I watch and read a lot of news each day in order to stay informed and to gather ideas and data for future columns and blogs. I watch the network news each evening taping and seeing at least three broadcasts. I also read the local and premier American papers, I review the weekly columns of a few of my favorite columnists and I also read the news on the Huffington Post (HuffPost).
The problem is that each day I see a lot of repetition of the same story. That’s understandable. After a while a definite format pattern emerges especially among the big three networks.
The motif is sometimes sensational and superficial with a strong scent of bias.
The news elements have a deja vu quality to them.
Each night there is a sensational natural disaster. It could be heavy rain, hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, droughts, flooding, earthquakes, ice melts, record heat or record cold or a record for having no record. There is sometimes the requisite whipping boy or girl, usually meteorologists, who must report in the midst of the worst weather knowing that most viewers are watching hoping to see the reporter destroyed by the turbulence or at least knocked down and embarrassed by it. Why else expose them to the elements? Tragic victims are always interviewed putting on a brave face and promising to rebuild not matter how absurd it seems. And then there are the interviews with the victims of nature’s fury. Journalism made easy: “How do you feel now having lost everything?” “Yes, I have lost everything I have accumulated for the past 60 years, but I am so glad that no one was hurt. It was a miracle.” (Question not ever asked: “Wouldn’t it have been more of a miracle if it hadn’t happened at all?”) Reporting on the same tragic, sensational story will go on night after night as long as humanly possible.
This could be upstaged by an act of incredible domestic violence. Though such a story comes up too often, it is less commonly reported than the natural disaster stories which can go on for weeks. Reporters can not only visit and report on the scene, they can interview experts who can give us all the speculation and details that we don’t really need to listen to. We can then spend weeks getting to know the victims, each heroes in their own way. We can not help but be touched. We send donations to the affected families. We then do little to avoid having it happen again and again.
Then there is the obligatory international violence report. It always involves Muslims killing or rioting or killing while rioting or rioting because of a killing caused by rioting. The motto should be “Go to the Middle East and have a riot, they’re to die for.” There is always much empty speculation as to the cause and the solution. “What are they thinking and is it anything like what they are saying? Can we believe them or convince them that we do even if we don’t? And will they believe that we believe them? And does any of this speculation really matter?”
We are sometimes subjected to the opinions of politicians that no one can take seriously talking seriously as though they were able. The more often they appear on T.V., the less reason they have to do so or at least that we have to listen. When the word “war” comes up we can always count on an interview with the terribly senior senator from a great southwestern state. His answer to every international problem is the same - let’s go to war! Let’s bomb Libya, Egypt, Yemen, North Korea, Iran and Syria - at the same time if need be.
Then there is the medical segment with a network medical expert who also manages to have a full time practice in another part of the country. Each night we learn of yet another change in modern medical theory. Something that was thought good is now bad. Something once thought harmful is now harmless. Medical procedures we were told were life-saving, we now learn were our greatest threats. One night we are told that a new study has found that we waste $750 billion on fraud, waste or unnecessary procedures. That amount, if true, exceeds our current annual federal budget deficit. We might wonder how many tests and procedures that we have had were unnecessary or even harmful. We learn that aspirin is good and we should all take one a day only to later be told to do so only if we have serious medical problem that requires it. Mammograms are and are not valuable, they save lives and produce false positives causing unnecessary testing. Coffee and alcohol are good up to a point but that point keeps changing perhaps affected by the amount we drink them. Cigarettes are still harmful, apparently. So far.
This segment can be followed by the day’s gossip. It usually involves some trouble involving a celebrity who became one by getting into the same trouble. Is so-and- so in rehab again? Did so-and-so really do that while driving? Are they really breaking up? Were they really ever together? Are they real? How do you know? And why should I care? And what is their take on the major issues of the day? This segment lets the media get back at their unfavorites, unusually the non-p.c. Did someone say something that could be racist, ageist, sexist or otherwise embarrassing? Let’s hear all about it, shall we?
A celebrity known to be a female Southern Bubba recently revealed that she once used the “N” word. Can you imagine? No one else ever has, have they? Let’s watch her career fall apart day by day. How many brave sponsors have cancelled her because they would never have used such language, nor would any of their customers? What could be worse? I know. An actor said something bad about a religious minority group when he was really drunk. The network news allowed us to watch him be destroyed, a little more each week. None of us have ever been drunk and none would ever say anything bad about any religious group would we? The media loves to see the successful fail, an American schadenfreude (a great German word that means taking joy in someone else’s loss).
All this “news” usually ends with a positive story about an American or group of Americans doing good for others. The stories are truly touching and show how wonderful human beings can be. It almost makes you want to be one even after all the bad things we see that they do during the rest of the news.
Then there is the print media.
The print media including online stories try to grab us with the headline. The reporter seems to lose interest in the story right after the headline. I think that the problem is that the story can not live up to the headline. So the headline is “The President crushes the House leadership.” The story is that the President has said he would veto legislation that also included........ There is no crushing. No crusher or crushee. Just the headline that got you to read an otherwise uninteresting article.
But it’s worse than that in the print media. Not only are the headlines sensationalised, but the reporting is of such poor quality. News writers in general seem to have lost the basics like who, what, when, where and why. They forget to summarize the story in the first paragraph and then they go on to leave out essential parts. There can be a story about an attack at a military base. Several of our people are killed. What happened to the shooters? Sometimes they actually leave that part out. Or there is a report about sentencing and it neglects to finally say what it was or at least what it could be. During the war in Iraq, we got a nightly count of our casualties but never told how many Iraqis had died. And they never mentioned that they never mentioned it. It was hundreds of thousands in case you still haven’t heard.
It seems that many reporters think themselves more like stenographers. They just record what the person interviewed says, even when not being asked. Reporters seem to sometimes forget that they can ask challenging questions to get at the bottom of the story rather than staying on the very surface of it.
And just when it seemed that journalism had hit an all time low, it went further from course. It started years ago with cable news that must pad and almost create news in order to stay on the air 24 hours a day. And then there was Fox “news” or what some call “Fixed News” because it seems that it was scripted by people with a specific political agenda and not one that reflected intelligence, integrity or impartiality: the ultimate slap in the face of journalist standards.
But now there is something even worse. It is malcontents leaking masses of confidential information in the name of journalism. Wikileaks and its sympathizers are seeking all the prestige and protection of journalism while actually just practicing mean-spirited gossip. The information they leak does not help anyone and is usually misunderstood and misrepresented. The mainstream media give these false journalists too much attention which only encourages their basic narcissism.
I have remembered the biblical passage admonishing the people to post sentries at all the gates of the city. Besides the straightforward tactical advice (something we are only now learning about the need for better border security), it is also symbolic. It means that we should control what goes into our body through its various entrances some of which are our eyes and ears. To this end, each evening I use fast forward to go past the repetitious, the gory, the gossip, and the sensational. It leaves me with a few minutes of interesting news. And there is some interesting news, every night, no matter what, you just have to work hard to find it.
That’s what’s news.
