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Last week was carnival time in New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro and Aspen. In Louisiana and Brazil, they were getting in their jollies before Lent started on Ash Wednesday; in protestant Colorado, we held a media carnival.
Though media carnivals may appear to be chaotic, there are rules:
1. Location. Famous people hang out in Aspen, so
whatever happens there is important. Face it, if 200 people
disappeared in Comanche National Grassland tomorrow
morning, you'd never hear about it unless you watched
Unsolved Mysteries
five years hence or read a
supermarket tabloid: UFOs abduct 100's from ancient
sacred Indian canyon.
There is an easy way to predict which sites will attract media carnivals: Where would you go to gather the news if you had an expense account? Aspen, or Las Animas?
2. Visuals. When writing for newspapers, you can get by with the traditional but stolid inverted pyramid. Find out who, what, where, when, why and how, and jam that into the first two paragraphs. But television, which serves millions of subliterate Americans, has different demands.
The story must be visual. If it's not visual -- you don't have any footage of a 1983 GM pickup exploding -- then you make it visual by attaching bombs to a few trucks. This is also safer and easier than getting live footage of exploding trucks, Somali snipers, Serbian mortars, etc.
Fortunately for journalistic integrity, the Missing Skiers Saga came with visuals -- raw wilderness, flying helicopters, emotional reunions the cameras could pry into.
3. Plot. A media carnival also demands a plot, which, like visuals, is often in short supply in the real world. No problem -- fabricate one.
The drama starts as mystery: What happened to the Five Missing Skiers? Move to romance: We know that these people (the Missing and the Rescuers) belong together, and we hold our breaths as their union is thwarted by malign circumstance.
But we can't just end at lived happily ever
after,
or all those pleasant days of reporting from
Aspen on an expense account will end much too soon.
So contrive a new plot with good guys and bad guys. If
there isn't a bad guy at hand, then make one, just as you
do with visuals. Transform Ken Torp from Hero who
Survived Five Days of Wilderness
into Reckless
Egomaniac who Abandoned his Comrades.
The next twist? Because the World Trade Center explosion inconveniently intervened before the Media Carnival finished defining Ken Torp for us, we'll have to wait for the mini-series to find out whether he's a good guy or a bad guy.
Meanwhile, will the Manhattan Bomb Carnival run longer than the Aspen Skier Carnival before it's canceled? Will NBC blow up a building to get us some visuals? Without bombers at hand for bad guys, can we use the Trade Center's inept staff for villains until we get better ones? Aren't carnivals fun?
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