Well, that certainly is an easy one to answer – just go to the mainstream sources that report it. It’s plain to see that “news” is anything that shocks, surprises or recounts horrific details of tragedy and human behavior at its worst. From marital misstep to grisly murder to the ceaseless coverage of any natural or manmade disaster that inflicts itself upon the planet – news, clearly in the modern sense, is almost always 100% of the “bad or worse” variety.
But how did we get here? How did we get from a definition that might have been, “anything deemed to matter to others that they might not otherwise be aware of,” to “anything that shocks and affronts general human standards of decency?”
Such a definition has always been with us on some level. It’s not hard to imagine the first caveman running back to the tribe and announcing, with both excitement and terror, that “Glog was killed in his sleep last night!” Sensational and surprising stories pique our natural human curiosity: “How did it happen?” “What was the reason?” “What sort of person would do such a thing?” “Could such an event happen to me or someone I love?” “What does this say about who we are . . .?”
I think it’s that last question that really drives us in the end. Not that the rubber-necker that slows as he passes a bad interstate accident isn’t driven by some morbid fascination to see what the worst of such an event might look like, but in reality I think we peruse the most shocking of news headlines in an attempt to parse and weigh out the general state of our culture as a whole.
And I would also contend that ultimately it’s a ruse perpetrated upon us by those who recognize our fallen condition and the propensity to gravitate to the base of our nature in such matters – individuals who have no problem casting the worst of murder and mayhem against the walls of our hearts and minds that they might garner a higher level of readers or Nielsen ratings.
Locally we suffer a daily newspaper that has no compunction running eight straight days of headlines having to do with the tragic death of a toddler – the last one blazing in giant print: “Warrant Says Child’s Body Wrapped, Taped.” Apparently the reporting the day before that the child’s body had been found in a local landfill just wasn’t enough. Nationally it’s no better, and even the internet news presented on major search engines has gone from the originally “interesting and insightful” to the now almost always bizarre and bewildering.
Has the world gone stark raving mad?
Well, yes . . . and no.
I was having a conversation with a law enforcement official the other day about how some cases can weigh so heavily upon the people involved with working them. He, in fact, was on the front end of the sad case so overzealously reported by the Times. At the end of the conversation I reminded him that the population of the U.S. now stands at just over 300 million people. When you look at the total numbers and then factor in the real ratio of horrific occurrences and acts to the number of people interacting on a daily basis you begin to get an idea that perhaps the steady diet of atrocities that the mainstream press serves up so continually, doesn’t really add up to quite the depressing reality they would have us regularly cringing over.
A single act, of course, is cause enough for an appropriate level of concern and even despair as warranted, but the great goodness of man as inspired by his creator shines on in so greater a number of unreported acts – both small and large and far and wide.
We just don’t often seem to hear about it.
Which is frankly one of the primary reasons we began this weekly paper for Roanoke. At our inception in November 2007 we promised to “lift up what is right and real and genuine about our community – the people, places and events that make us who we are . . .”
It is my hope that we are getting better and better at reaching that goal and we will continue to do so and expand our reach to the very best of our ability.
In the meantime, we need your support as we seek to serve the greater community that is the Roanoke Valley. If you believe in what we’re doing please let us know by subscribing – or simply sending a letter of support to the hard working folks that make this “community trust” happen for far less monetary reward than their gifts would bring elsewhere.
We really do need you now – not next week or next year. Please join us as we seek to shine the light upon the best of who we are and redefine real news in our community.
By Stuart Revercomb stuart@theroano.wwwmi3-ss14.a2hosted.com