Remember when the news was newsworthy?
News, of course, is anything you learn that you didn’t know before. Using that definition almost anything is technically “news” if it’s new to you.
Researchers at Georgetown University, for example, found that caterpillars can “shoot” their feces a distance of 40 times their body length. See there? News! Is it newsworthy? Unlikely, that is unless you happen to be sitting next to a caterpillar when you read that.
Newsworthy
In reality when we talk about “news” what we mean is “newsworthy.” Is it interesting and/or pertinent information brought to us by a reliable source? Unfortunately these days all too often it seems the answer is “no.”
In order to feed the voracious appetite of the 24-hour news cycle we now desire to know something not only the very moment it happens but before it happens. This has led to the kind of debacle that is the balloon boy story.
Only if you were living under a rock over the previous two weeks could you not know about the Heene family and their elaborate hoax whereby they pretended their six-year-old had been accidentally sent aloft in a homemade helium balloon. Sounds believable right? Rigggghhhtt.
Not so much news
Still, most major news outlets immediately went to live coverage of the event, spending hours breathlessly hypothesizing on the fate of the boy while following the flight of what appeared to be a partially deflated mylar balloon across the Colorado sky. Pretty scenery, yes. News? Not so much.
Fortunately, of course, there was no flying boy. Only the deflated balloon — and egos — of numerous commentators who had breathlessly provided play-by-play conjecture of what would have, could have, and/or might have happened — but precious little in the way of what actually was.
In the end it turned out to be more a story about the Emperors New Clothes than anything else.
Nothing
Still, it was bound to happen in the instant information age. Today it’s not enough to know that something might have happened and then gather the facts, check them against available data, and provide a correct and comprehensive overview of the entire scenario at a later point in time. No. The breaking news cycle meant that almost the instant the Heene balloon took flight, national news channels trained their cameras — and babble — squarely on the sky.
The Internet lit up with so much chatter over the situation that the omnipotent public commentary site, Twitter, was momentarily overwhelmed with the traffic.
The phrase “much ado about nothing” comes to mind.
The most newsworthy aspect of the whole adventure was how quickly conjecture and “expert guesses” replaced absolute fact. No longer are we content to just let the news happen and read about it later.
Quill pen
Research, fact check and edit a story to be sent to print sometime in the next 24 hours? Why, you might as well say you plan to write the story out with your quill pen.
I love the 24-hour news channel, I do. Each morning I get up and say, only half in jest, that I need my a.m. news and my cup of coffee to confirm that the whole world hasn’t gone to heck in a hand basket while I slept.
I like a little national and a little international news, a medical report to convince me I’m dying of something (and really, aren’t we all?) and a nice wrap up about a moose that stumbled into somebody’s swimming pool (those moose are so cra-zee!) to start my day. What I don’t like is a whole lot of hype.
People can say what the want about the death of print media, but I still look forward to a nice, tight, fact-checked little “who, what, when, where, why” story. It can be so refreshingly real when compared to a lot of “ifs, ands, buts, and maybes” pulled, as in the balloon boy saga, out of the clear blue sky.
Wait
There is no shame in saying “we really don’t know what’s going on right now, we’ll bring you more when we have some facts.” Unfortunately, there are very few ratings in that tactic either.
The digital age can — and will — bring us the world at the touch of a button. Yet instant access is meaningless if we instantly access only nonsense. Me, I wouldn’t throw away my newspaper subscription card just yet.
If we can’t count on the people that bring us that much ballyhooed instant information to be a bit more discerning in what makes the cut, the news, much like the balloon boy saga, is just going to be a lot of wasted airtime — and a whole lot of not-so-hot air.
