Hold your breaths.
August arrived this weekend, and now the annual news silly season officially begins.
Andrew Cunanan has been tracked down and, probably, consigned to Hell. Baby Richard, now fully out of diapers but apparently forever tattooed with that diminutive description, has popped up, but the Illinois Supreme Court once again seems determined to follow the law rather than public opinion, and the case is on hold for a while.
Gov. Jim Edgar managed to survive his day on the witness stand in the complicated MSI trial in Springfield without erupting in rage like Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men.”
In short, summer is here in earnest, and the news media have run out of news. Governments, like Frenchmen, usually take August off. Businesses, except the back-to-school ones, are in the doldrums. Families are at the lake. Yawn.
But the time blocks for the news remain reserved on radio and television every day. And the newspapers still publish, plopping on porch steps as stolidly as they do every other month when the living is not so easy.
The beast, as the saying goes, must be fed.
This final full month of summer is not yet the time when little girls fall into wells and get rescued by guys with no shoulders. It’s when grizzly bears, sharks–even rabbits–maul the unwary. It’s when some member of the Kennedy clan, America’s version of a dysfunctional royal family, gets in trouble and must go to court to show that justice is evenhanded.
August is when dogs get more than their day, especially if they are found mistreated or behave in some unhumanly heroic fashion. In fact, all animals are fair game in August when the news hunters are looking to bag their quota.
True, ferry boats will continue to tip in India, buses will overturn in Latin America and mudslides will wipe out villages in countries with names that probably didn’t even exist a decade ago. But the key to news value these days is pictures, and if there is no videotape of the event in progress, it is about as relevant to the television news as some written report on how to balance the budget.
True, too, that it seems as if virtually every tornado that develops gets captured on videotape, but video recorders are not as prevalent in Chad or Pakistan as they are in Kansas, so faraway tragedies go undocumented. (By the way, has the old phrase, “It’s a twister, Auntie Em,” been replaced with, “Grab the videocam, Auntie Em”?)
It is August now, the lazy, hazy days, the silly season for the news media.
Even the most serious sections of the most serious newspapers seem to give up during August, printing musings that, in the newsier months of October or February, wouldn’t even be considered.
So it has always been, and, apparently, always will be.
