Jim Lehrer said it: On the Newshour tonight...a media unit look at the cult of personality in the news business...



All this business about Katie Couric caused me to have a Society of the Spectacle moment a few months ago. I had flown into the ATL on the redeye, and all of the televisions were on, singing a collective praise for all news because CBS promoted Katie Couric. The newspapers had pictures of her. "Oh how wonderful we are--a woman is going to present the news." It reminded me of this passage by Guy Debord:

The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.

The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.