Pin the tail on the story
The press corps has spent the past 24-hour news cycle bumbling around like a bunch of blindfolded kindergarteners in its attempt to cover the outrage over the Bush/Cheney campaign's use of images from the World Trade Center attacks, including one of a team of firefighters hauling the flag-draped remains of a fallen brother out of the Ground Zero rubble.
Somehow one reporter got the notion that the only people with any right to say anything about the political use of those images are those who lost loved ones, or at least someone they knew, in that day's terrorist attacks. And from there it seemed the rest of the pack just followed the leader. (More often than not, when a pack of reporters takes off chasing a story, all but a few of them are actually chasing each other.) They tried to outdo each other, pulling in widows and former co-workers, preferably in twos, following the lazy journalist's assumption that if you talk to two people, you've covered both sides of the story, that assumption a result of the more widespread misconception that there are only two sides to any story.
And while those most vulnerable to the traumatic impact of those images are way too young to vote (or be interviewed without their parents' permission), the media machine completely ignored the effect those ads, or their coverage of them, will almost certainly have on children.
While the reporters were asking 9/11 survivors (and honey, we are ALL 9/11 survivors, just as those of us who are old enough to remember are all survivors of the Vietnam war) to quantify just how bad (or good) the political use of those images made them feel, their producers were busy putting together montages of 9/11 images to illustrate the news about the controversy over 9/11 images, much easier news to illustrate than problems with Social Security. That leads us to another news biz insider term: tragedy porn. I trust that one is self-explanatory.
Visuals are very, very, very important in the news biz (outside of radio, where the choice bits are called "actualities"). They're important in newspapers -- I once had an important story buried, without so much as a refer on the section front, because a competing story came with "good use of yellow" in its illustration. But visuals are everything in television. So when visuals themselves became the news of the day, the people who went to school to study things like "good use of yellow" just couldn't help themselves.
Meanwhile, as usual, the news was frequently interrupted by advertising. Coincidentally, some of those ads were the very same ones they were talking about, and showing along with lots of other 9/11 images, in the programming they interrupted. It was like a snake eating itself: "I'm George Walker Bush and I approve of this message"...political ad using 9/11 images...news about political ads using 9/11 images..."easy money from Green Light"..."I'm George Walker Bush and I approve of this message"..."You lost your husband on 9/11; nice to have you with us..."
The peak of the whole experience for me was a shameless, thoughtless segue on WCBS-TV's noon news, going from their live coverage of the controversy over the images to a story that had happened earlier in the day over in Germany. "The conviction of a man accused of helping the 9/11 hijackers was overturned today..." the talking heads droned; behind them flashed yet another image of Twin Towers rubble.
The news corps talked all day about the ads, even as they avoided pointing out that the Bush/Cheney campaign's "
$10-million ad buy" was paying their salaries. And that's the
elephant in the living room.
Meanwhile, they missed the day's big story, perhaps because the visual that was supposed to go with it didn't turn out as planned. The signing of the interim Iraqi constitution was postponed again today after the
Shi'a faction balked at the last minute. Early this morning, I saw the council members assembling for their group photo op right before the scheduled signing, and then disassembling. There were only three women, all with their heads covered, in the group of about 20 people.
There's your story, boys and girls.
