Chasing the cat in the box, missing the story

If the conditional tense were suddenly eliminated from our language, the people who tell us what's going on in the world would suddenly find themselves at a loss for words. If they couldn't report anything they didn't know for certain, if they couldn't speculate about either the future or the past, the silence would be deafening.

The other day, for example, the news machinery was running at top speed, fueled by reports that a person who may be one of the leaders of al-Queda might be among a group of fighters that may be surrounded by the Pakistani army (possibly assisted by the U.S. Army), in a place called Waziristan on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, While the non-American news organizations (usually called "the international media") managed to avoid climbing that spiral of what-ifs and maybes and continued telling us about the news that was actually happening, the domestic media got stuck in conditional mode.

They didn't tell us about the violence in Kosovo, sparked by the drowning deaths of two children. We didn't hear much about the bizarre, possibly staged, assassination attempts on both the president and vice president of Taiwan on election day eve, or the equally bizarre replay of our 2000 election that ensued. They were about to tell us about the day's new round of explosions in Baghdad when the maybe-maybe-maybe story broke, not hypothetical blasts but real ones, but Wolf and the rest of the pack seem to have forgotten all about what was actually happening as they turned their (and our) attention to the hypothetical scenario in a place with no live video.

Maybe they measured the Baghdad blasts by the old man-bites-dog rule and decided they weren't news, really. Everybody knows that if a dog bites a man it's not news, but if a man bites a dog, that's news because it's unusual. The Baghdad blasts happen every day, so are they still news? Apparently not -- not if a possible "high value target" might be involved in what might be a firefight in a place so remote that all you can do is point to it on a map over and over. Maybe if there's a day without explosions there, we'll get a live breaking-news report. Maybe. (Hey, I've learned from watching them.)

With the notable exception of crusading journalist Lou Dobbs (may he remain on the air for decades to come), they stopped talking about the economy, stupid or not -- except to report on how the markets were reacting to their reporting on the speculation that somebody who might be somebody, referred to as "that guy" by at least one TV news reporter, might be surrounded, and presumably subsequently captured or killed, by a bunch of other guys who may or may not be on our side.

They even stopped, for a few hours at least, going on and on about the latest breaking developments in the stories that usually expand to fill the space available, like the live reports from bleary-eyed stringers standing outside closed courthouses at 4 a.m local time to give us what we need to know about motions that might or might not be filed in the Scott Peterson trial, or the charges against Michael Jackson or even his sister's overexposed parts.

And they showed us, once again, that the laws of physics also apply to journalism. In this case, the journalists were after what the physicists refer to as Schroedinger's Cat:



Physicist Erwin Schroedinger's cat was a hypothetical critter that lived, or didn't live, in a box that had, or didn't have, something in it that could kill it, or not kill it, at any moment, and there was a 50-50 chance. The box was sealed with the cat and its potential death inside, so from the outside nobody could tell if the cat were alive or dead at any given moment. The cat exisited as a half-dead, half-alive entity: as long as the box was closed, it was nothing but a probability wave.

The barking news hounds' cat, Ayman al-Zawahri, one of the apparently gazillions of #2 masterminds in al-Queda, may not even have been in the box at all.   ¶ 8:05 PM |