It’s been sort of funny watching from afar the media coverage of the Caylee Anthony case, the poor child who died too young with a mother who just didn’t seem to know what happened. Casey Anthony was tried and found innocent, a shocking verdict to most people, and probably most shocking to CNN / HLN anchor Nancy Grace.

I can debate Nancy Grace’s position, I can debate her feelings, I can debate her opinion. But that would be meaningless, it’s been done before. Rather, I would rather look at how this particular case, and the particular media frenzy around it have shown that we have reached a point where the media themselves have become more important than the message.

Nancy Grace is just a different flavor of self-important media star, in the same group as Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, and the sainted Rush Limbaugh. They all believe that they are bigger than the stories they cover. They seems to think that they, as the stars, are more important than the news they cover, the stories that they examine, and the opinions of others. There is a huge problem here that we no longer get news from people we trust, we get it from stars. Heck, for the most part we don’t even get news, each and every one of the 5 I have listed are editorialists, opinion piece writers, and self-justifying media whores.

Does anyone remember when HLN was Headline News, and you could actually get news on the channel? I don’t even both to tune in anymore, because what news they do bring is always “with so and so”, indicating to me that the person reading the news is somehow way more important than the news itself. It’s like TV news has turned into a 24 hour per day op-ed page, with the rest of the newspaper thrown away. We no longer get unbiased coverage, we get opinion and slant. Fox News is typically cited as the worst, but MSNBC is quickly pulling up into a solid second place with a programming schedule that is almost all about opinion, and not about news.

I found it funny to find out that this week, local CTV reporter Kai Nagata quit his job with the network, for a whole bunch of reasons. You can read his blog here, safe to say that what he sees in media working in it is pretty similar to what I can see from the outside – it’s all about ratings and low hanging fruit, and no longer about actually providing information to the masses.

RIP Headline News, I truly miss a friend that would tell me what was what 24 hours per day.

Larry King has been sinking into irrelevancy for many years now, and he finally agreed to retire from CNN earlier this year. But like a bad smell that just won’t go away, Larry King is lingering on the airwaves until the end of the year, when Piers Morgan will take over, and take the 9PM hour in a new direction, thankfully.

This week, Larry stooped about as low as you can go to get attention to his show, a desperate move from a seemingly desperate host trying to get one more shot of that old adrenaline of being relevant. He interviewed Mel Gibson’s baby momma Oksana Grigorieva. He didn’t just interview her, he gave her an open mike and guided her to make some fairly incredibly statements and to make public accusations as to what Mel Gibson may or may not have done.

All this, of course, in violation of a judge’s order not to discuss the case in public. Larry King and his people knew this, and they did the interview anyway.

The result? Mel Gibson will go to court personally on Monday to claim custody of his 1 year old daughter with Grigorieva, claiming that she isn’t responsible, and isn’t willing to follow a judges orders, be respectful, and do what is best for her daughter. He has a point, and is likely to score well with the judge.

Larry King? Well, his try for one more starring role instead may tip the balance, hurting his guest’s legal challenges, and potentially costing her custody of her daughter.

Go away Larry. Stop hurting people, stop hurting CNN… just quit now and avoid any more embarrassment.

When I heard that TLC was picking up Sarah Palin’s new reality show, I couldn’t help but think the timing was perfect. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, considering commentaries like this one on CNN that shows more than a few people picked up the vibe.

When it comes to playing in the grey areas of politics, Sarah Palin is a pro. The whole Tea Party movement (which appeared to fall flat on it’s face in many areas during the midterm elections) was her baby, but she very carefully made sure she wasn’t running it. Sure, she will turn up and give a speech, but she won’t run anything. She stays away. The TV show? In her own words, “Now there you go again”, Palin takes advantage of wide media coverage without having to commit to anything.

It isn’t surprising coming out of TLC, who’s roster of programs on the channel often reads like a conservative Christian manual, cheering on oversized families, putting people of Christian beliefs front and center on their network. TV shows such as the insane 19 Kids and Counting seems to celebrate old Monty Python “every sperm is sacred” song. What is truly stunning is that the people running TLC either didn’t consider for a second that Palin is very likely using her show to springboard a campaign, or is at least using it to create a more favorable profile to the public, a very controlled image where they can edit out the bloopers, eliminate the ugly phrases, and show Sarah as the tough mom, hardened outdoors person, and just swell gal you want to spend your time with.

Shame on TLC for getting caught on this one. Shame on Sarah Palin too, for being one of the most incredible self-promoting political shills.

Almost every generation of music has had the professional fame whore. Pretty much since media became a visual medium (the TV era), there has always been at least one attention whore running around, doing whatever is required, dressing in whatever they can, just to get attention. The rock and roll world has had more than it’s share, from the outlandish costumes and glasses of (the still in the closet at the time) Elton John, to the makeup of Kiss, the 70s and 80s had their share of pure attention whores. Madonna took the whole deal to another level, being willing to get naked for a book if that is what it took to keep people’s attention.

The latest phenom to run down this road is Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, and she is proving not only is she willing to go the extra mile, but that she is horribly transparent at it. What is more disgusting, I think, is that the public is buying into it bigtime and rewarding her with huge amounts of fame and money. I was surprised up front that people didn’t catch on to the idea of outrageous outfits (many of which reveal more flesh than the average stripper), or the mind numbingly stupid afflictions (the tea cup), or the whole “on 24 hours a day” attitude. Gaga travels in full “costume”, and is rarely if ever seen in public in anything but outrageous. This morning, she was travelling in basically bra, panties, and fishnet stockings. This isn’t for an event or anything else, it’s just to get on a plane and fly to the next performance.

Her real trick is the outrageous for the intention only of getting the media to cover her. A minidress made entirely out of meat, example, which got enough press that she repeated it (as one of her many different outfits) at the MTV awards. She changed outfits a rediculous number of times. Again, I cannot grasp why people cannot see they are being set up. Her “connection” with certain people or groups is entirely to outrage as well, including her close personal relationship with failing (or is that flailing) gossip dude Mario Armando Lavandeira, aka Perez Hilton. Her support of causes (this week is the “don’t ask, don’t tell” gay military issue) is also quite transparent, often timed to perfectly match media desire for coverage and not really showing any true depth.

Wake up people… you are falling for an attention whore. The 15 minutes is long overdue. Time to tune out and move on before the maggots come and eat the meat off her back.

As I mentioned back in April, it was getting clear that it was time for Larry King to Retire. While I am sure that my blog entry made not a wit of difference to the old guy, I think that time and reality have finally caught up to Mr King. He announced this week that he will be retiring from his show after 25 years (about 10 years too many, many people think), and will only appear on the air for special events and whatnot.

The bad news is that, just like that persistant old person fug that must be in the air of his studio, Larry King will linger until November, effectively killing CNN in the rating for another season. Instead of being a gentleman and stepping down before the start of the new broadcast season, he will linger on, much to the delight of Faux News and MSNBC.

Replacement? Well, the one tapped at this point as likely to get the job is Piers Morgan, currently a judge on Americas Got Talent. This of course assumes that CNN will continue to run a 9PM snoozer interview show, forever damning their viewership to drop. I am personally hoping that if they go with another interview / talker show, that they push it later and stack it up against Leno and such, giving us perhaps a more news oriented talk option at 11, and allowing stars like Anderson Cooper to bring their in depth news coverage into prime time where it belongs.

It is said that bad things happen in threes, and this week’s RIP list pretty much sums that up. Dennis Hopper, Gary Coleman, and Rue Mcclanahan all passed away in the last few days, kicking in many memories of 60s, 70s, and 80s culture.

Dennis Hopper is probably best known for his role in Easy Rider, the 60′s look at two bikers going across country for kicks, drugs, and girls. More recently, Hopper had been the spokeman for a retirement planning firm, which certainly shows how times flies. He died of cancer way too early, at 74.

Rue Mcclanahan is best known for her roles along side the late Bea Arthur, first in the wildly successful show Maude, and then on the Emmy Award winning The Golden Girls. Her career spanned stage and the screen, and passing leaves only Betty White as the last of the Golden Girls with us.

Gary Coleman is the best known for his childhood role in the immensely popular show Diff’rent Stokes, where he played the wise cracking younger son Arnold. He died as a result of a fall, at a young 42. Since his time on the TV show, he has spent much of his career as a sort of classic B list celeb, moving from odd project to odd project, often making fun of himself and his small stature, and getting into trouble often enough to keep his name in the news.

Three stars in a week, it’s never a good time to see them go. RIP all of you, your contributions to our common culture will live on for you.

There has been much discussion the last year or so about the ratings decline at CNN. Since Lou Dobbs left, the numbers if anything have gotten worse, perhaps making Lou seem like the only smart one in the bunch. Christiane Amanpour wisely signed on to ABC to host This Week, and likely to do more journalistic work much more in the public eye. All this against a background of CNN slipping to third in the news channel ratings, now behind MSNBC.

This New York Post article talks about the situation with Larry King to some extent. He is signed through mid 2011, and he pretty much seems to have no desire to retire. Yet, the numbers are in and things seem to be pointing only one way for CNN as a whole and a weeknight schedule that is tied around his 9PM prime time talker.

In this New York Times article, you can see that the latest ratings show that “Mr. King’s audience dropped 43 percent for the quarter and 52 percent in March. He dropped to 771,000 viewers for the quarter from 1.34 million in 2009. More alarming perhaps, Mr. King, whose show has been regularly eclipsed by Rachel Maddow’s on MSNBC (and is almost quadrupled by Sean Hannity’s show on Fox), is now threatened by a new host, Joy Behar on HLN (formerly Headline News.) “. Effectively, CNN’s main network is being eaten up by it’s sister channel, the inappropriately named “headline news” which is also more of a talker than a news channel anymore.

Right now the tide is against CNN for many reasons. Foremost is that the Obama revolution has started to galvanize people to the right and center right, away from the more liberal / centrist opinions of the CNN on air staff, and more towards the left leaning fox news or the more strident groups at either end of the spectrum. Celebrity interviews and such are nice, but the current culture of instant TMZ and Perez Hilton gratification makes Larry King’s interviews often out of date or over taken by events even as they happen. The lead in from Campbell Brown is soft, and even Anderson Cooper is losing out, dropping audience even as he has traveled around to cover the news such as in Haiti. The other issue for CNN is that viewers trust them for the news, but they seem to tune away from their talkers. With a soft news cycle for the last year or so, it has been hard for CNN to get people to tune in when there isn’t news.

Finally there is King himself. At 76 years of age, has he reached the point where he can no longer connect with a younger audience? I can’t imagine too many people under 40 wanting to tune in to see what grandpa has to say, and I think that this is key to the overall decline of CNN. With King’s show right in the middle of the evening, it makes it hard for viewers to stay tuned in for the whole evening of programming. I personally cannot stand to listen to Larry King, even during one of his “breaking news” shows where CNN somehow feels obligated to let a talk show host deliver news and interview people. He is enough to make me tune out, and apparently many others are doing the same.

My suggestion for CNN is this: Give Larry King his retirement party already. Put the news hour back at 8PM, start Anderson Cooper’s show at 9PM, and then bring in some actual talk show magic at 11PM to compete right in the time frame people are more comfortable with celeb talker shows. Maybe try out Joy Behar at that time. Stop trying to out talk Fox News, that isn’t going to happen. The liberal / centrist message isn’t strident enough to amusing enough to keep viewers, Fox has that market sewn up and MSNBC is working hard to get the other part of it. CNN needs to just go back to what they do best, update their on air staff to people under 70, and give it another shot. Sorry Mr King, but even a king needs to know when to cede his throne.

A recent rash of celebrity sex scandals has made me wonder how all of this has come about. Is there more cheating going on in Hollywood, or has scandal become so fashionable that nobody tries to avoid it anymore? Actually, I think the real answer is money and the 15 minutes of fame.

Tiger Woods’ well publicized sex scandal has made instant stars out of any number of girls. Many of these girls appear to have either sold their stories for cash to the tabloids, or have used their Tiger connections to boost appearance fees or generate press. Anything connected to Tiger Woods is money, that is for sure, and being attached to him in such an infamous way is certainly not hurting these girls too much. In fact, more supposed players keep coming out of the woodwork, so it isn’t like shame is driving them to hide, now is it? Tiger has done a well publicized stint in rehab, and his near triumphant return to golf has be closely watched – and well marketed by one of his few remaining sponsors, Nike.

Jesse James situation is even a little weirder, because he is married to Sandra Bullock, who many consider just too damn sexy to stay away from. Yet, Jesse has been connected to a collection of tattooed girls, odd Nazi references, and even weirder group sex stories that will have you shaking your head. When you look at those girls and Sandra Bullock, it is really weird to think anything would have happened at all. It seemed that pretty much every nut job with a tattoo was coming out claiming to have some sort of sexual relationship with the West Coast Choppers builder. Jesse has apparently also gone down the rehab road, and already fallout comes with the cancellation of his “Jesse James is a Dead Man” series, which had actually done pretty well on SpikeTV.

The latest scandal involves movie star, cop, and martial arts master Steven Seagal. This one is particularly weird, if only because the charges leveled by a former model are so out of character for him as to be a little hard to swallow. Kayden Nguyen alleges that she was hired to be a personal assistant, but upon starting the job she discovered it was more about being his personal sex toy. It’s a bit of a head shaker for sure. The question now will be how many more girls will suddenly come out of the woodwork to claim their 15 minutes of undeserved fame?

While he is mostly not wrong (such as with the problems of illegal immigration in the US), his last few years have been marked with repeat returns to the same themes, often appearing to fill quiet news days with illegal immigration outrage stories that were often puffed up to make them bigger than they seem. Some people have suggested this has come as CNN has tried harder to compete with Fox news on the “strident shill” level, which is something that more liberal media seems very poor at doing. Instead of coming out as the champion of the average guy, Lou Dobbs started to come across to me more and more as someone with an axe to grind rather than a series of solutions. Certainly, his inferences that President Obama may not be American enough to be President didn’t win him any fans.

Lou Dobbs hasn’t said where is going to next, but he will still be on syndicated radio and is “looking at his options”. Some have suggested that he might end up at Faux News, where a strident axe grinding attitude seems to go over better. Read more of the story here.

It’s almost a traditional thing now, the Tom Cruise dead rumors seem to come up about two or three times a year, more often when he is doing something nutty. Recent stories have peopel from inside his camp reporting on his weeks of trying to use his Scientology powers to dominate door knobs and other inanimate objects. It’s sort of up there with his classic jump around on Oprah thing. Whatever the deal, there is no truth to Tom Cruise having a heart attack, Tom Cruise falling off a building, Tom Cruise falling off a cliff, or Tom Cruise dying in some other manner, at least not yet.

Xenu must wait another day, I guess.