Good news is no news
Stephen Colbert opines in Entertainment Weekly (#1014, 3 October 2008):
There’s not more news now than there was when we were kids. There’s the same amount from when it was just Cronkite. And the easiest way to fill it is to have someone’s opinion on it. Then you have an opposite opinion, and then you have a mishmash of fact and opinion, and you leave it the least informed you can possibly be.
Sometimes it’s tricky to separate mish from mash. To this 2 Blowhards post, Tatyana (a name I once knew how to spell) offers the following suggestion:
I think [the] Times (or Sun, or Post) should not keep the pretense of “balanced” politics. Times should stop calling itself “a newspaper of record”; they should come out and say, openly and honestly — we are the Socialist Democratic newspaper, we serve the angry left that now have infiltrated themselves into positions of power — be it in industry, finance or in government — and we reflect their views and plans for further dominance.
Circa 1900 in New York, there were something like nine daily papers in English, each of which catered to a particular political niche. I’m remembering Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, which was something of a radical organ for its time; in the 1850s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were Tribune correspondents, based in London. (Marx, I’m told, was paid $5 for each article that appeared in the paper.) Yet the Tribune was considered staid, especially after Greeley died following his unsuccessful Presidential run in 1872. And if the Tribune was pinko and the Times was gray, the World, acquired by Joseph Pulitzer in 1883, was the prototype for yellow.
Which is by way of saying that the notion of the local newspaper — in most places there’s only the one — as an independent, therefore presumably trustworthy, oracle is a fairly recent development, sustained largely by myth and legend and the dreams of Edward R. Murrow wannabes. Murrow himself, though, had few such illusions: “Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world,” he once said, “doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.”
That Blowhards piece, incidentally, refers to the decision by the Seattle Times to move most of its editorial commentary and op-ed material out of the paper and onto the Web. It may be that Web consumers are more interested in that sort of thing — or that print consumers have had their fill of it.
Erratum: Well, it’s obvious. That one, anyway.
Tatyana »
29 September 2008 · 4:53 pm
Er, flattered, I’m sure. But it TatYAna, not TatANYa
CGHill »
29 September 2008 · 5:13 pm
Oops. (That has two O’s, right?)
fillyjonk »
29 September 2008 · 5:41 pm
I’m not a big fan of Colbert (I don’t really watch Comedy Central any more), but I do think he has a good point here.
One thing he is leaving out is that another way to fill the news-time is to Sensationalize! The Heck! Out of Things!
Hence, you get the ongoing Caylee (or whatever her name is, or unfortunately, probably WAS) Anthony search-stories. Yes, it’s sad. Yes, it’s tawdry and awful. But unless you’re related to the family, involved in the prosecution of the case, or even in the same general area, why exactly does it matter? Yes, sometimes bad things happen to small children. Yes, sometimes parents (probably are) guilty of crimes. What was once general (bad things sometimes happen to kids) has been turned into a very specific spectacle for the delictation of a particular type of person. (I assume people must care about it and pay attention to it or they’d not continue to show it.)
But this is the kind of stuff we used to read novels for, I tend to think. At least in novels much of the time you get the “redemption moment” where you learn something or come to understand human nature better. Watching the Jerry-Springer-ized news of today, I only feel sad and isolated and more wanting to go live in a cabin in the woods so I can avoid my (apparently) increasingly nutso fellow humans.
Tatyana »
29 September 2008 · 6:47 pm
Chaz: I always add another one. Three strikes, and all that.
McGehee »
30 September 2008 · 9:33 am
Also recycle, reuse, repeat, reiterate, recap, and … did I mention repeat?