News?

Man in miniskirt, fishnet stockings
and heels, arrested for hiding and
watching porn in weight room.

We have a real problem with “news.” First of all, definitions of news are not helpful. You find definitions like “material that is newsworthy,” or “announcements of recent events,” or “what appears in a newspaper,” and so on. Thus it appears that anything and everything can be news, and is. It is not clear to me who decides on what is news. Do reporters decide on their own what is news? Probably in some cases, but in others, like on TV, there is probably an editor who oversees things and decides what is news. It appears to me there are no ground rules for news, or for how important any particular piece of news is, or for how long it stays news, or whether something is considered news at all. More often than not it seems to me news is determined by whatever someone thinks the public will want to hear about, and for how long. I find this whole business about news to be completely unsatisfactory. Today is a great case in point. If you are deaf, dumb, and blind, and live somewhere in the remote wilds of British Columbia under a rock, a hundred or more miles from the nearest burg, have no radio, TV, or telephone, you might not have heard that Michael Jackson died. Michael Jackson, you know, the used-to-be and recently wanna-be-again “pop star.”

I mean no disrespect to the now deceased, but I must question why his unexpected death is of such overwhelming importance that it displaced all other news for hours on end. Even Keith Olberman, who I like to think is a more conscientious newscaster than most, spent his entire hour on this topic, and then went on into Rachel Maddow’s hour as well. He repeated I don’t know how many times that Michael Jackson died at precisely 2:26 p.m. We also heard over and over again that he was not quite 51 years of age. Then there was a kind of review of his life, pictures of him as a boy, and on and on. Now here is where I think there should be some ground rules for the News. Olberman (and others) should simply have reported that Michael Jackson died unexpectedly of a massive heart failure at 2:26 p.m. If you are interested in any further details there will no doubt be retrospectives from now until doomsday. In the meanwhile in Iran today…Benjamin Netanhayu said…Things are not going well in Afghanistan…and so on. I simply do not believe that the death of Michael Jackson (God bless him) is so important it should dwarf all other news. And if people are really that interested in the details they should be able to find them later (and believe me, they will be able to). They should have said the same thing about the death of Farrah Fawcett – she died today of cancer. She was 62. All the details will be forthcoming shortly. In the meanwhile…

The MSM seems to be determined to force news on us that we don’t require and in many cases probably don’t even want. Why for example, should they start covering a car chase when they say they don’t know who is driving, why they are chasing him or her, what it is all about, and so on. Why can’t they say (if they must), there is a car chase. When we find out something about it we’ll tell you about it. In the meanwhile…Ditto for train wrecks, hostage situations, and what have you. Just say there is one, we don’t know anything about it yet, when we do we’ll let you know. In the meanwhile…They simply refuse to do this, they just begin speculating about everything which then later turns out to have been completely false. The Columbine case is a classic in this respect. It is not that there is no news of importance elsewhere, it’s because the Newspapers and Networks don’t want to spend the money to actually cover the news when it’s so much cheaper to just focus on nonsense that will keep the public entertained. The net effect of this is, we just don’t really have any news anymore. What becomes news is what is in the paper or on the TV, not what is actually happening around the world. We are not better off for this, and it is almost surely the case that the average American knows far less about current events than most Europeans and Iranians. The motto for American newspeople seems to be “keep ‘em empty-headed and fat.”

LKBIQ:
Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
Elbert Hubbard

TILT:
Goldfish were kept as ornamental fish in China for hundreds of years prior to the 15th century.