I love the news. I especially like getting beyond the headlines. I listen only to our all-news station in order to hear the weather and traffic. That station used to advertise that they would give me the world in 20 minutes. Well, maybe…but only if the world exists in teaser headlines.
But lately I’m irritated by my other standbys such as NPR and the BBC. Their programs tend to go much deeper than the papers and the nightly news. But if you listen carefully, you’ll find that their is a pattern to most of their stories. A good story, it seems, must show one of several things: (a) government leaders are idiots and/or liars, (b) whatever you used to believe is wrong, or (c) Things are worse than you thought. I don’t think NPR is anti-Bush. But they do love pointing out his mis-steps. I suspect they’ll do the same for the next Democrat president. Or they tell us that company x was off in their accounting by 3% and so the stock market is going to crash. And then they use commentators like Daniel Shore (a very bright man I must say) to drip disdain in their cutting viewpoints.
Not that these stories shouldn’t be run. But, I’m not sure they know any other story. If the story doesn’t show death, corruption, leader stupidity, environmental decay, then is it worth telling? Apparently not as the lead story. If you listen to All Things Considered (NPR) all the way to the end of the program, you usually get at least one interesting story that doesn’t end in negativity.
In Philadelphia, the TV news consists of body count/crime reports, weather, sports, and some canned medical or health report that was likely produced by a national media company. The TV news my parents get (Portland, Maine) is much less crime and more interesting stories (the 500 lb pumpkin some kid grew, maple syrup futures). Portland is a city and has some city crime, but I suspect they don’t include all of the crime they could.
I think the heart of this style of news-reporting is anxiety–anxiety that the desired qualities of America are being systematically destroyed. This is not some new worry. As I watched a PBS special on Andrew Jackson, I saw similar media response to one of his cabinet members who had an affair with a married woman. The scandal was covered because the entire fabric of society would be ruined by the woman (who had since been widowed and then married her lover).
When I was a kid, I delivered the Grit. It was a weekly feel good newspaper. For 35 cents you could get a paper filled with interesting stories. I don’t think it covered current events but you got something new and interesting. I guess I’d like something somewhere between the Grit/rural news and crises coverage. For example, I saw a short story about an 83 year old doctor (somewhere in the South) who has been delivering underweight babies since forever. He had hoped to wipe out this problem. Though he hadn’t he still labored to help these mothers and their babies survive. Here you get a story of courage and hard-work while still acknowledging a growing problem of underweight babies born to impoverished minority women.
Musings on Faith and Psychology 