How Times Have Changed…
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
What passes for political news these days is vastly different than when I was first starting as a broadcast reporter….
Much of it is gossip-related and driven by the insatiable news cycle that includes blogs, cable news channels, and talk radio—-both liberal and conservative…
A moment in time that once would have been largely ignored, is now the fodder for days upon days of pundification from all those who make their living trivializing the easy catch—while largely ignoring the more important, serious issues.
Here’s what I mean….
I was cleaning out my wallet the other day—and nestled in one of the plastic pockets was this clip I’d saved because it tickled me back in 1972…
It was a simple 16 lines—used a “filler” at the end of another unrelated story back in the day when newspapers didn’t have the ability to lay out their pages with computers.
When a story ran short—typesetters like this tucked in a few lines of something to avoid having a white hole in their layout.
This “filler” story refers to the 1972 presidential campaign when Richard Nixon was running for re-election…
“Four more years” was one of the slogans of his campaign against George McGovern.
The reporter covering the story treated McGovern’s remark as a light anecdote…
THAT was then… THIS is now.
Given the current state of political reporting, can’t you just imagine the furor a comment like that would create if any candidate in the same situation uttered the same remarks?
Imagine the Media Madness!
Front page headlines around the world blare out the tale of the candidate with the foul mouth !
Political Blogs would postulate on the candidate’s fitness for public office !
The radio talk shows and the 24-Hour-a-day cable networks would endlessly explore—in depth—the implications of such an outburst by an obviously unstable and anger prone hothead !
A grizzled old editor once told me there were only two kinds of news.
- News that people NEED to know…
- News that people WANT to know…
We all WANT to know the latest gossip or pop culture tid-bit—but we NEED to know things like what the General Assembly is doing with our money.
Maybe it’s time in our 24-hour-a-day, blogesphered society that we pay a LITTLE more attention to the NEED to KNOW news.
—Steve
