I was skimming some of his past rants up on HBO’s site this evening, and came across the classic one on media bias, and I can’t help but lament that he no longer is coming out with these on a weekly basis:
In today’s information economy, the old journalistic mandate of “Get it fast, first, and right” has been downsized to just getting it fast and first. Today’s idea of an “investigative report” is one they remembered to run a spell-check on. And the line between fact and opinion gets stepped on more frequently than the feet of a circus clown slow-dancing with a scuba diver.
[ . . . ]
The sad truth is, we don’t object to the slanted nature of our news because being told how to think is easier than figuring it out for ourselves. Media bias is just the latest in a long line of American labor-saving devices that began with the cotton gin and will likely end with us swaddled in our full-sensory La-Z boys, while a holographic Wolf Blitzer gnome dances on your man-breasts and yips, “Bad stuff happened to other people in the world today, but not to you, Pumpkin. That’s the news. Have another bear claw.”
Let’s be honest with ourselves. You want the truth? You can’t stay awake for the truth. We want police chases, mudslides, and world leaders caught on tape having sex with their daughter’s piano teacher. We don’t give an embryonic rat’s ass about Enron, the Middle East, or the new Campaign Finance Reform bill because it’s way too complicated and depressing. When we come home from a hard day at the office, all we want is to kick our feet up on the coffee table, pop open a cold one, turn on the television, and be reassured that everyone in the world is more fucked up than you are, especially the people reporting on it.
At this point, Dennis would end with his trademark “Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.” But he rarely was.