Those few

So I tuned into the ultra-mega super exclusive Diane Sawyer interview with Mel Gibson the other night. If you didn't see it, well let me tell you, it was a strange affair. Maybe it's only strange to me because I don't watch Sawyer and I wasn't used to that face she can make for extended periods of time. The face says, you're a liar and the whole world knows it and I'm so clevah that I'm making this face - boo. Or maybe it's because I've never watched Gibson try to sit still for an hour. That didn't work so well either.

But the thing that really made me go hmmmm, was when Sawyer started to grill Gibson about a series of articles written by NY Times columnist Frank Rich.

So Rich had written these articles (three of them I think) say anti-semite this and publicity stunt that and whatever. But my mind drifted back to a post that I wrote a week or so ago and Sawyer and Gibson started sounding fuzzy and I was thinking about Frank Rich.

Rich had written an article in the Times about the current state of marriage in America. Marriage ala media was making him sick and Diane Sawyer received his ire for how she had conducted a few interviews with leading couples. So we have Frank Rich, a New York Times columnist, writing about marriage.

And then I shook the cobwebs out of my head in time to see Diane Sawyer, now talking about evangelicals. And she had some b-roll going and I was thinking - wait, those don't look like the evangelicas I grew up around in Ohio. I wonder where they got that footage? And I wonder why they thought that evangelicals look like that?

So then I thought, there are a lot of people watching this and there are a lot of people reading Frank Rich. And from where I sat in NYC, I would take their words on marriage in America, goodness knows there's nothing much to contradict that around where I live and work. And I would now know what an evangelical looked like, because I don't know any from where I live or work.

But then I remembered that when I lived in Columbus, and Chicago and Indianapolis I did know a lot of evangelicals and a lot of married people. But I never made the connection because that's not who Rich and Sawyer were talking about. Those were normal people. People who went to work and did grocery shopping and normal things. Rich and co. were talking about Britney Spears and American Bachelor (or whatever) and all these freaky things. And the pictures of their evangelical were freaky and everything was not to be trusted and they knew all of this because . . .

That's were the mental train stopped. How the hell did they know?

Then I thought about all of the stuff that people say on TV and in print and they think they know and really they've never even seen what they are talking about, let alone lived it. Sure they've lived their lives, but they haven't lived the lives of others. And that is pretty offensive. To be telling an entire country that may not have experienced something before that "hey, I know what I'm talking about here." That's really frustrating.

I suppose that's an argument for people to get their news from locals. Word of mouth is just better for some things. The idea of a national professional journalist is pretty silly when you think about it. Especially if there are only a handful. That's downright crazy. Especially if they want to talk about places and people they've only ever flown over.