Newsweek columnist George Will has a pretty good piece this week on declining standards of decency. He manages to tie together Larry Craig and Alberto Gonzales, drawing in a Ken Burns documentary for kicks.
But he closes by bringing in Miss Teen South Carolina's rambling (posted to YouTube if you missed it last week).
Will writes:
- Last week, there was nationwide merriment at the expense of an 18-year-old participant in a South Carolina beauty pageant. Asked a question about why many Americans might lack elementary knowledge about the world, she got lost in syntactical tangles and spoke nonsense. Although there was not a shred of news value in it, Fox News and CNN played the tape of her mortification, and by last Friday YouTube's presentation of it had generated more than 10 million hits. The casual cruelty of publicizing her discomfort, and the widespread entertainment pleasure derived from it, is evidence that standards of decency are evolving in the wrong direction.
Do you agree with Will? Does it lack news value? Is it OK to watch it but not OK for FoxNews and CNN to cover everyone watching it? (Can you find the United States on a map?)
We'll talk about communication values Monday. What makes a story a story? Why do people connect with advertising? Research gives us some clues ...
