Talking Points for the Media (The Good Rabbi's Blog)

So Saturday was the broadcast of the Live 8 concert. It promised to be quite an event, as the G8 conference gets underway in Scotland. The event was broadcast live from ten different countries (members of the G8). Celine Dion managed to cause quite a stir by not appearing live, but rather sending in a performance from Vegas (the actual U.S. portion of the concert took place in Philly). It was apparently a huge deal, as both of Celine Dion's fans were highly disappointed.

For me, however, the main draw to this concert was the reunion of Pink Floyd, which is one of my all-time favourite bands. There set was nothing short of amazing (even if they look like they just came from a nursing home). I was a very happy camper when they were singing Wish You Were Here. All of this is all well and good, but why am I bringing it up? Well, I was watching a good portion of the telecast on MTV, and during what happened to be (for me, at least) the absolute pinnacle of the entire concert was the live performance (by Pink Floyd, of course) of Comfortably Numb.

Unfortunately, even though this is one of my favourite songs, what made this performance memorable was that the bonehead announcers at MTV talked over this performance. It also appears that I was not the only person that felt that this was an eggregious error on their part. To judge from the blogosphere, MTV has been taking quite a drubbing for this. Personally, I think that this is a really problematic trend that seems to only be getting worse with time.

It seems that there are many different events lately where the media feels the need to give us their opinion of what is going on, or more prevalently, tell us exactly what we can plainly see in front of us. Now, I know that Pink Floyd doesn't hold the same value to some people as it does for me, but it's pretty obvious what's going on, and I don't see the need for them to pontificate. The weird thing is that it's the Tuesday after the concert (three days later), and I'm still annoyed. Fortunately, I did find a link for those Floyd fans out there, and you can access the live track (without MTV's input) here.