IX-NAY on the eckham-Bays – Plumbing the Depths of Shallowness

Okay, this is obviously not a social issue, per se, but when the LA Times does a brief 235-word story on a major gang study that relates directly to Los Angeles (a story that nearly every other major paper in the country—plus several of the Canadian papers— reports on in full [see below])…. then devotes three, count ’em THREE stories to the &^%$#@#& Beckhams….AGAIN….it merits comment.

One of today’s three is titled, in all seriousness, “Hollywood breathlessly awaits Beckhams.”

(NOTE TO TIMES EDITORS: No, actually it doesn’t.)

And the Times’ Thursday News briefs section earnestly calls our attention to…. “Beckham-mania.”

Hey, I like gossip as much as the next person. I read with enthusiastic abandon about the mayor’s love life. And I had more than one conversation with otherwise serious-minded friends about whether Paris Hilton ought to go to jail, (and whether or not Sheriff Lee Baca let her take her moisturizer in with her). But, when all was said and done, those were real stories. There was conflict. Drama. In each of the instances, something was at stake.

Look, I’m sure David Beckham is a swell guy and all, and it’s sort of interesting that the dude pulls down a salary equal to the gross national product of several developing countries—and certainly we in Los Angeles genuinely hope he’s not so much past his prime that he’s going to make us feel really SAD, from a….you know…. soccer perspective— but he’s a sports story. That’s it. And that over-thin blond woman who married him? She’s a pop singer with an extremely expensive publicist—AKA a non-story.

Even the National Enquirer knows the difference. (Yes, I admit I did do a web search, God help me, and the Enquirer has hardly touched this broad.)

So why is our home town newspaper behaving embarrassingly like Victoria Beckham’s PR flak?

Or as my friend John Leone put it, “Waiter, may I please have some real news with my paper this morning?”