Stayton Bonner

In the current  24-hour-media world, epidemics are updated like Facebook posts. I recently spoke with a friend's elderly parent. Channels make money by keeping viewers tuned in with omnipresent catastrophies. Swine flu. North Korean nuclear testing. Tony Romo dumping Jessica Simpson. 24 hour news channels employ vaudeville techniques of titillation to retain audiences. But they don't have to pay performers or write scripts. All they need to do is press "record".

This spring, I visited Plainview, a small town halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo. Its peanut plant made international headlines in January for producing product with salmonella. The health violations uncovered would make Upton Sinclair nauseous. You may read it here.

This story was all over the news in January. Peanut butter sales dropped. Congress and the president proposed overhauling food regulations. But who remembers it now? We're so inundated with crises that they've lost impact.

When Sinclair wrote The Jungle, an indictment of the U.S. meat packing industry that led to the passage of 1906's Meat Inspection Act, it shocked readers. The same goes for Rachel Carson' s Silent Spring. The book's exposure of DDT's environmental effects led to Congress banning use of the pesticide in 1972. Sure, we get Fast Food Nations, Supersize Mes, and a host of other muckraking documentaries. But they've lost their impact in an oversaturated media. 

Speaking of Plainview...What would Daniel Plainview, the protagonist of There Will Be Blood, (which was loosely based on Sinclair's Oil!,), say about the glut of cable news? Are we all drinking from each other's milkshakes?

But I've lost my train of thought...the octuplets are on.