Posted by Leonard Steinberg on June 8th, 2013

We live in a ratings-obsessed world: is the  only way to achieve strong ratings these days through extremes? American Idol’s ratings soar when a contestant is discovered to have been jailed in their past, not because they sing well. People love those Mob Wife’s when they get into a crazed, Jerry-Springer-style cat fight. Real estate reality shows are only interesting to the masses when there is back-stabbing, trashy, pseudo-scripted intrigue and vomit-inducing conduct. On Friday as CNBC announced the unemployment figures this was confirmed when one of the anchors glumly said he was going to pretend to be crazed by waving his arms up and down to give viewers the impression something big was happening: those figures were kinda boring (neither sharply up nor sharply down at 7.6%)……he even said they were simply not good for Cable TV ratings. It was a sad revelation of what surely must be the orders coming from the production suite…..the artificial creation of ratings-worthy content.

In this highly competitive race for ratings, the extent to which the media will go to by either artificially exaggerating a story or worse, fabricating it, is frightening: It contradicts this whole new world of social-media-transparency. What is real? What is fiction? What is newsworthy?

Surely its newsworthy that the unemployment figures are somewhat stable? Not to Cable TV!