Spinning

Coincidence: a striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance.

Conspiracy: an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons.

Coincidences are interesting, shocking, and often amusing.  Conspiracies are interesting, shocking, and almost never amusing.  Both are bread and butter for writers, especially the television kind.  And it's no coincidence I mention writers and television together.

Police caught committing violence escalates and television is flooded with new cop shows.  Wall Street, CEOs, mortgage companies, and politicians are caught in massive frauds and television is flooded with new lawyer shows.  Powerful, rich men like Blagovitch and Madoff are proven to be con men and television is flooded with caper shows.

The question that comes to mind is how much is coincidence and how much is conspiracy?  Are writers simply reacting to current events?  Or are networks receiving incentives to air programming that will sway the public?  Is the message "cops are the good guys, so they can bend the rules a bit" coincidence or conspiracy?  How about "lawyers are good guys just like everyone else and deserve your sympathy?"  Or "expensively dressed con-men are really good guys and shouldn't need to follow the rules?"

Network executives deny such accusations regularly.  The denial is predictable, in fact, going something like, "Goodness, it's impossible to do such a thing; these shows take YEARS to get through the pipe from pitch to program."  Of course they neglect to mention it is themselves who control the spigot at the end of the pipe and decide what comes out when.  

Sadly, such collusion probably wouldn't even be unlawful.  After all it is the business of the media to sway the public for advertisers.  In fact, television was originally created by big business for just that purpose.  It's not much of a step to shill for big spenders whose desire is to buy public opinion instead of  sell soap.

Then again, I could be writing this while hoping someone would bribe me to stop being mean to the networks.  Coincidence?

I think I just gave myself a headache.