Chris Crocker and the Ongoing Decline of Mainstream News

I find it depressing that Chris Crocker's most recent rant is getting so much media attention. For those unfamiliar with the debacle, Brittany Spears gave what many are calling an abysmal performance at an awards show. This is unremarkable in and of itself, as most the performances at awards shows are abysmal.

What got the media's attention however was the response of Youtube and myspace "celebrity" Chris Crocker. He whines and rants about how terrible it is that people are giving Brittany Spears a hard time, all the while managing to remain intelligible while crying hysterically.

A quick review of Chris Crocker's previous videos reveals that he makes a habit of over the top, whiny, drama queen rants. The only thing about his most recent rant that sets it apart is that it's about Spears. Crocker is a man who released a video where he was making out with another guy, all the while claiming this man was his biological brother. This of course turned out to be false, as faked and scripted as his rant about Spears.

He has since gone on to defend his Spears rant, claiming it was genuine, but this is a laughable notion. Any attempt to defend the sincerity of the performance falls cleanly into the "Boy who cried Wolf" category. He's done this sort of thing too many times to be taken seriously now. Well, anyone who takes the time to do ten minutes of research will see he's not to be taken seriously. The media however, seems incapable of even the cursory research that would have revealed the true nature of this video. The coverage he's receiving is not just proof of the poor research skills of the Mainstream Media. It's also proof of how pathetic and vapid news coverage has become.

Crocker has shown that a single person with a little creativity and no shame can wrap the major news networks around his finger, and that the Mainstream News can be played like a fiddle. The ability to do research is lost on the Mainstream News outlets. The fact that some reporters are actually asking if Crocker could be genuine shows just how rare a commodity research and critical thinking skills have become.

The Mainstream News has proven it's irrelevance by reporting the latest bit of Performance Art Flotsam as "news." It's been said that no one ever went bankrupt underestimating the intelligence of the American public. It seems the same is true of the US News Industry.

Chris Crocker is an actor playing the role of a vapid, self centered, overly emotion and clinically depressed gay teenager. He plays the role poorly, but he's so over the top, so dedicated to the ruse that the poor performance fools the Mainstream Media. Threating anything he releases seriously makes as much sense as writing an article assuming Stephen Colbert really is the ultra conservative FOX news impersonating pundit he pretends to be. It's as logical as running an article from The Weekly World News as a "Breaking News" headline on the CNN Ticker.

There are some voices of reason, a few online articles have cropped up that point out Chris Crocker's status as, to be kind, a Performance Artist. Sadly, these voices are lost in the flood of outright morons who, incapable of doing a little research, take Chris Crocker seriously.

As for Chris Crocker? I'm sure he's laughing his head off at all the attention he's getting.