Yesterday as part of NBC's Olympic coverage, Ryan Seacrest did a segment on tweets. First he told us how Tuesday night's competitions fared, in total number of tweets generated, compared to other recent big events; then he broke down Tuesday's tweets into subject. Michael Phelps inspired the most. Never were we told what any of the tweets said. It was all about numbers, quantity over quality. The audience was not amused or entertained or enlightened as to anything other than what is popular (which most people watching could have figured out for themselves). Thanks to the Internet, journalism (and not just television) now worships at the altar of popularity, which makes life tough for wit, nuance, the idiosyncratic, the exquisite and, sadly, the educational.
Also yesterday (in an unrelated matter) Terry Gross interviewed a writer for The New Yorker and said, as she always does when interviewing New Yorker writers, that the article under discussion "appears in the current edition of The New Yorker." It's not the guest's place to do it, but could somebody else, perhaps someone on the "Fresh Air" staff, please tell Terry Gross that books have editions, magazines have issues?
