Gibson’s drunken slurs get more media attention than Castro’s silence

WHEN the judgment of history is passed on media during this decade, it will cause a lot of turning in graves.

Because history will say that the fourth estate, throughout the first decade of the 21st century, substituted comment for content, elevated columnists above fact-finders and preferred celebrity to significance.

Celebrity is easy for media. Take a smirking moron with a name drawn from a hotel chain, half-dress her, photograph her, promote her squabble with another of her like into a major issue. Then a current affairs programme, previously credited with helping to elect a president, devotes a full edition to trying to reconcile the two celebs and you can fill pages without much of an effort. Certainly without the effort that it would take to cover the massively destructive wars in Africa.

Take, for example, the conflict around the Congo. Most people know little or nothing about it because newspapers and TV programmes pay so much attention to the rich and infamous nearer to hand.

The reality is that more people have thus far died in that war than died in Vietnam. Yet Vietnam shaped the media coverage of an era, the sensibilities of a generation.

One key difference between the two wars, of course, is that one side, in the Vietnamese conflict, could readily be identified with. They were the home boys, the American teenagers sent to fight and die in a place they’d never heard of.

The media in the west had an immediate and potent interest in Vietnam, whereas in the Congo, two sets of black people (or, in some tragic cases, two sets of black children) are fighting each other to the death.

Not as sexy a story as Vietnam, particularly when the latter allowed for activism-by-photo-opportunity, with the camera-friendly Jane Fonda straddling a rocket-launcher.

It’s a new and interesting litmus-test of material, that judgment that something “isn’t a sexy story”.

Up to recently, it was the job of journalists to take complex, contentious and confusing information and craft it into something that grabbed the reader by the mind and the heart.

It was, in short, the function of the journalist to make a story sexy. Now, that function has been abandoned. A story must arrive, reeking of obvious sexiness, before a journalist will consider it.

The apotheosis of celebrity versus significance has to be the contrast, this week, between the attention given by international media to the anti-semitic drunken warbling of Mel Gibson, as against the level of attention given by the same media to the first silencing in almost 50 years of the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro.

When Gibson was stopped and fell out of the car he was driving — drunk — and was obnoxious to the arresting officer, opining aloud that the Jews own and run everything and demanding to know if the officer was one of them.

Thereafter, Gibson, sobered up and, facing the career consequences of this appalling episode, has apologised repetitively in ever-increasing detail and now plans to address the congregation in a synagogue.

If they can hear him over the whirring of the camera and audio-recorders which undoubtedly will be present to catch his verbal self-mortification.

Media will be present in the synagogue because Gibson is a celeb, not because he will come up with an insightful explanation of how he, a man who is phenomenally successful, filthy rich and widely liked, who can pick and choose among films, producers and production companies, should still, in vino veritas, choose to believe Jews rule everything when his own rich experience demonstrates the contrary.

BY getting drunk and abusive, Gibson has taken much public attention away from the potentially-fatal illness of the ruler of Cuba. Except, perhaps, in Florida, where so many Cuban exiles live and where Castro’s demise is prayed for with fervour.

In the past few days, not many of the Cubans who got to Florida using courage and home-made rafts paid much attention to the magazine covers contrasting Mel Gibson’s good-humoured handsomeness with the sodden shot of him in police custody. All of the talk was of Castro.

To many in Europe, Castro, through media inattention in recent years, has effectively retreated to being little more than a bearded stereotype spouting Stalinist clichés at great length and presiding over a country where the cars are from the 1950s, the healthcare is innovative and cheap, and the citizens are given to sporadic mass exit using whatever water-borne vehicles offer the hope of transporting them to the US.

To the exiles, Castro is a figure of horror, an up-close-and-personal Hitler, crushing independent thought, free speech and the means of transmission of ideas in their country for half a century.

They tell stories of firing squads and of grandfathers, fathers and uncles who stood before those firing squads.

They point to the entrepreneurship which has turned hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles into multi-millionaires, as contrasted with the abject poverty still regnant on the island itself: this, they say, is what we could have created back home, if one man had not been allowed to pervert a socialist revolution into a personal dictatorship.

What excites the Cuban exiles most is Castro’s silence. The defining characteristic of the man is his capacity, not to communicate (how often, after all, do Castro quotations surface in the minds even of the most convinced left-winger?) but to talk. Ad nauseam. Forever.

Three and four hour speeches in the blistering Cuban sun have been typical of the man. Constant media appearances, likewise. Even when he fell off a platform earlier this year and broke his arm, the accident failed to interrupt the continuity of his verbal flow by more than a day or two.

Now, however, Castro is silent. For the first time, he has handed over his powers to his brother, Raul.

Handed them over covered with caveats about the temporary nature of the transference, but handed them over, nonetheless.

It is clear something serious is afoot, and this man in his 80s, diagnosed as having continuous intestinal bleeding requiring major surgery, is in the last years, if not the last weeks, of his long reign.

It is widely believed his kitchen cabinet has neither the force of personality nor of ideology to continue his iron fist control of Cuba as a communist state. They have seen, at close quarters, the promise of tourism presented by the growing ghetto of luxury hotels on the island.

If, as is expected, Cuban communism swiftly morphs, post-Castro, into socialism in name only, with an opening of its borders, this will have profound implications for the island — since tourism and its conjoined twin, gambling, are poor deliverers of equality of wealth, tending instead to make the rich richer while maintaining a servitor underclass.

Even more importantly, his passing will have pivotal impact on the wider global balance, making the USA an even more dominant world power.

But the Mel Gibson story is sexier. Much sexier ...