On the Subject of Fishwrapping

Watch any television show and count the seconds between each different camera shot. If you’re counting right, it should be about seven seconds. This isn’t happenstance, it’s science. Studies have been conducted to determine the attention span of the average television viewer and seven seconds seems to be the limit.

No study has ever been done, that I know of, on the average attention span of the way Americans view their news. The way news is sold to the average right/left/undecided/other, the seven-second test would seem to hold.

How else can we explain the way the media treats us as viewers and readers? They give us the surface of bits and pieces, little seven-second snapshots of passing news that, for reasons only they can tell us, doesn’t merit more reporting. For example, are you aware of the slaughter of innocents in southern Sudan? Some are, I know. Who among us knows the reason, or the story behind it? Too much depth required for the average news reporter to believe we’re worthy of that information, apparently.

How about Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe was once a thriving island surrounded by countries governed by the rule of mistake. For decades it was a net exporter of food and fed much of southern Africa. Then a reverse-apartheid happened and ownership of all the farms – 90-percent owned by whites – was taken from them. The white farmers left, the land turned to rot and now the country is starving. Just to add confusion to a necessary and more informative story – but far from a full one – Zimbabwe’s brand of dictatorship led by crazy narcissist Robert Mugabe has resorted to bulldozing what he calls the slums. But people have lived in these homes and huts for a generation and now they are forced to live in temporary shelters 100 miles deeper into the bush where they struggle to find food. The reasons behind this must be too much for CNN or Reuters to discover or you think they’d tell us, right?

We hear a lot about the struggles in Iraq to draft a constitution and how it reflects on the success or failure of U.S. foreign policy, never mind what it means to the Iraqi people who only seem to matter to the media when strapped to a bomb. There is a deeper untold truth to reasons a constitution is unneeded and unworkable: Iraq is too fractured along sectarian lines, too socially ruined by 30 years of totalitarianism, too new to the habits of democracy to be able to record in stone the kind of great cosmic compromises that are the essence of constitutions. That story seems to escape the punditry. Even America, which had a century of self-government before independence, needed 13 years before it could draft a workable and durable constitution. And even that one ultimately floundered (albeit, threescore and 11 years later) over the then-insoluble problem of slavery. Yes, I know Bush said this at a press conference, but he had to simply because the media should have, but didn't.

What you may not have heard or read, perhaps because reporters don’t know, is that among several successful Western countries without a constitution is Britain. Not so overly-reported was the failure for 25 countries in the European Union to ratify their multi-nation constitution which had been given five years of negotiation before being put to the voters, who ultimately rejected it. So why is all the ink going to the process in Iraq instead of Europe? Sure, the U.S. and Bush foreign policy have made the constitution a key issue to measure success in Iraq, but a little perspective from the press would be more helpful to those who care enough to pay attention.

Just the opposite is true when the media gets a hold of a story they can milk. Who heard enough of the Scott Peterson\and Michael Jackson trials? And so much on the missing teen in Aruba who, in not exactly a news flash, is not the only missing teen in the world. Then there is Cindy Sheehan and the media onslaught to cover her mid-life meltdown. Thank God a hurricane hit and all the reporters had to put on the hip boots to cover the real-life drama and tragedy of a Level 5 hurricane hitting the coast. Does anyone know that nearly 500 people have died in monsoon flooding in India? Does any news reporter or talking head know the policy specifics of the Government of India that caused such a disaster? Come to mind, perhaps reporters are best off in hip boots. It’s their best hope to step out of the mess they leave for the rest of us.

The main problem facing the press, as I see it, is that they usually only study Journalism in college. Sure, they take the odd history and humanities classes along with the required journalism coursework of Pagination and First Amendment law and how to misunderstand its meaning so you end up doing some white collar time in New York. If a reporter is going to cover a story on a hurricane, is it too much to ask that they know a little about meteorology before telling us it’s windy?

Too often reporters come to the job with the notion of “making a difference” rather than reporting what happens around them. Later, they just become lazy. During both coup attempts in Russia during the Nineties, most reporters sat in the bar at the Odessa Hotel and counted on daily news from the Ministry of Information on what to report back to us. Heaven help us if a story happened outside of Moscow. Then we watchers of news had to rely on press releases filtered by the local cleansers and then washed again by the same Ministry of Information just so we got the news they wanted us to have.

During this past year’s great Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Western media never once interviewed Victor Yanukovich, the man who had the election stolen from him by populous whim. The story was set and the sheer beauty of a Sixties-style protest was too much for the gray-haired members of the Fourth Estate to keep them from finding out the truth. The press, which loves to equate Bush and Cheney as an evil cabal set on world domination, missed their chance to catch them in the act in Ukraine. They also missed it in the Republic of Georgia, Serbia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Imagine if the Russians were helping elect a government they could dominate in Canada and Mexico. I suspect, but can’t be sure, this would be a lead story on Nightline, which not coincidentally, was created for the sole purpose of over-covering the Iranian hostage story.

My apologies to all that this story took longer than seven seconds to read; I did my best to cut it down to size.