Local Newspaper Struggles With Its 'Real Housewives' Crack Habit
Once you know that the reality TV "star" "phenomenon" is merely a set of nonsense network-packaged narratives, stories and characters deployed to capitalize on the news outlets that need "information" to sell their own products, particularly when those news outlets don't care that the information they present is actually the product being sold itself, and that the whole thing is a business ploy wherein publicity is made through various entities using other entities in a cash-funded reputation market, well then there's no point in treating reality TV as a cultural product. Sorry, Hank Stuever! You're right about reality TV, but you're just feeding the beast. Particularly since your Washington Post newspaper is running a "preview" of the "latest installment" of Real Housewives alongside your criticism. Reality television is only a capitalist product-a great one, in those terms, as it lends itself to multiple repackaging and distribution. (See also: "LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY"!) But the only way out is all the way out. We know for a fact that you can sell newspapers another way.
I'd say we'd give the media an "Intervention", but that's on another network.
"We need you to make it more real."
Reality TV is a cultural inevitability. Any sufficiently advanced society will develop it.
This was part of the Mayans' predictions for 2012.
THEY TRIED TO WARN US.
Ancient Mayan calendars have Snooki's face carved into their centers.
Most bizarre passage in the linked article:
It's been seven months since Michaele and her husband, Tareq, brazenly crashed a White House state dinner and thus ensured their inclusion on this TV show. (Bizarrely and metaphorically, that act signaled for me the close of 9/11-era seriousness; it was the final sacrilege, the end of Washington, of grown-ups, of manners, of the capital ideal.)
Really?
Whereas Wilbur Mills doing laps in the Tidal Basin was the height of decorum.