Media Spin and Streisand’s Cloned Samantha

Not sure if she’s pleased or not. In her recent interview in Variety magazine, Barbra Streisand opened up, as she rarely does, about important issues facing all of us, especially women, today; glass ceilings, sexual harassment, #MeToo, gun control, the “boys club”, etc. etc. However, the media spin of a brief, off-topic comment has taken off and overshadows everything else.

The 1% Overshadows the 99

For people “our age” who grew up with Streisand’s Funny Girl, Prince of Tides, The Way We Were, etc etc., it a great piece. It is also nice getting “to know” Babs as a regular (if you can EVER call her regular) person. She comes across shy and very personable, likeable. She may be much more mellow now at 75, but still – I like her and I liked reading the Variety interview.  Because 99% of what you’ll find about Streisand’s interview online is just that 1% of what she said, you should read it yourself.  We could use this as a perfect example of the media hyping for “eyeballs”, sensationalism and $$ rather than meaningful content, but we’ll not. We’ll join the bandwagon and hype the cloning thing, too.

Media Spin and Hype

Speaking of media spin, hype and sensationalism, it’s interesting the various “angles” different publications took in covering this; from scientific, pet-lover, financial, crazy lady, etc.  Look at the “meta description” for coverage of the same subject to the left.  Pretty funny, right?

So!  On with the subject at hand. It seems you, too, can have a pet cloned if you have $50k to spare. If you had the cash, would you?  We LOVE our pets and the worst thing about having a pet is knowing you’ll lose them one day. Would it make you feel better if you could clone Fido? A mental trick to give you the illusion of “starting over”, sort of like Groundhog Day. We’re not sure how we feel. For us anyway. On one side, having another pet that is as cute and loveable would be wonderful. But on the other hand, it would be creepy to look at your new Fido as a literal replacement or duplicate.

What do you think?