CSotD: Coverage that sparkles
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Matt Wuerker on the inability of the media to focus on any but the low-hanging, sparkly fruit.
Granted, the GSA scandal is easy coverage, since there's no possible justification for the wretched excess involved, and I suspect that, if they had gone to Seattle, stayed in penthouse suites and gorged on Kobe beef and caviar while attending seminars on new accounting software applications, the coverage would have been more nuanced.
Clowns, bicycle projects and karaoke videos really stuck the "Kick Me" signs on their backs.
But, like the Secret Service scandal — What? Macho guys on temporary out-of-town duty assignments actually drink and consort with loose women? Who'da thunkit? — the heads have rolled or are in the process of rolling.
It's like the joke in the meeting that cracks everyone up. Nice to share a laugh. Let's get back to work.
A conspiracy theorist would insist the stories are being kept alive to embarrass and undermine the Obama administration, as if the GSA conventions hadn't gone from modest to lavish under W's watch, and with the presumption that, until now, Secret Service guys on TDY were all tucked in by 8:30 each evening.
But one of my laws is that one should not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
Start by knowing that the bulk of reporters are innumerate and can only really cover budget and spending issues by quoting people who they assume understand that stuff. This tends to steer them towards the sparkly stories and away from the ones that look like homework.
And we frequently hear about how more people can name the Simpsons or the Seven Dwarfs than can name the Supreme Court Justices. I'm sure it's true but I'm not sure what it means.
When I was in the eighth grade, I was required to know all the cabinet secretaries and the Supreme Court justices. None of those people are still in those positions or even, I suspect, alive, and nobody since has required that I learn the new ones. (I can name the current Supreme Court. Not the cabinet. Meanwhile, we've had the same Seven Dwarfs since 1937; the same five Simpsons since 1989.)
If you look at papers from 120 years or so ago, they go on about free silver and bi-metallism and all that William Jennings Bryan stuff at great length, not only with the confidence of being the only medium in town and thus having your full attention, but on the assumption that you already know the basics and are looking for new developments and further insights.
Our forebears, though, were certainly not without a taste for the trivial, the scandalous and the apocryphal.
Alongside those discursions on the question of silver were articles on the latest doings of Sarah Bernhardt, quotable quips from Chauncey DePew, the ghastly murders of H.H. Holmes and light features about things like the neighboring towns that each put a bounty on rats, with one demanding heads as proof and the other paying for tails so that enterprising exterminators were collecting twice on each rodent.
My guess is that a lot of readers skipped over those earnest, in-depth discussions of coinage and, instead, expressed the same blowhard party-line opinions as the rest of the guys at whichever barbershop they went to. And that they likely chose their barbershop according to the direction of the hot air blowing there.
Still, the material was there for those who wanted to read it, presented with an underlying assumption that people needed to know about it in order to vote intelligently. Not that the two newspapers in every town would each be presenting the same in-depth perspective on the topic.
However, as Wuerker suggests, the media are not even touching the larger issues today, and that's quite a different accusation from saying they shouldn't waste so much time on trivial scandals.
There was a Moyers & Company dedicated to this yesterday, entitled "Big Money, Big Media, Big Trouble," about how networks have folded news into the entertainment side of broadcasting and let ratings dictate coverage.
It's a genuine problem that I take seriously. But — and you can watch it for yourself at that link — it was 45 minutes of two guys sitting at a table talking. They really needed Brooke Gladstone to edit their drone-a-thon down to 10 minutes and then toss in a couple of incisive, similarly bite-sized segments on the issue.
(Why does NPR get it, while Public Television remains so utterly clueless? Ah, that's a rant for another day …)
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