But boy, there is a lot of noise in the news. For example, I defy you to find any “news” about Sarah Palin published in the last month. Plenty of noise and commentators asking each other whether or not she was being kept in the news by news commentators (even they know there’s no story there)—but news? News would be if the Alaska legislature impeached her. How much clothes she purchased and to whom they will be donated is not news. it’s gossip, and not even nourishing gossip.
I won’t bother to offer more examples. For one thing I’m beat after spending a few hours pushing slush across and down our parking lot at work. For another I’m still recovering from the shoplifter my daughter spotted in our store yesterday afternoon. First time we’ve ever had someone handcuffed and led away. This particular Christmas shopper had managed to stuff $1600 worth of beads into her large purse. Had lots in her pockets too. (Now for us, that was breaking news!)
Revenons a nos moutons, as my favorite Swiss French teacher at UCLA used to say, after one of her elegant digressions en francais. Mme Walker, I miss you!
So what if we put a tape delay on the news, make it a bit more historical. I remember being very impressed in school when I read that it took months for early Presidential election results to reach California. [I don’t even know if this is true, and I don’t want to check because the concept of a 2-3 month old newspaper arriving out west with the NEWS is so evocative.]
Perhaps if we sat on the news for a while, then the trivial stuff would have a chance to drain out through the holes in the media colander, and what ended up being reported would be tasty pasta instead of a lot of hot water and the occasional news noodle.
And then l’affaire Palin would be reduced to something like this:
Senator John McCain chose Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, as his Presidential running mate. After an initial burst of popularity, questions were raised about her qualifications to be President should Senator McCain become ill or die in office. Governor Palin also did not fare well in interviews with the press. Following the election of the Obama-Biden ticket, Ms. Palin returned to her post as Governor of Alaska.
So instead of several hundred million words on radio, television, and sprayed across the internet like foam on a runway when the jet’s landing gear ain’t working, we’d have a calm little paragraph suitable for one of those horrible textbooks we make our children read in social studies.
But that wouldn’t be any fun. And making noise and calling it news is entertaining, which is why so much of the news industry has long since devolved into just another form of entertainment.
There is still news, of course. The informative kind. But man, it’s often so grim. Like this story about cholera in Zimbabwe in today’s New York Times. It’s tragic in every possible way, and very hard to read. There’s the rhetoric—speeches by politicians, promises to do this or that—and there’s the reality that we are powerless to protect helpless people in Darfur, Zimbabwe, N. Korea, Burma and so on. Even as we witness daily tragedies here of home foreclosures and mass layoffs, it’s worth remembering that we could be worse off.
[The cynic in me here comments that we are, in fact, rapidly becoming worse off, and that we also seem to be powerless to solve problems here at home. Ask any Katrina survivor for a quick report card.]
See what an ice storm and lack of sleep can do? Oy!
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