“George Melish looked down, but one glance confirmed his suspicions: 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, 1973, “Nothing Happened.”
“It’s not news when an airplane takes off and then lands safely. It is when it crashes.” — David T. Young
The news is so easily misunderstood, especially these days, these troubled times. So many people complain that the news media is a huge part of the problems that plague us because journalists are nattering nabobs of negativism.
As a 45-year member of this despised fraternity, I have to defend it and yet plead guilty to a number of transgressions.
My defense is very simply that the news by definition is those things that are unusual when they occur. I cite the airplane quote above. And I cite the farcical skit from Monty Python when “Nothing Happened.”
To be sure, the nature of a lot of news deals with the “ain’t it awful” kind of development. The humdrum story that won’t be aired or published is about a man who ate breakfast, got in his car, drove to work, came home for dinner, watched television and then went to sleep without any trouble. If he was killed in a traffic accident, if a scoundrel broke into his house and robbed and killed him, those incidents, because they are not typical, would qualify as news.
We everyday Americans have a hard time taking proper stock of what’s going on when we start believing we’re going there in a handbasket because of what we’ve seen, read or heard.
Part of the problem is that we must be clear about just what the news is.
Too many local print and broadcast media outlets provide a plethora of stories about crime. But that very simply is because the public wants and demands it. On my site, public safety stories get a lot more readership than what the Planning Commission did last night. Even more troubling is that the latter actually may provide greater impact on the readers’ lives.
And the media that only a half century ago was serious about journalism has somehow deteriorated into masqueraded clever advertising. I’ve seen far too many stories about new products and services at businesses that advertise prominently. And don’t forget the steady diet of manufactured public relations for events carefully designed to lure consumers to come on down and spend their money.
The amount of sports coverage has exploded over the years, pretty much in line with the increasing public interest. I don’t ever recall in my salad days of community journalism so much coverage of college football practices or recruiting reports.
I was told many years ago that sports was the playground of journalism, a place for readers, viewers and fans to go to forget their troubles and get immersed in things and events that have little to do with the quality of their lives. In others words, it’s escapism.
And don’t get me started about celebrity journalism and entertainment, which has overrun our political process almost as badly as money and religion.
Historians have pointed to “Bread and Circuses” as one of the telltale signs of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. As long as the rich and powerful can keep us distracted, misled, uncurious and fighting amongst ourselves over whatever crumbs remain, we don’t appear to be turning the tide in our favor. We’re letting our republic slip away.
Pulitzer Prize winning author and columnist Chris Hedges often has accused the United States in the last four decades to have fallen victim to the same fates as all other empires before it in history — The Roman, Greek, Dutch, Ottoman, French, British… He wrote about it in a book subtitled “The Death of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”
I fear that Chris Hedges has it right.
