This is your brain on news.