Spitz Take

So, this weekend, my media experiences have all been tied somehow to Eliot Spitzer. Whether it was NPR (Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me prided itself on making Spitzer comments for the entire hour) or Saturday Night Live, there were plenty of people willing to make comic hay out of the disgrace of the former New York governor. Having seen the painful images of Spitzer's shellshocked wife by his side at his press conferences made it a bit more difficult for me to laugh along with the media. There was a real family that had to deal with this. My students may have heard the news and not seen the pain of his wife, so they may have laughed along. Or not. I was experiencing media outlets my students may not have (NPR and a 30+ year old sketch comedy show). I am sure that whatever comedic media outlets students chose to explore, however, made jokes about prostitution, infidelity, power, and sex.

Then I opened up the Deseret News this morning. In the Opinion section tof the newspaper, there were two editorials focusing specifically on the influence of sex on our society. They tied the Spitzer news with other news stories that were released this week (25% of adolescent girls have tested positive for an STD and others) and determined that we exist in a sex-saturated society. Just the fact that Spitzer's story surfaced in so many media outlets seems to give validity to the editorials' stances. The problem is that students may not have seen the press conference, but they heard the jokes. The human connection is missing. It would have been missing for me if Spitzer had allowed his wife to grieve privately and not bring her out in front of the cameras for whatever purpose.

Is the fact that we use these current events as punchlines lessening the impact of the news? Are we more accepting of sex in our society because sit-coms, where innuendo abounds, blurs with "real news" and making fun of real news? In a world where media is becoming omnipresent, creators of media need a steady stream of material, and making comedy out of sexual situations and news stories, regardless of the emotions or people behind them, is an easy path. Just compare the sketches occurring early in a SNL telecast, mostly current event, celebrity, or sexually-oriented humor, and those that show up later in the broadcast where the "original" material dwells and has little quality or impact.

I could pull lots of educational ideas from this, but I don't know how students would respond to it. We could examine hard news broadcasts of events and humorous references to it later on late night talk shows, etc. There are several activities that would could do in monitoring sexually-based humor in a media text, but that would not work in my current school environment. I don't know what concerns me most - students only hearing snide humor slants of current events or being raised as a generation where sex=funny. I don't know if it is getting worse, 1980s teen films had a lot of sexual content, but was is different is the pervasiveness of media. In the 1980s, students could avoid those films. It is harder to avoid today. Spitzer, and jokes about him, are everywhere.