I’m familiar with Howard Stern, I saw a movie about him. Or a TV show or something. He’s a talk show guy. Thinks he’s out there. And I knew there was an Anna Nicole Smith… something to do with Paris Hilton, I think, and I saw the green Paris Hilton vid where she’s naked and everything.

So I had a connection to this news that Howard Stern and Anna Nicole Smith were to marry. Sort of. And during this morning’s idle clickage, I ran across a Salon link to the People magazine million dollar photos of the happy - sort of - couple. Her post partum depression couldn’t have been eased much by the death of her twenty year old son, but that’s a thought that came after the exposure to the People Smith/Stern Bahamas shoot, since before the exposure I really knew neither about the baby nor the son nor the life and times of Anna Nicole Smith. Now that I am better informed, I have to admit that I was surprised to discover that there is another Howard Stern… surprised and disappointed.

On my way through Salon to the Smith/Stern sort-of-nuptial photos, I saw the following letter to George W. Bush from his (ardent) admirer, Belacqua Jones. It explains things. Sort of…

Dear George,

One symptom of the Corporatist State’s emasculation of the media is the public’s belief that if a story is heavily covered, it is important, earthshaking, and trend setting. The opposite is true. The more coverage a story gets, the more trivial it is. The saturation coverage of John Mark Karr, JonBenet Ramsey’s alleged murder proves the point. Then there is the possibility that the midterms may turn on the size of Mark Foley’s pecker. The beauty of the trivialization is that it draws media attention away from your misdeeds.

Goebbels is in his grave kicking his own ass for not coming up with the sound byte that does more to corrupt a free press than the strictest state censorship: If it bleeds, it leads.

But the media’s greatest act of trivialization is their breathless willingness to lap up your rhetoric. You have given them the one morality play that plays well in Peoria, the Hollywood Western, a study in a celluloid morality for a celluloid people. Iraq burns, the Constitution dissolves, the Geneva Conventions are “quaint,” while the media sloshes here and there looking for the next trivial Dingleberry they can hold up to the pubic as if it were a nugget of gold.

The key is to keep the media preoccupied with mindless drivel until after the midterms. Maybe Tom Cruise could jump on a few more couches, or Brad could start seeing another woman. Never forget the golden rule of media relations: The media feeds on the trivial and chokes on the important stuff.

Your admirer,

Belacqua Jones

UPDATE: Wikipedia marks the critical distinction between Howard Allen Stern and Howard K. Stern (no relation, I think, to Howard K. Smith, although they were both in the show biz game at one time or another). Without Wikipedia, I probably never would have heard of the movie “Wasabi Tuna,” which grossed $7,950 in US ticket sales after its release in 2024.

There is some confusion now about whether or not Howard K. Smith and Larry King are the same person, and the earlier reports of Howard K. Smith’s death were part of an elaborate insurance scam.