I am a hypocrite. I love writing columns, arguing my opinions, excavating the news of the week for interesting artifacts. I haven’t written a column since the Spring semester, and I waited for that privilege again, which I am exercising and enjoying now and is the ultimate expression of my hypocrisy.
News is too broad and too thin of a subject. It emanates from too many mediums, platforms, channels, pages, web pages; from too many times of the day; from too many perspectives and pundits and commentators and talking heads; from too many panels; from too many tweets and posts and shares. It has been bended, blended and stretched. There is so much of it, in so many different forms, that you cannot define what it is today. Analyzing the news is like playing whack-a-mole, or tackling fog.
Maybe, not so surprisingly, this broadness of the news is where I aim my sights. More specifically, I want to argue against the way in which our news acquires its flexible, shapeless character: 24/7 news.
One slow, eventless day this past May, I picked up my dad’s copy of the Orlando Sentinel, expecting the lead story to be something important. Instead, this was the main headline on the front page: “Lake Eola turtles need sunbathing perches, says club's petition”. The most pressing concern of the Orlando community that day was whether turtles in Lake Eola, a lake in the heart of downtown Orlando, were receiving ample respect and care by local authorities.
I found, and still find, this both silly and serious. Why didn’t the Sentinel just write on their front page: “No news today, enjoy the comics.” Why, instead, did they have to give the reader the illusion that the health of turtles is as important as, say, the city’s emotional devastation after the Pulse shooting, which duly received relentless front-page attention?
Yet, we encounter similar tendencies in all forms of media.
Not only does this unintentionally confuse important information from non-important, but it takes a big pink eraser and smudges the ultimate journalistic distinction: news from non-news. Our traditional understanding of news implies an event or happening which is now, after the occurence, being reported to us. The Biblical word gospel literally translates to “good news,” for example, which, in Biblical context, means that the gift of life and oneness with God has been bought and offered to you through Jesus.
Notice the past tense here. The Gospel refers to an event that has happened. News also refers to something that has happened, a concrete, historical moment, which has passed us by and can only exist through our reporting it.
Twenty-four/seven, perpetual news breaks this definition. Our media does not sleep. Daniel Boorstin in his famous book “The Image” discusses the accidental, but inevitable, by-product of our sleepless, instant access era. He was writing from the 1960s, but even then, he could see that the media, feeling the dread of the omnipresent deadline, would increasingly create news rather then report it.
Failure in the media world is not having a story; success is the opposite. And stories don’t grow on trees. So how do you keep up? You ask important people gotcha questions, to report on their reactions. You report on the health of some turtles rather than admit that nothing important has happened. You report on the president’s Twitter account. You, at the end of the week, create news quizzes to test how attentively people consumed your product. You gather panels and ask for expert opinions. You hunt your next story like Ahab. You do anything but allow the natural rhythms of our world and the pace of life dictate what you can and cannot report. You demand mastery over it all.
This is problematic. Ironically, though, I end this column by asking you to read next week, when I will examine the implications of this reality.
Scott Stinson is a UF English Major. His column appears Monday.
