The eight biggest media moments of 2007

Hey, everyone else closes out the year with some kind of stupid list. Why shouldn’t I?

On the other hand, this year didn’t exactly lend itself to media listing. For example, as I scanned the critics’ lists of best and worst movies of 2007, I realized that I’d seen almost none of them. That’s due at least in part to changes in my consumption habits: I only went to three movies in theaters this year. So if it didn’t make it to DVD, I pretty much didn’t see it. Likewise, the day job kept me away from trade publications, The Wall Street Journal, and other sources that track what’s really going on in the media world (rather than the Entertainment Tonight packaging of what’s important).

Nonetheless, I managed to eke out eight items that are at least somewhat likely to fill the bill.

The birth of 8sails.com – What could possibly be more important that this?

Celebrity rehabitants – Lindsay Lohan in and out. Britney Spears in and out. Kieffer Sutherland ending the year in the lockup for DUI number four. And so on. Worst of all, Paris Hilton’s foray into the only-mildly-stripy-hole was covered like the Watergate hearings. And that’s the real point here. The celebrities themselves aren’t the media moment of note. Instead, they’re notable as the absence of other media moments. Somewhere people are dying. Laws are being passed that do horrible things to us (and they’re being passed with our consent by the people we elected to protect us from them). Paris Hilton doesn’t want to go to jail? Who gives a crap?

Jesus vegetable fruit snacks – Yeah, I know media merchandising is as old as the hills. But this one really stood out it my mind because I personally fell victim to it. This past summer I needed fruit snacks for some reason (recipe? craving? don’t remember). I’m no great connoisseur of fruit snacks, so I operated under the assumption that they’d all taste pretty much the same. That left me free to make my pick based solely on price. And the cheapest of all were the Veggie Tales version. They were even cheaper than the dinosaur kind, which was odd because I don’t imagine dinosaurs charge much in licensing fees. And for the most part they met expectations: they tasted just like fruit snacks. Except for one: Bob the Tomato. It tasted just like a sweaty armpit. Mrs. Lens wanted to try one, so I gave it to her. Then I handed her a tissue so she could spit it out.

The writers’ strike – At long last, this is the elephant that’s been lurking in the corner of this column for a couple of months now. When they came for the soap operas, I said nothing. When they came for the late night talk shows, again I said nothing (losing Letterman’s top ten lists was a minor annoyance, but the rest of it – especially Leno – was no skin off my backside). Now I’ve lost new 30 Rock and My Name Is Earl episodes, and The Simpsons won’t be too much farther behind. Though I’d prefer that this hadn’t happened, it’s still not exactly turning my world upside down. At the moment this is a prelude to what may be the number one story of 2008. For now it’s an unfortunate fight. But if and when the actors and directors join the fray, things will get interesting. For the time being, however, it merely ranks between nasty-tasting fruit snacks and new whacko religions.

The Secret – I’m not sure exactly when this got started, but it made it into my house in 2007 via the DVD we rented shortly after seeing this on Oprah. The idea here appears to be the mass-marketing of infantile magical thinking: wanting something will make it so. I suppose these people have half a point. If you don’t think you’ll be successful at something, you probably won’t be. But that doesn’t make the opposite true. How many times have we sat through an American Idol wannabe butchering a song and then proudly proclaiming that he’s never had a lesson or really any other rational reason to believe that he could sing? The only thing that brings these pathetic creatures before us so we can feast on their humiliation is their absolute, unshakable conviction that they’re going to be famous and successful solely because they believe that they’re going to be famous and successful. Shame on anyone who encourages this at any level.

The increasing irrelevance of NPR – I didn’t do a content analysis (or at least I haven’t done it yet), so I don’t have any objective evidence of this. But subjectively I’ve noticed NPR doing less real news and more useless crud. How many obscure folk singers is it possible to interview? And don’t even get me started on the time-wasting felony known as the call-in show. The only thing that shoots my hand toward the Jeep radio off button faster than “Let’s go ahead and take a call” is any story that begins with “When I first learned that my mother had cancer” or words to that effect. In the 21st century, the public airwaves are no place for personal axe-grinding or hand-wringing. Get a blog.

Aqua Teen Hunger Terrorism – Here’s an odd note sounding in the early bars of the advertising industry’s funeral march. Though the world isn’t completely ready to give up on the notion that ads work, the logic is starting to fray at the edges. In particular, the world’s largest media conglomerate seems to have little interest in traditional marketing for movies spawned by the Cartoon Network. Stands to reason, though. Why should Time Warner pay a ton to promote a movie when the whole point behind it (and the TV show that spawned it) was that it cost nearly nothing to produce? So they get some boxes bedecked with LED versions of one of the characters and stash them in visible spots in a handful of cities. Then for some damn reason the Boston authorities decide one of the boxes may be a bomb, so they shut down half the city while they investigate. I don’t mind that the network paid out $2 million for the misunderstanding, because I’m sure it got its money’s worth in free publicity. However, the payment was also an admission of responsibility for the cops’ inability to tell a bomb from a Lite Brite. The words “bad precedent” spring to mind.

The death of my local video store – This one’s rounding out the list because I have to assume personal responsibility for it. I mean, obviously I didn’t single-handedly run the Hollywood Video corporation out of business. I probably didn’t even have all that big an effect on the store I used to go to on Johnson Drive. But as I look back on my movie-watching habits for 2007, I note that I went for more than six months without renting anything from the place I used to go to all the time. Between Netflix and our DVR/dish combination, we just weren’t renting stuff from the store anymore. And apparently we weren’t the only ones. I didn’t think I’d miss it, especially since – as I already mentioned – I wasn’t spending much time there. But now I kinda do. Every once in awhile I get a craving to watch a mess of lowbrow new releases in a single evening (or weekend), and my main channels don’t fill that bill. Plus I felt like a ghoul picking through the store’s dwindling supply of discs when it finally declared that it was going under.