Smile! You're on Deather Camera!

Marty Kaplan
HuffPost

I keep hoping that the health care "debate" we're having this summer will turn out to be just a plot point in the 2009 version of The Truman Show, the movie where Jim Carrey's character, Truman Burbank, discovers that what he thought was reality is actually a reality television show.

I want my character in The Marty Show to discover that Rush Limbaugh calling Obama a Nazi, and Glenn Beck calling the president a racist, turn out to be harmless taunts in a fictional storyline, not actual invitations to nutballs with weapons to do something truly terrible.

I keep waiting for that Candid Camera reveal when members of Congress realize that the constituents accusing them of wanting to euthanize their grannies turn out to be actors playing their parts, not voters too dumb or too scared to resist being manipulated by political demagogues and industry propagandists.

I keep praying that the execrable job the news media is doing turns out to be an intervention by extraterrestrials in an episode of The Twilight Zone. The elevation of combat over content; the false equivalence of lies and facts in service of a bizarre notion of "balance"; the imperative to captivate instead of the obligation to inform: I want the camera to pull back and disclose the alien mind-control experiment that has forced human journalists to become entertainers.

(More here.)