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Critics often complain that the American news media offer only bad news; good news is never reported.
That may be just human nature. There's a common saying,
No news is good news.
Logically, that is Good
news is no news,
or, in essence, Good news is not
news.
And one must wonder at some news organizations, who
apparently believe that projecting an image is more
important than covering the news, good or bad. Several
weekends ago, my daughter, Abby, was among the 1,600
Colorado youngsters in the state-wide Odyssey of the
Mind
competition on the DU campus.
(Her team placed fifth in the creative problem-solving contest. The first-place winners advanced to the international competition, which is in Boulder later this month. It's an amazing spectacle. If negative news has made you fear that all the next generation is dropping out or joining street gangs, go see the contest. You'll be astonished and delighted.)
That Saturday morning, the competing students were disrupted by the roar of three helicopters in the sky. Maneuvering in precise formation, the whirling trio landed near the fieldhouse. We were all quite impressed.
Then we noticed that the aircraft were from Channel 4, whose studios can't be more than a few miles from the DU campus. Why were they sending noisy, disruptive helicopters to cover the contest when a van would have done the job more easily?
Because they weren't covering the contest; we never saw a camera crew, nor anything on the news. The entire chopper disruption was apparently staged just to show off the Channel 4 helicopter.
Perhaps someday we'll be able to read new theories which explain broadcast journalism as a performing art, wherein you make a statement while out in the field and never bother to cover the story. Your loud arrival is the real event.
But that won't explain why bad news
sells papers
and attracts viewers while good news
doesn't. The
latest such complaint comes from John Sununu, White House
chief of staff, and concerns the Alaska oil spill.
He noted that coverage has focused on the 240,000 barrels that went into the sea, not the million barrels that stayed aboard, owing to Exxon's heroic struggle to keep the ship from breaking up while pumping its oil crude into other vessels.
Three quarters of it was contained within the ship.
There's been very little reporting of that,
Sununu
said.
Certainly we must grant that an at-the-scene account of
that struggle could make good reading. In a chilling spray
of brine and crude, an accountant probably stood at the
bridge. We had 1.3 million barrels at $12.50, which
comes to $16.25 million. Thanks to the spill, now we have 1
million barrels at $19, or $19 million. We just made $2.75
million here alone, and we've got billions of other barrels
that just became worth a lot more. Captain, I think the
company can stand for your next bottle. Hell, get a
case.
If the news media adopted this positive, supportive tone, look how other recent events would be reported:
· One gun turret functions perfectly, and 1,484 sailors aboard the USS Iowa were still reporting for duty when the ship returned to Norfolk, Va., after maneuvers near Puerto Rico.
· Recent investigations have revealed that Jim Wright, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, made an honest $89,500 last year, and that further, entire days often passed without either Wright or his wife receiving any sort of payment from the Mallightco Corp.
· Displaying their concern about the state's largest school district, which takes the lion's share of their local property tax dollars, a record number of Jefferson County voters went to the polls yesterday. Initial returns show that at least six percent of registered voters cast ballots.
It's fun to write news in a positive, upbeat way.
However accurate such stories may be, though, they don't
answer certain questions, such as What happened to the
other gun turret? And to the 47 sailors on the Iowa who
weren't reporting for duty?
or Doesn't Jim Wright
have some other sources of income? And how much money were
the Wrights getting on the implied days that Mallightco did
pay them?
Good news fails to satisfy human curiosity. That's why
the news we read or hear is generally negative. If you want
to see the positive
accentuated, wait for the
helicopter and its grand arrival.
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