The media – GAH! Or, maybe it’s the people watching?

*Note – my own life is rather incredibly routine at the moment so putting the spotlight on others is just way more interesting :-)*

I saw this tag line on Politico today during lunch: “Going gray’s just fine, man” and I immediately knew it was a write up on Howard Fineman.

Why? Because while watching him yesterday on Hardball I noticed that he has been letting himself go gray.  This picture shows him before – I searched and could not find a recent one with the gray more prominent. Actually I noticed it a few days ago on Countdown when he and Keith were side by side and it kinda looked like Keith’s natural gray (which I love) was bleeding over onto Howard. And I like it. I wrote once about how I love gray hair and will not be coloring over mine. So when I see TV stars/personalities letting their gray show I tend to notice. But, it was just something I *noticed* – not something I freaked out about which prompted me to start emailing or blogging about the hair color change.

Freaked out about you say? Blogging about it you say? Emailing the man himself over it? Yeah – check out this part of the posting from Politico:

Perfect strangers, we hear, go up and talk to him about it. If you Google “Howard Fineman” and “hair,” 30,500 hits pop up.

Fineman told Shenanigans, “I’m letting my hair go gray — duh — but it grows slowly. I attribute [last week’s] particularly disconcerting look on ‘Hardball’ to two factors: I drove around town with the top down on my old convertible, and I read the hair-raising details of the stimulus package. By the way, nothing I’ve ever said, reported or written over the years has generated as much comment as the Hair Transition, which says a lot about the power of television and, I guess, the importance of what I have said, reported and written.”

(emphasis mine)

Agree or disagree with him, this is a very well respected political correspondent. The Chief Political Correspondent for Newsweek magazine and someone who has interviewed every President since 1984. And it’s his HAIR COLOR that has people talking about him?????

I would love to blame this on what is an easy to pick on shallow media, but from that Google stat and the feedback he is getting from what must be much more than just reporters, I now have to just put it out there – perhaps the media is shallow because the VIEWERS are shallow?? Maybe that’s all they really want? Is this a which came first question? Did American dumb down the media by only demanding and responding to fluff? Or did the media dumb us down by only feeding us fluff?

Well?

And yes I realize that I will be adding to the Google stats with this post.