So the 94th Academy Awards took place Sunday night. I wonder if most of America would have known or cared, had it not been for the now infamous altercation between presenter Chris Rock and Will Smith. Will Smith's slap was endlessly debated on multiple media channels throughout the day with everyone weighing in. (Apparently, even with inflation, everyone still has at least two cents to put in!) The visual of the slap has already developed into a meme that will no doubt endure for years to come.
What strikes me about this whole incident (no pun intended) is that the discussion has consumed all the oxygen in the room, so to speak. There has been little coverage of anything else except for Biden's latest faux pas that his handlers are furiously trying to walk back. So if you came across any news yesterday - especially any cable news - it was focusing on one of those two incidents.
The problem is that we have become such a society consumed by the sensational that we have little time to dig into items of substance. There is so much more going on in the world around us, but we get sucked into the hot topic of the moment (if it bleeds, it leads!) instead of items of more lasting import. They are interesting, but not important. Important things get covered in feature articles and books and are never accompanied by flashy graphics that try to grab your attention. But we often focus on the trivial and don't take time to go deep. (I was going to write "have time", but that's not really true. We always have time for what we decide is important.)
There is no doubt much that occurred yesterday that will endure long after this latest controversy blows over. But you'll never know about it if you just spend time consuming the headlines being fed to you by social media, the legacy media, or cable news networks.
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