ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” story. It is an editorial by the editor.

“Behind a bush, on the side of the road, there was *no* severed arm. No dismembered trunk of a man in his late fifties. No head in a bag. Nothing. Not a sausage.” — Monty Python, “Nothing Happened.”

Stories of fear and loathing abound in daily broadcasts of the news. Indeed, the staples of televised local, state and national news programs are murder and mayhem, entertainment, sports and what celebrities are up to.

We modern a-go-go Americans for some time now have been guilty of misunderstanding news developments. We somehow have come to believe what we’re seeing and hearing in these news programs is just the way things are, and we’re going to an unpleasant place in a handbasket.

What we fail to understand is that the news most often is about the offbeat, the unusual, the crazy, the bizarre. That’s what makes it news, the weirder, the more interesting and compelling. An ax murder is a lot more interesting than a public debate about transportation policy.

So what catches our attention and interest is that offbeat story about tragedies and horror. The news organizations know what pushes our buttons and they exploit it under the guise of, “You gotta see this!”

But if we really examine this critically, we have to come to grips with the explanation that this is news because it is indeed unusual. It’s way off the beaten path of normal. When we start to believe this stuff is typical and just the way things are, we cave in to our fears and spend most of our time huddled in front of that boob tube that created our problems.

“Take your TV tube and eat it, with all that phony stuff of sports and all the unconfirmed reports, you know I watched that rotten box until my head began to hurt, from checking out the way the newsmen say they get the dirt before all the guys on channel so-and-s0, further they assert that any shows they’ll interrupt to bring you news if it comes up, they say that if the place blows up, they will be the first to tell because the guys they got downtown are working hard and doing swell. So if anybody gets the news before it hits the street, they say that no one blabs it faster. Our coverage can’t be beat…” Frank Zappa, talking about his impressions of the Watts Riots in LA in 1965.

But it isn’t entirely the news media’s fault for exploiting our fears and pushing our buttons. As I used to tell so many of my colleagues in the newsroom, “It’s not news when airplanes take off and land safely like they do 99.9% of the time. It is news when they crash.”

Our critical misunderstanding of just what the news is leads us to develop a cockeyed world view of just what’s happening around us.

“Living is easy with eyes closed… misunderstanding all you see.” — The Beatles in “Strawberry Fields.”