The Election

And the front page of USA Today featured the breakup of Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. I wish I still had the copy, but it’s true. It just shows how pervasive celebrity and entertainment is in our society. If USA Today has that on their front page and they reach millions of readers, then I imagine that it means that they believed people would be more interested in reading about Britney Spears’s divorce than the early results of the midterm election. We seem to value entertainment above the general news.

The top TV ratings from Neilsen’s shows something about the way we watch TV. For the week of November 20, you see that the top two shows on Broadcast television were Desperate Housewives and CSI:Miami.

Nielsen’s Top TV Ratings Nov. 20:

http://www.nielsenmedia.com/nc/portal/site/Public/menuitem.43afce2fac27e890311ba0a347a062a0/?show=%2FFilters%2FPublic%2Ftop_tv_ratings%2Fbroadcast_tv&selOneIndex=0&vgnextoid=9e4df9669fa14010VgnVCM100000880a260aRCRD

Another observation I made that may fit into this arena is the Mark Foley scandal. Foley got caught sending elicit e-mails to young male pages in the White House. It will forever go down in infamy as one of huge things that brought down the Republican rule in the House and Senate. Most exit polls showed that the greatest percentage of people voted based on their views of “corruption and scandals.” Foley’s scandal and Webb’s macaca statement both got a lot of press and were all over the web. There were two American Forums this year devoted to the future of the news and what the internet and sites such as YouTube have to do with it. The overexposure of both elements on the internet was probably the end for the Republicans and the beginning of a new era of people directly interacting with pop culture.