This past Saturday, the weather, and my growing distaste for slogging long hours outdoors - running (shuffling) in single digit temps with double-digit winds - sentenced me to 2.5 hours on the treadmill. Thank goodness for Pandora!
I changed treadmill’s settings, raising it’s incline, increasing its pace, reversing them, checking my heartrate, retying my shoes...Through it all I noticed one channel, CNN, kept playing and playing and replaying coverage, if you will, on the recent high school shooting in Colorado. If there’s one time I was grateful for my driver’s licensed approved near-sightedness this was it. I could see the images and their marketing title of Shooting in Colorado or whatever they titled it for maximum marketing impact. But I couldn’t read their words. Over the 2.5 hours CNN played and played and replayed and did it all over again ‘coverage’ of this tragedy. Pictures and interviews and more interviews with talking head subjects, video from helicopters hovering overhead, photos of the kids waiting outside, speculation of motive, pictures of the shooter...on and on. And on. And on. CNN would cut briefly to another story, then come right back to this ‘coverage.’
Yesterday’s run was a slow run, a long slow run. The pace is what I call conversational. But with only strangers around me and CNN shouting at me to LOOK! LOOK! LOOK! ISN”T THIS HORRIBLE! HERE WE’LL SHOW YOU SOME MORE! I had a conversation about when coverage crosses the line to voyeurism, puerile obsession, confusing news with entertainment and its carefully crafted images and slogans and breathless copy and faux empathy expressed by the ‘newscasters’ whose careers and incomes are built on...entertaining us. The pace of their segments and the content is based on...market research judging our attention spans, how many times can they show the same image before we lose interest...
2.5 hours. It was still going on when I left. I’m sure it continued through the day. If...I were to turn on CNN (and it could be Fox or MSNBC or CBS or ABC or NBC...) today - Sunday - when I’m writing this post the coverage would be the same.
I’m not a fan of pollyannish, ostrich-like avoidance of bad news or suffering or human tragedy. It’s part of life. We weaken our reality as we deny it. This mass shooting epidemic is a reality we’ve denied for too long. Clearly the news coverage is superficial, banal and self-serving for the networks and their advertisers. They’ve pushed coverage past news into voyeurism and fascination years ago and now they’re stroking the robe of promotion.
I thought...what if we the viewing public (that’s you and me)....insisted on the same coverage, live reports and helicopter videos and pictures and speculation of motives and chasing witnesses down in parking lots and in their homes, and shoving microphones at leaders for the event and press conferences...for learning? What if we insisted networks invest in the same coverage for something like Destination Imagination or science fairs or chess clubs or debating competitions or art exhibits at these high schools? What if we insisted on the same coverage for inventions or innovations or wait a minute...Best Places to Work in our communities? Huh? Can you imagine an army of reporters and helicopters demanding interviews with company managers and employees when their company is listed as a Best Place to Work?
Can you imagine CNN devoting 2.5 hours on a Saturday to covering the local Destination Imagination event? ( I use DI as an easy to recall example, not promoting it.)
Can you imagine CNN devoting 2.5 hours on a Saturday to covering the high school’s annual art exhibit or its drama department’s production of Othello or Romeo and Juliet?
Can you imagine CNN devoting 2.5 hours on a Saturday to covering a company listed as the number one company to work for in a local or regional or national Best Place to Work?
Neither can I.
But given their ratings, they might consider it. The lurid and puerile, the banal and inane, the loud and obnoxious have their outlets in the other networks.
Would that stop future tragedies like this most recent one? I don’t know. I’m not assigning culpability here. But what they’re doing, and what we’re rewarding them for doing, isn’t helping.
Warning: pompousness alert. Our lives are made up of the little moments, the little habits, the little thought patterns, we repeat over and over. What if we changed those moments like this? I’m not saying politically correct censoring. What if we favored this news and not the other?
What if?
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