Back in the 1980s, I remember watching part of a documentary that was as much a satire of the genre as the real deal. It was focused on the pop culture events of the day, presenting them as though the documentary was being assembled sometime in the future, thus looking back at what were then current events and personalities through a historical-refracting prism. One of the personalities featured was, naturally, Madonna. Voicing over a truly wretched early lip-sync video of hers, the narrator intoned, “She couldn’t sing, she couldn’t dance, and she couldn’t act. All she could do was be.”
I was reminded of this and a line from the song “Boy in the Bubble” by Paul Simon while reading Nick Arama’s excellent dissection of Leslie Stahl’s astonishing lack of perception and Van Jones’ slightly more perceptive lament as to why legacy media has…
