June 26, 2007

When Bad News Is Good

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Like many I subscribe to email services that promise to alert you to what is called "Breaking News." This is, one supposes going in, a service that will tell you when something important or earth-shattering happens. That way you'll be "in the know" right away.

"Earth-shattering" news could be, for me and my fellow Seattlites at least, a moment when our local dormant volcano, Mt. Rainier, decides to blow its top. (I'm told it is about 60 years overdue.) I'd hope to get an alert on that "breaking news" early. I'd hope to get it before the lava bombs started to rain down on my neighborhood. I'd want to know early enough to get in the basement so that my ash-crusted corpse could be dug up by the archeologists of whatever life form might be around in a post-Vesuvian, post-Waterworld, post-return-of-the-ice-age that would be interested. ("Look Professor, yet another bizarre example of the weird beings with no exo-skeletons and less than 8 limbs!")

Lately, however, there has been a drought of breaking news coming out of ABC News (the service I subscribe to). Not that I don't get any alerts, but the ones that come in always fail to match my fervid expectations of, say, "Global Thermonuclear War." Oh, ABC sends out "alerts" once, twice, or several times a day. I guess they do it to remind you they are still there and on the job. But these "alerts" have lately been extremely lackluster and hardly "breaking!" in the sense of "Hey, this is life critical, man. Check it out."

By way of example here's a selection of the latest items ABC News thinks are really important:


"A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL TELLS AP THAT PRO WRESTLER CHRIS BENOIT STRANGLED HIS WIFE, SMOTHERED HIS 7-YEAR-OLD SON, AND HANGED HIMSELF"

"BOBBY CUTTS, OHIO POLICE OFFICER ACCUSED OF MURDERING HIS PREGNANT GIRLFRIEND JESSE DAVIS, HAS BEEN CHARGED WITH TWO COUNTS OF MURDER. ALLEGED ACCOMPLICE MYISHA FERRELL HAS BEEN CHARGED WITH ONE COUNT OF OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE"

Then there's the ever-popular (for no good reason other than that she has single-handedly dragged the C word back into popular usage) Paris Hilton item:

AFTER 23 DAYS IN AN L.A. COUNTY JAIL PARIS HILTON WAS RELEASED.

I make that two tawdry crimes and one skeevy bimbo ranking up at the top of the "Breaking News" moments of today. That's it. That's the way it is. That's 30. Th-th-th-that's all folks!

I hope you won't take it amiss that, as one of my close friends notes, I think that sort of "Breaking News!" is very good news indeed. It gives me a great deal of reassurance to see such stories dominating the half-baked brains of those in NewzBiz. Stories like that mean, in short, that nothing terribly bad is happening in the world at this moment. No airplanes crashing into skyscrapers. Nothing other than a low-grade grind coming out of Iraq. No tsunami sweeping across the globe. No nation poised (right now) on the brink of eradicating another nation.

Nothing breaking except the ordinary evil of ordinary individuals losing it in ordinary ways. When you've got 300 million people bouncing around this country, you're always going to have this kind of mundane stuff popping up. Tragic to those touched, but utterly without import to everyone else. If you are a NewzBiz bozo you put it on the air because... well, hey, you gotta have something, right? Right. You just can't send out an email saying, "We wanted to bring you some "breaking news" but right now there just isn't any. Have a nice day."

But it is, I can see from here at this moment, a very nice day after all. I just love this lull in real "breaking news." It puts ABC and the rest of the clowns in the same boat as the current Republican Party lurch towards the next Presidency -- Both institutions got nothing and nobody.

I know you know I know you know I know that real "breaking news" will be back any moment with a flame-thrower. But until that happens let's revel in the mundane murders and bimbos of the moment.

Let's have a nice day.

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Posted by Vanderleun at June 26, 2007 10:07 AM | TrackBack
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AMERICAN DIGEST HOME
"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

You have to take a look at Drew Curtis' book "It's Not News, It's Fark".

Not that you don't already know what is going on in the media, but I've not seen it laid out so succinctly as in that book.

Posted by: Eric Blair at June 26, 2007 11:59 AM

Quite true. Of course, the bright bulbs at ABC (and elsewhere) could also choose to highlight Operation Arrowhead Ripper, to show we are finally doing something right (maybe, so far, cross your fingers) and causing a whole bunch of terrorists to have a bad week.

But they can't ever seem to find room for such stories, Paris Hilton or not.

Duly noted.

Posted by: Jeff Brokaw at June 26, 2007 2:59 PM

It is all so very, very 9-10.

Posted by: andrewdb at June 26, 2007 5:36 PM

Twenty year old kid, sweet as can be, and 7 feet tall.

Pituitary tumor.

One year to live.

Heart can't support his mass.

Mother's a physician, but couldn't stop it from happening.

Which one's the big news?

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