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.