Fun News?

Of course, the biggest news of the Kansas City Chiefs' dominating win over Chicago was a 33-year-old spectator sitting in the club level. Watching the game alongside Donna Kelce, whom we Chiefs fans refer to as Mama Kelce, was one Taylor Alison Swift, who may very well be the biggest music star on the planet.

If you live under a rock, you might not know that Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce -- who is clearly one of the top players at the position and one of the key reasons the Chiefs play at the elite level they do -- has expressed a crush on Swift, and they have been what every news story I've read has called "hanging out."

Lots of 33-year-olds hang out. But when one of them is NFL royalty and the other is music and cultural royalty, then it becomes something people talk about. And do more than talk, for that matter -- sales of Kelce's jersey rose four hundred percent since Swift was spotted in her club box seat with Mama Kelce. For KC folks, Mama Kelce is perhaps even more beloved than her yardage-generating son. When she wanted to see son Jason play for the Philadelphia Eagles as well as Travis play in KC on the same day, the mayor of Kansas City offered a police escort from the airport so she could arrive in time. For Taylor to sit with Mama Kelce is a kind of seal of approval all of its own.

Writing for Poynter, Tom Jones also suggests that a big chunk of the interest stems from the meeting of the two biggest shows on Earth. He also asks this important question.

Whatever the case, doesn’t this beat some of the depressing news we hear on a daily basis?

And yes, it does. Two relatively nice people meet, get intrigued by each other and hang out a bit to see where it goes. Only difference is they're famous. On the other hand, all I have to do is list names: Trump, Biden, Harris, Menendez, Biden H, and so on.

I'll pick "Traylor," "Tayvis" or "Swelce" any day of the week.

Data Error?

Writing for the American Council of Science and Health, Cameron English outlines "four awful science journalism trends that should die in 2022."

The majority of the trends have been exposed or exacerbated by the pandemic and have a common thread as English presents them. They mainly fumble when that old-fashioned quality of "nuance" is required. Correct facts are used as the basis for significant overreaction, alternative explanations are shoved to the side, the amazing diversity and curiosity of science is covered over by being lumped as "the science" or "science," a point of view that overlooks the reality that settled ideas are usually not a goal, but a scientist's biggest target.

I know a few scientists and was in college with a bunch of students exploring its various fields, so I echo Isaac Asimov's statement that what makes scientists' eyes light up are data that seem a little wonky. Their greatest joy is not in saying "Eureka!" although figuring out a problem is a welcome development. No, a scientist's favorite phrase is, "Hmm. That's odd."

The kinds of errors English describes come from science journalists who have gotten so tribal in their outlook that oddity is crushed, ignored, explained away or called an "outlier." But in reality oddity means it's time to crack the knuckles, lean forward over the microscope or computer or data chart and say, "The game's afoot indeed."

If they are Sherlock Holmes fans, that is.

Self-Destruction

One of the best things about the growth of the Substack newsletter format and one of the reasons I hope for its longterm success is the way certain writers that have previously leaned heavily on the book format now produce new content in between book releases. The shorter format gives a reader a chance to appreciate something important that they have to say that might not by itself be long enough for a book but is still good to grapple with.

Recently, for example, music and culture writer Ted Gioia put out an article on his The Honest Broker Substack about Columbia Records' purge of its old-school jazz roster in the early 1970's. For someone like me who is much more of a skimmer of jazz music than a deep-sea diver like Gioia, it's a great piece of history of the music to learn. But it probably would make a very thin -- or very padded-out -- book. This way, it need not be either. For the writers, of course, it turns out better because instead of a blog post that pays nothing they can produce content that people might subscribe to and pay them for. And no, I'm not considering a Substack model. I don't need confirmation of what this blog is worth in real monetary terms; my own feelings of inadequacy confirm it just fine, thanks.

I haven't yet subscribed to any of these newsletters, although I'm considering a few. My gut tells me that the company is probably trying to work out a system whereby you could bundle some of your preferred writers at a slight discount and I'm waiting to see. I'm also waiting to see newspaper publishers see that happen and kick themselves for not coming up with that model of online content before they collapsed. But as Gioia's article makes clear, sometimes large media corporations are not nimble thinkers and they have a gift for making the wrong changes.

Where Credit Is Due

I had thought about a post outlining the way that real scientific research, experimentation and the like had given us a vaccine for a new disease in less than a year, and pointing out how stupid stuff like "autonomous zones" and "Green New Deals" had absolutely nothing to do with that, but it turns out Dan McLaughlin at National Review already did.

He probably got paid for his, too.

Location, Location, Location

A few weeks ago, staffers at the New York Times got twisty because the paper's op-ed section ran a signed piece by Sen. Tom Cotton that argued President Trump should deploy National Guard troops to quell riots in major American cities. The Times killed the piece before it could run in a print edition and opinion editor James Bennett "got resigned" from his job.

Turns out that Times staffers actually are pretty much OK with forceful intervention in the face of civil unrest -- as long as it's done by the totalitarian Chinese government. At least, none of them have so far objected to the presence in their pages of a piece supporting the crackdown on personal freedom in Hong Kong.

As the post title suggests, the old real estate maxim really can apply to just about anything.

Diminishment

The young Friar, who had his eyes on a journalism career, sometimes had a hazy picture of himself working for The New York Times. It was the apex of all of the newspaper monuments, the closest our nation had to a "paper of record" in the same sense that a county seat daily is for that county's publication of legal information. 

It was never fully formed and as time wore on, it morphed into the idea of a byline at The Chicago Tribune or someplace that wasn't New York City -- a place that, during those years, was very much a Dinkinsian area to be avoided. A deepening interest in working with young people at his church made it morph into a complete career change that brought him to a pulpit instead.

But still, early illusions fade the hardest, and the idea of that solid thump of paper landing on someone's doorstep while bearing within it my own words under my own name hangs around, lifting its head at odd intervals. Which is one of the reasons this story -- here linked from Quillette, but available in other places as well -- is such a bummer. We can discuss the virtues and vices of the Times' "1619 Project" at length, of course. An ambitious attempt to examine unexamined aspects of the role of race-based slavery on the United States in the time leading up to and after its founding, the Project has been called to account by historians across the political spectrum. Even some sympathetic to its goals seem to think its reach exceeded its grasp.

But that's all a part of give and take discussion, something people used to do back in the dim prehistory of the Eightyzoic Era and earlier. In Philip Magness's story, he uses screen shots to demonstrate how one of the most contentious claims of the Project -- that the arrival of African slaves to the New World in 1619 represents the true American founding, rather than 1776's the Declaration of Independence -- has been quietly disappeared.

Whatever truths the Project's different authors may have grasped, that contention was clearly without merit and so described by most of its detractors and some of its supporters. For the Times or Project coordinator Nikole Hannah-Jones to fess up to this error and print a correction wouldn't really affect whatever parts of it prove true. Instead, Hannah-Jones denies that she meant that claim and statements to the contrary simply disappeared without notice.

One of the major responsibilities of a news organization is to be accurate. When it's not, the way that the trust of the reading public is maintained is by swift and clear acknowledgement of the error and reporting what actually turned out to be accurate. Corrections on the sly, especially in a medium as malleable as pixels on a screen, are evidence of a news outlet's lack of trustworthiness. And so the fond old illusion of my byline under that masthead takes another jolt to the head, because it seems that masthead has lost much of its luster.

Balance

Hanging out with the folks for dinner and caught one of the network newscasts and remembered why I stopped, even before they became so Trump-centric.

Story 1: Civil unrest in Beirut following this week's massive explosion, as protestors demand to know what the heck their government was doing by storing 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in a hot, unsafe warehouse. Duration: Approx. 22 seconds.

Story 2: America's Got Talent judge Simon Cowell falls off of an electric bicycle and breaks his back in six places, and is now being monitored following surgery. Electric bikes are now a thing because they're enviromentally better than cars but the electric motor on them reduces the strength needed to power them and makes them a favorite among aging Baby Boomers. Who, consequently, can find themselves with more broken bones that younger folks when they fall off. AGT's season premiere up in the air following injury. Duration: Bit more than two minutes.

A national newscast spent just about six times as long on a story about a talent show judge as it did about the site of a world tragedy. This is why what's sometimes called "liberal bias" is hardly the modern media's worst problem.

On the Up Side

There's a meme going around that says if we defunded the media, we could solve most of our nation's problems. It's got a couple of problems itself. The first is that it's unlikely to be true. The word's problems exist whether the media covers them or not, and the issue irresponsible media outlets present is the way they march in a lockstep mindset about what problems they will pay attention to and what ones they won't (Hint: All of the problems they'll pay attention to rhyme with "bump").

The other problem is that we can already defund the media, so to speak, by not watching it or reading it. But that would take some thought and work and if there's one thing that a snappy sloganeer in 2020 doesn't want to do, it's put any actual work towards whatever goal is at hand.

The real problem is that media is a mixed bag of pluses and minuses. Take the independent news operation ProPublica, for example. A few days ago, it ran a long piece showing how different governors issued executive orders placing recovering but possibly infections COVID-19 patients in nursing homes. For comparison, the Washington Post was busy finding space for 3,000 words about a guest at their cartoonist's party who wore an offensive Halloween costume in 2018. Sorry to link to the Washington Examiner, but the actual Post story is behind a paywall and ought to be ignored anyway.

ProPublica made it clear that these executive orders -- including ones by CNN's favorite governor, Andrew Cuomo -- led directly to more infections in those nursing home facilities. This is the kind of reporting that's been done before in American journalism, usually by institutions like the Post or the New York Times. But as noted above, the Post has been busy running down two-year-old guestlists and the Times has been busy with everyone demanding everyone else be fired because of an editorial column no one on the staff wrote.

It's an independent site, which means revenue from donations and pledges. No ads. It'd be even easier to defund that a TV station or local paper, and you could make a case that the site would merit that defunding. During then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, before they went full Avenatti, ProPublica put out a call for anyone who went to a Washington Nationals game with the judge as a way of trying to find out whether he really did rack up credit card debt buying Nats season tickets.

But when it takes journalism seriously, PP puts out work like the COVID-19/nursing home piece. Even though I don't really think I want to defund the media I'd have to say that these days it's not all that easy to defend the media. If media outlets would spend some more time being serious, then I expect we'd see fewer calls for the former and maybe some more of the latter.

Angles & Lenses

By using different lenses and taking pictures from different angles, photographers Ólafur Steinar Gestsson and Philip Davali show how the same exact grouping of people can be made to look like a crowd when they are actually spaced widely apart. Visuals in news media are used to enhance a story and give it some added dimension, but sometimes that added dimension is spin.

As the first president I ever voted against -- I've changed my thinking somewhat -- used to say, "Trust but verify."

Whaa?

I'll give Owen Jensen, the White House correspondent for Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the benefit of the doubt on the question he asked President Trump last week. Jensen noted that even though "non-essential" businesses were shuttered in an attempt to keep people from gathering and potentially infecting each other with the COVID-19 virus, grocery stores, fast-food restaurants and pharmacies were all still open and people still gathered in them. "...why even take a little chance? Just shut it all down temporarily." Jensen said.

The president didn't answer, which may mean he likes Jensen and didn't want to tear a strip off him about his dunderheaded question. But lots of people noticed, and they have held Jensen up to serious mockery -- partially if not totally deserved.

Now, Jensen's outlet EWTN is connected with the Roman Catholic Church. Several commenters and religious opinion writers have questioned why certain businesses were labeled essential and allowed to remain open while religious services have been prohibited if they include gatherings of more than 10 people. It's possible that Jensen wanted to set up a question about that matter but got cut off before he could.

Even that rather charitable reading of his intent, however, doesn't explain why Jensen doesn't know that the federal government doesn't have health and safety shutdown power -- governors and mayors do. It's one reason why calls for nationwide closures and shelter in place orders go unfulfilled: the president doesn't have those powers.

And, dumb question about grocery store closure aside, that's something a White House correspondent should know.

Whaaaa?

"OK, so we're going to use these large, multi-unit properties to give the homeless people in our community a place to live. We just have to buy the properties."

"Sounds great. So they're empty, they'll need a little fixing up?"

"No, there are tenants in them now."

"So you'll move the homeless people into the vacant units."

"No, we'll move them into all the units."

"So you'll buy out the people who are living there now."

"No, we'll evict them."

Roget to the Rescue?

This NBC story on tariffs President Trump set on certain Chinese goods is fine -- it's balanced, accurate as far as I can tell and seems like a pretty straightforward account of a presidential action.

The headline, on the other hand...

There will be dozens, if not hundreds of versions of this story in different online, print and broadcast media outlets in the next several days. If more than 15 percent of them avoid some form of the word "slap" I shall be shocked to the very core and fibre of my being. Nearly every story or headline about tariffs always suggests that someone "slaps" one on. It's clichéd and boring.

It'd be one thing if the same half-dozen lazy writers were responsible for all of it, but the problem is widespread. The symptoms also manifest in stories about hurricanes, which invariably "roar ashore," "packing xx mile-per-hour winds," and so on. Conservative-leaning websites note how often those headlines and news reports show Republicans or conservatives "pouncing" on one news event or comment or something or another.

This has been a test of the middle-aged grumpy news consumer griping system. We now return you to your regular programming.

Mic Flop

An attempt by MSNBC reporter Mike Viquiera to question special counsel Robert Mueller Sunday morning as he left church has drawn some fire from people on both sides of the opinion line regarding Mueller's recently-concluded probe of the 2016 presidential election.

More right-leaning folks think Mr. Viquiera was wrong to confront Mr. Mueller when the latter was leaving church, with a lot of them using the word "ambush." Whether that label is hyperbole or not, the report was clear that the news crew waited outside the church and Mr. Viquiera even said he had a few "prepared questions" ready. Mr. Mueller simply said "No comment" and drove away, which should probably give you a clue as to how important he thinks Mr, Viquiera is in the scheme of things.

Some left-leaning folks also criticized the choice of venue for the questioning, with a couple of them also wondering why reporters weren't trying to pin Mr. Mueller down during a time when it might have been a little more useful, such as during the probe itself.

I agree that the set-up is rude -- Mr. Viquiera, there's not a lot about sticking a camera in someone's face when they're leaving a church service that's "as respectful as possible."  And I agree that "interview" attempts while Mr. Mueller was actually at work on his investigation make a lot more sense from a news perspective.

But I actually want to critique Mr. Viquiera on other grounds, to suggest he is guilty of an offense much worse, and it's this: Just how stupid and attention-hungry are you, Mikey? If you really thought that the man whose entire volume of comment during the two years of his project could fill about one paragraph was suddenly going to answer your loaded interrogatories, then you need to stick your diploma back in the oven because your bread ain't done. If you knew he wouldn't answer then what was the goal? Get your face on the camera asking him questions? Projecting an image? To whom, and for whose benefit? Your own highlight reel, or your network's promo videos?

What kind of substantive news was going to result from surprise questions blurted out at the car door? What kind of detailed observation or explanation of a two-year legal process was going to happen? "Well I'll tell you what. You know, I don't have any of the documents or material that I worked with here in front of me and my family would like me and the Mrs. to get home in time to share in the Easter ham. But because you jumped out of the bushes and caught me before I could get inside my car, I'll stand here and try to walk you through a process that about two and half people in the bowels of the Justice Department legal library understand and summarize the decision-making process that I took about 400 pages to explain in the report."

There are lots of things news reporters and writers do today that some commenters like to seize on as reasons for "why people hate the media." I don't know if this incident amounts to one of those -- plus I don't really think that we should hate the media, either individually or as a group. But I am definitely starting to get a picture of why no one should take Mike Viquiera seriously.

Why Social Media Sucks -- Part I've Run Out of Numbers

Earlier this week, computers analyzing data from eight different radio telescopes produced a picture of the gas and debris that surround the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy called M87. In the center of that ring was a dark region that astronomers usually call the "shadow" of a black hole, since the actual black hole itself is a phenomenon with gravity so powerful not even light can escape.

Naturally, most news stories left out some of the important details and said that the scientists had taken a picture of a black hole. As that news sped around the internet, many people dubbed themselves unimpressed by the image, which is not very clear, offers little sense of scale and could be bettered by photo-imaging software on your average desktop. Some writers decided to make a little fun of both the hoopla from the scientists as well as the blasé attitude of those shrugging at the discovery, but at least one found herself stepping on her keyboard as her article required two corrections of some pretty basic facts about M87.

The "face" of the project quickly became Dr. Katie Bouman, who posted a picture of her own delight when the image was finally revealed. Dr. Bouman was one of a team of 200 or so people who worked on the algorithms that collated and interpreted the immense amounts of data required to produce the image. She also posted pictures of a larger part of her team and made clear just how many people actually worked on the project, from facilities all over the world.

But Dr. Bouman is a young and attractive person whose sheer Christmas-morning glee at the success of this project was tailor made for a widely-shared photo. A number of political figures, who seem to know even less about this project than did all the headline writers, seized upon her presence to highlight the Very Important Role a woman scientist played in this historic event, apparently believing she either did it all herself or was in charge of the project. In their defense, news outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times did much the same.

These possibly well-meaning but not very smart folks placed Dr. Bouman in the line of fire of people who were happy to point out that she was a part of a team, but also claim this was another example of a woman being given more credit than she deserved in order to satisfy some feminist standard. These not well-meaning and not very smart folks didn't take the time to learn that she had not claimed credit for the whole project.

As far as I can tell, nearly everyone involved with the coverage of this event is awful and should make a public commitment to reading things more carefully -- and by more carefully, I mean, "More than the headline, dopes." The only person I really like, after reading what she's said about the project, is Dr. Bouman. She got married in September, helped develop and reveal an image of a black hole shadow and landed a job as an assistant professor which will start in the fall. And she won't be 30 until next month.

May your good fortune continue, Doctor.

Somewhere, Sam Donaldson is Smiling

Hilde Lysiak of Brooklyn, NY, has been running her own newspaper, the Orange Street News, since 2014. Considering that she was born in 2006, that means she's put quite a bit of her life into the business.

The News started out as a family newspaper with crayon articles about events in the Lysiak home, but soon expanded thanks to modern media technology. In 2016, Hilde overheard police talking about "something big" and found out it was a murder committed just a few blocks from her home. She went to the crime scene, gathered information and published her report (with the aid of her reporter father) and then went back to film a short video news segment. The News beat other area publications and news outlets by several hours.

Earlier this week, Hilde was in Patagonia, AZ, and was tracking down a story about a mountain lion when she encountered a Patagonia Marshal who stopped her and asked for her identification, then responded rather huffily when she told him she was a reporter working on a story. Rather than remembering that he was talking to a 13-year-old kid, the marshal then threatened to have her arrested and thrown in juvie when she was not as cooperative as he wanted her to be. Out came Hilde's cell phone to record the interaction, and the marshal then threatened her with arrest or problems if his face was recorded and posted online. At some point, he gets the idea he's not going to win and drives off.

The Town of Patagonia, the story at Reason notes, said it reviewed the situation and has "taken action we believe to be appropriate." Since it's a personnel matter they don't go into detail, but you couldn't color me surprised if the "appropriate" action involved one of the marshal's superiors frequently saying the word "dumbass" to him while reviewing the incident.

I would love for Hilde's parents to give her permission to interview the couple dozen or so Democratic candidates for president right now, as I believe she would not come away satisfied with the boilerplate balloon juice they are now permitted to get away with. The rest of the press corps, could, of course, continue to bulldog President Trump over his choice of breakfast cereal. Cue Jim Acosta, shouting from the back of the room: "Mr. President! Doesn't your choice of Rice Krispies -- known for their explosive snap, crackle and pop -- clearly indicate you want to get us into a war with Liechtenstein in order to satisfy Vladimir Putin's displeasure at his inability to locate it on a map?"

In any event, perhaps one of the best statements from Hilde about her journalistic ambitions comes from a September 2015 story in Columbia Journalism Review. In it, she says she doesn't really want to work for a newspaper when she grows up.

She wants to run one.

Timely and Smart

I recently re-read a book from 2000 about the aftermath, impact and some possible reasons for the Columbine school shooting in 1999 (It's shelf-culling time and the book is kind of dated, but more on that in a potential future entry).

One of the things that struck me was the relative slowness of the usual suspects with their responses. Stuff about violent video games, violent images in the media and so on took a week or so and some considerations of the incident and issues surrounding it were prepared over a considerable time. Now we react with light speed and with opinions and comments that demonstrate every second of the thought taken to create them.

Which makes this piece by Emily Richmond in Columbia Journalism Review so interesting, as she suggests education reporters and others take a serious look at the way journalism covers such shootings when they happen at schools. Overloaded coverage has caused several significant overreactions by schools and other institutions, Richmond said, and the notoriety given to the shooters may push someone over the tipping point who would have walked back from the brink otherwise.

It's worth reading the whole thing, and if I were still in that business it's something that would make me think about the different crimes and misfortunes I had covered and whether or not I had been as responsible as I should. It's the kind of thing you'd hope a lot of newspaper, magazine and website editors would take a look at and at least play around with in some discussions or staff meetings.

TV? Nah, that's beyond hope. Whatever journalism used to be done in that medium is mostly gone & the best thing one can hope for is for the 24-hour-maw to get distracted quickly by the next shiny thing that comes along.

Motivation

So Joy Behar, whom this space has previously opined is not the sharpest pencil on the planet, today on The View offered a rationale for some of the bigger stupidities we have seen recently from media folks and others.

Behar answered moderator Whoopi Goldberg's question about why so many people were so quick to judge high school students shown on a viral video this past weekend. The original version had just a brief snip of confrontation between a Native American man in Washington for the Indigenous Peoples March and teenagers who, we were told, surrounded the man while wearing their Make America Great Again hats and chanting hatefully at him. Many people saw it and forcefully condemned the students, but within hours significantly longer video clips from other sources surfaced that showed a multitude of other factors the original video omitted. Among them: the presence of another group shouting insults at the students and the way the Native American man approached the students rather than the other way around.

In the meantime, the school which sent the students to Saturday's March for Life and several of the students themselves -- some of whom didn't behave well either -- had been identified and received death and bomb threats. Many tweets had flown around suggesting the students be punched or worse, only to be withdrawn or deleted when the new information began to come out.

Behar said that the rush to judgment came because so many of the people condemning the students were "desperate to get Trump out of office." She seems to have said it for a laugh line, but I think she revealed an important truth -- and weakness -- held by many people who oppose President Trump.

I'm no fan of the president. I didn't vote for him and I don't intend to vote for him in 2020. I think he is not of fit character to receive the salute of the lowliest buck private recruit in uniform. But I think he won the election in 2016 and so he's the President and will be until at least the morning of January 20, 2021.

Far too much of the energy that could go into opposing him, opposing his policies or attempting to negotiate deals with him is going into futile attempts to undo 2016. Rather than sitting back and let this unstable goofball self-destruct his way into a primary challenge from his own party, people do incredibly stupid stuff like run his press secretary out of restaurants, pretend that cursing him at awards shows was brave and take every frickin unsubstantiated negative story about him as God's own handwriting on Moses' memo pad. People who might consider voting against Trump if given a viable alternative see instead a 24-hour rage monster that offers no guarantees victory will turn it back into Bruce Banner.

Progressive folks seemed to have learned the worst lessons from the people who opposed President Obama during his terms. The birth certificate crap, his identity as a "secret Muslim (or atheist, take your pick)" and the like were issues raised by many people as reasons that the 2008 election was in some way illegitimate. Because of them, the election could or should be null and void -- leading to exactly what, nobody could say, because there wasn't that much thought going on in the process. Although those folks remained mostly fringe characters for much of Obama's first term, they had enough of a profile that some who might have supported Mitt Romney in 2012 were leery of putting them or anyone who might have thought like them anywhere near political power.

Currently, the problem is significantly more serious because the anger level seems so ramped up. But the end result could be exactly the same: Four more years of a hated president, in significant measure because people who opposed him were so "desperate to get (him) out of office" they believed any stupid thing that promised that possibility. And in the end they believed so many of them that they were never able to make a case that they could offer anything better to people who might have been interested in hearing it.

The More Things Change...

A friend recently posted an interesting observation about morning news in the first day or so after President Trump announced the United States would pull its troops from Syria. The interesting thing was that CNN -- a network which is, we might charitably say, ambivalent whether or not the president should be impeached or impaled -- had heavy coverage and commentary on the pullout. But during the period my friend watched, Fox News -- an outlet which is, we might charitably say, ambivalent about whether to bow or to scrape to the president -- had very little coverage at all. Apparently a news event was a news event only as it suited the distinct purposes of the network.

I gave my own long-held response, which was that if the verb people used to describe their primary method of newsgathering was "watch" instead of "read," they would have a hard time convincing me they were well-informed. I'm a softy these days -- when I first said that I allowed for no such possibility.

Anyway, it stirred my memory of a Bloom County comic from 1985, which this journalism major enlarged and put on his desk:

Opus' soliloquy highlights how even thirty years ago the image-centricity of television news had a firm hold on its broadcast. Even though all three men who anchored the major networks' nightly newscasts had solid journalism backgrounds -- for all of their flaws each of them was more reporter than any 20 TelePrompTer muppets who torment airport travelers and waiting room patients today -- they were also each carefully crafted for their respective images.

If Berkeley Breathed were drawing this strip today, it would probably have a couple dozen panels to illuminate the wide range of choices Opus faced. And his closing panel might have had our intrepid penguin reading from a tablet instead of an actual dead tree newspaper.

But the outcome remains the same. The less work our brains have to do to acquire content, the less worth the content has -- be we primates or flightless waterfowl.

Koppel!

Beginning with the Iranian hostage crisis in the late 1970s, ABC News' Ted Koppel appeared on America's televisions nightly with a summary of the days news events and some in-depth reporting on different issues. Mostly the episodes of the show, which came to be called Nightline, focused on a single issue or story. When Koppel retired in 2005, ABC kept the show but switched to a multi-host format. Nightline is still unique in television news programming in this respect: Similar shows usually air weekly and late-night programming is thought to be the domain of the smarmy and pretentious talk show.

In any event, Koppel recently appeared on The Kalb Report, a monthly show at the National Press Club hosted by Martin Kalb. He offered some opinions on several topics, suggesting that the national media treated the women who accused recently sworn-in Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault much differently than they did some of the women who leveled the same charges against then-President Bill Clinton.

His most interesting exchange came with CNN's Brian Stelter, in which Koppel said that Stelter's network as well as MSNBC enjoy higher ratings today because of their wall-to-wall coverage of President Donald Trump. “Is there a moment of the day when they are not focusing on Donald Trump or some intimately related subject?" Koppel asked. Stelter hmphed but not very loudly, since it wouldn't be hard to set a timer on a broadcasting day at CNN and find that the Trump minutes vastly outnumber everything else. Koppel suggested that an event such as the devastating Typhoon Mangkhut would get airtime if the death total hit four figures, which may or may not have been a little too much on the mean side.

In any event, Koppel points out that networks which lament the damage they say President Trump is doing to the nation were more than happy to cover his antics before he was elected and the coverage drew eyeballs to their shows. The recently disgraced and resigned Les Moonves of CBS said the same in February of 2016. When the people who eyed the ratings jumps as they snickered off-camera at the antics of candidate Trump complain about those same antics now staged from the White House by President Trump, I think of the old scorpion and frog tale. The scorpion talks the frog into swimming them across the river, promising he will not sting the frog if the frog carries him across, since they would both drown Midway through the crossing, the scorpion stings the frog and as the dying frog begins to sink he says, "Why? You said you wouldn't sting me because we'd both drown, and now we'll both be dead!"

"You knew what I was when you picked me up," says the scorpion.

Donald Trump was a reality-TV show host before he was a candidate for office. So TV people especially should have known what he was and avoided "picking him up." Now they're stuck with him and as much as I dislike the guy, I don't feel one bit of sorry. Doesn't sound like Koppel is, either.

Twisted

So I typed the name of the person who killed 17 people at a high school in Florida last month into Google, and I got 8 million and some hits.

I typed Arnaud Beltrame into Google and I got just under 700,000 hits. Sure, the Florida murderer has been on the news scene for longer, but Col. Beltrame is the French police officer who traded himself for one of the hostages in a Friday terror standoff in the southern part of his nation. Police cornered the gunman in a supermarket and when they heard shots, they stormed inside. Beltrame had been mortally wounded.

It seems pretty easy to blame media outlets when they pay more attention to women who claim to have had affairs with the president than they do to Congress passing a spending bill not a single member had read. We can get chapter and verse on who Pres. Trump slept with while married but we can't get anyone to devote more than a few minutes of attention to why the mokes on Capitol Hill think the country will shut down, the sky will fall and life as we know it will end if they don't spend $1.3 trillion dollars as soon as damn possible.

But the disparity in searches seems to suggest that they have an accomplice in their fascination with the facile, and that would be us. As long as we keep wanting to read and listen to the wrong thing, they'll keep spewing the wrong thing. The double-sided fascination with train wrecks -- we can't turn away and they're happy to show us more -- gave us our current president, who seems more than willing to maintain the supply of grotesquerie upon which both beasts can feed.

I seriously doubt we can fix him. But maybe we can fix us. It's just barely a start, but at least here's a couple more Google opportunities to get Arnaud Beltrame's name a little higher on the hits list.