Curtis Cunningham on technology, music, dogs, and life.

Well put my man, well put.

Stolen from: Arkadelphia Siftings Herald - News

We care about Paris Hilton; we do not care about Iraq or Darfur
By Dan Marsh
Published: Monday, June 11, 2007 1:50 PM CDT
I don’t know if you are aware of this or not, but apparently, Paris Hilton has been involved in some sort of legal fracas in L.A.

Perhaps you’ve seen it on the news. Paris, locked in the back seat of a patrol car, screaming on her way to jail. Paris, in better days, posing on various runways, with that stupid, smug, rich-girl look on her face, mugging for photographers.

I’m guessing you’ve seen this coverage, I don’t know. Perhaps some of you have been living under a rock the last few days. Perhaps some of you have never even heard of Paris Hilton. I wish I hadn’t.

I think the news media is a wonderful invention, I really do, but I also think that, somehow, the media has gone off the rails. Somewhere, somebody in an air-conditioned office in New York or L.A. or Atlanta decided that, you know what, people don’t really want “news.” They want to be entertained. Sure, there has been a terrible slaughter in Darfur; of course, there are millions dying of disease and starvation in Africa; and, oh yeah, our troops are getting killed by the dozens every day in a delightful little corner of the globe known as Iraq.

We don’t care about any of that.

Quick, tell me the reason for the genocide in Darfur.

Quick, tell me how the G-8 summit may or may not have positively affected the poor and starving masses in Africa.

Quick, what’s the latest on al-Qaida in Pakistan?

I’ll bet you don’t know, because all weekend, we have been fed a steady diet of Paris Hilton on every major news network. Don’t feel bad, I can’t answer any of those questions, either. I can tell you that Paris mouthed “I love you” to her mom while the judge was throwing the book at her. I can tell you the name of the Los Angeles County sheriff who unlawfully yanked Paris from jail where she allegedly belonged. (Lee Baca, brother of Chew.) I couldn’t tell you the current status of the Taliban in Afghanistan, or how much money we spent on Iraq this past week.

The media has trivialized the important and made monumental the utterly trivial. Paris Hilton is a spoiled brat. I don’t care about Paris Hilton. Yet Fox News re-hashed FRIDAY’S coverage of The Hilton Event on SATURDAY NIGHT’S prime-time broadcast. I can only assume nothing of importance was taking place anywhere else in the world. If so, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS chose to ignore it.

[snip]