Money-tainment

Maybe I'm a little behind on my cultural observations, but I'm just noticing that financial analysis shows are blossoming on the media like so many dandelions after a good rain. "Marketplace" is running on National Public Radio not just during the week but on the weekends, too. On TV, "Wall Street Week in Review" used to be the only show of its ilk. A panel of the financial elite calmly discussed the whims and proclivities of how the market had performed over the past seven days. And it was dull, dull, dull. The stuff for economists and brokers, and not for the common man. Now, we have CNBC, a network totally dedicated to business and finance, and every 24-hour news channel has its whiz-bang panel of experts, its gurus of finance, shooting stock advice at you at a pace formerly reserved for those three-minute political "debates" formerly so popular on those same shows. Wayne Rogers does this now. Trapper John is now a stock maven. There’s also some guy who looks like Alfred E. Newman and a woman with a huge, huge mouth, so big that's all you see when she talks. And some guy named Cramer who screams a lot and really should cut down on the coffee is ruining my digestion because Husband absolutely has to watch his stock market call-in show that is on the air right around the time I eat dinner.

I've starting taking my evening meals in another room.

I don't know whether this trend in finance-tainment is because the media is reacting to the cultural zeitgeist, as they claim, or if it's the other way around. Or maybe it's a natural result of our culture's "do it yourself" mentality. Pump your own gas (don't worry, Jerseyites, you'll be experiencing this soon), check out your own groceries, choose your own poison in the stock market. Thanks to on-line brokerage "houses" like E-trade and Ameritrade, you no longer need a broker or even a boatload of money to obtain a little piece of corporate America for your own. Yes, these services have been available for a while, but the public education part of it took a little longer to come on line. Rights and responsibility go hand in hand, and if you're going to log on and dither around with Junior's college education fund, then you should know a little bit about P/E ratios. So television, that benevolent force only interested in our own welfare, stepped in with some advice to keep us from falling flat on our nest eggs. (followed by extremely long disclaimer text that past performance is no guarantee of future results and the network is not responsible if you take any of these yahoos' advice and lose not only your shirt, but your pants and shorts as well) And these shows give us the illusion that we actually might have some control over the vagaries of the economy, even though most of us don't have a clue.

I'm certain this is trend in money-tainment is going to bleed into the game-show lineup any season now. Think of it: instead of vying for cash and prizes, you can either stick with a hundred shares of this blue chip stock that hasn't moved three cents in either direction in the last ten years, or....take a chance on the IPO that's behind door number three!! You really could become a millionaire...or wind up with enough MCI stock to wallpaper your bathroom. I'd have a little more respect for a game show like that, which, like Jeopardy, at least depends a little more on the skill of the contestant than something stupid that depends on the luck of the draw or how many Madagascar hissing cockroaches you can eat. And of course as soon as it's out, Donald Trump will cop to it. Just watch...he's bound to come out with a show where he selects a number of teams who, over the course of a season (it might take two, or he could just do that massive, incomprehensible editing job he usually has done), form a corporation, develop a product and have an IPO. Highest opening stock wins. And, if you bet on the right one at home, you win a hundred shares!!!

I don't know. Overall, I'd rather just pump my own gas, check out my own groceries, do independent research on my own stock picks and not have to watch any more of the Donald Trump's bizarre hair than I already have.