Verbal filler drowns out significant news stories

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By D.L. Stewart, Contributing Writer 5:11 PM Tuesday, June 16, 2009

At the risk of biting the hand that feeds me, clothes me and allows me to make retirement investments that now are worth half as much as they were a year ago, sometimes I think we’re getting too much news.

Not too many newspapers, of course. There never can be too many of those and there probably should be something in the Constitution that requires all Americans to read every item in their local newspapers every day, especially the columns. But cable television news, or what passes for news on cable television, seems to have become an endless exercise in search of a reason. The standard journalism imperatives of “who, what, where and why” have been modified to, “Who, what, where, why and how much air time do we have to fill?”

Talking heads yammer incessantly about subjects worth, at most, a paragraph or two in most newspapers. Analysts with divergent views shout their opinions at each other like guys in a bar arguing about sports. Experts are located to provide deep analysis concerning events of shallow significance.

News needs to be fully reported and there are, to be sure, some stories that deserve all the attention they can get. The president’s trip the Middle East. The effect of government intervention on the futures of the automobile and banking industries. The progress of the war in Afghanistan. But more often, it seems, the yammering, shouting and analyses sound like so much Hamburger Helper, verbal filler to stretch news bites into entire meals.

Last week, for instance, I’m walking through a room where the television is on and one of the yammering heads is talking about a story that had broken the day before: in Washington, D.C., an 88-year-old man had entered the Holocaust Museum and fatally shot a security guard. From watching and reading earlier reports, I knew the man was a real nut-job, with a racist and anti-Semitic history. Or, if you prefer, a profoundly disturbed individual unable to think rationally due to a chemical imbalance in his brain.

It was a significant news story, one that needed to be fully reported. A graphic reminder, as if we need one, that racism and anti-Semitism, still exists. As President Obama would later say, “This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.”

But the yammering didn’t address that. It stretched into whether the attack was, somehow, connected to other incidents. The shooting of an abortion clinic doctor in Kansas. A shooting outside an Army recruiting office in Little Rock. Then an expert of some sort was called in to declare that the root cause of all this was a “confluence” of events. The election of Obama. The economic situation. Some other stuff I didn’t catch.

And perhaps all of that will be proven to be true, although my feeling is that the only thing the story really proves is that you’re never too old to be a nut-job.

More importantly, though, it made me wonder about another possibility. The possibility that the major by-product of all that yammering about stories like that one will be more stories like that one.

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