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.