HA! Would it, indeed.
"Do not go gentle into that good night....
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Dylan Thomas
quote:
Today is Labor Day, a day set aside to honor working people and give them a day off. So why am I working today? Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer. The summer of '02 may go down in the short remaining history of the world as the first summer that global warming intruded upon the masses, though most of us pretend not to notice.
Oh, we noticed the floods and droughts and heat records nearly everywhere, but we treated each extreme as if it stood by itself.
It's as if we Americans are engaged in a massive conspiracy of silence. Like Scarlett, we'll worry about the end of the world tomorrow.
Our leaders lead us not only into temptation but also into perdition. Our president, George W. Bush, was notably absent last week from the United Nations Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa.
The leaders of about 100 nations were there, struggling to find a way to limit our damage to Mother Earth. Bush, the leader of the greatest consumer nation in the world, couldn't be bothered to attend. He was too busy playing cowboy on his make-believe "ranch" near Crawford, Texas.
On television last week, the big news stories were the threat of a baseball strike, the sentencing of a wealthy ne'er-do-well for a murder he committed 27 years ago (they interrupted regular broadcasting for that scoop!) and latest details on the kid snatching du jour.
I don't mean to minimize the importance of a missing or murdered child, but such events get great coverage on TV these days not because of their importance but because of their emotional appeal.
Would it be going too far to say the news media panders?
There are many lamentations these days, much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, over corporate ownership of news outlets, but (stop the presses!) I've got news for you: It ain't no worse than it's always been.
People who own newspapers, radio stations and television stations do so for one reason: to make money. That's the way it is now, and that's the way it's always been.
The principles these owners adhere to are economic principles. Journalistic ethics, service to the community, exercise of the First Amendment -- all these things are secondary to the profit motive.
And profits are made through the sale of advertising. Without advertising, we would see very few newspapers and very few TV stations, and we'd hear very little radio.
When it comes to the media, money is king.
Even the Internet, open and raucous as it is, is not pristine. Almost everyone who posts news or opinion on the Net dreams of the day he or she will be successful enough to sell advertising and make enough money to retire to some exotic paradise -- like San Francisco, for instance.
I've been disillusioned by the press twice in my life. (Normal people would have learned the first time.) That first disillusionment was more than 40 years ago. In 1959 I bought a small-town newspaper and was excited at the prospect of rubbing elbows with other small-town journalists, those cranky old guys and energetic young ones who tell it like it is and don't back down from anybody.
Ha! I met a lot of small-town publishers, but not a one of them was a journalist first and a businessman second. They were ad salesman who had bought the shop, or country printers or young folks who had inherited the business, and so forth. Not a journalist in the lot that I met.
My second disillusionment came here in San Francisco, about 15 years ago, when I was a daytime cab driver. There was a convention of CBS-affiliate owners meeting at the Fairmont, so I hung around the hotel that week hoping to meet some real journalists.
Ha, again! I did meet a few TV performers (none of whom I recognized, even after they told me who they were), but the owners I met had the unmistakable odor of car salesmen about them.
And that's what they were: salesmen. They bought and sold stations for one purpose only: to make money. CBS's revered journalistic icons -- Edward R. Morrow, Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite -- were mere moneymaking tools to them.
Most people get their news these days from television, which pretty much explains why we Americans are so poorly informed. Thanks in part to cable, TV has a problem: too many stations. With all that competition, the quest for dollars becomes more and more fierce.
That is why, in my opinion, we see so many compelling emotional stories on TV these days, and so little news of importance to Americans. There is so much competition among broadcasters to get our attention that the programming gets more and more outrageous all the time. I'm convinced that TV outlets would show snuff films if they thought they could get away with it.
News broadcasts are called news "shows," and for good reason. Listen to the music; look at the graphics. The color, the action, the sound -- it's all designed to draw us in, like the lights and sounds in a casino.
We are so conditioned to this show-biz approach that a straight news broadcast, such as one might see on public television, seems tedious to us.
Unfortunately for us, character is not considered as important as money these days, so it's unlikely that many in control of the news business will ever again try to give us the news we need to know. What tugs at our heartstrings, what scares us, what fills us with wonder -- those are the things we'll continue to see and hear and read as our planet spins through space, getting hotter and hotter by the minute, because we aren't interested.
I'm not seriously predicting the end of human life on Planet Earth -- not yet. But the wake-up calls are out there. They're faint, but they exist between the revelations of the latest theory on the Jon-Benet Ramsey murder and the sexual escapades of soon-to-be ex-congressman turned pensioner Gary Condit.
The summer of 2002 has been a mighty loud wake-up call. God help us if we continue to snooze through it.
Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist and iconoclast. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at harleysorensen@yahoo.com.
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