Supplements

Commentary

By Liz Quirin

'At the Top of the News ...'

Too much information: That’s what my children would tell me when I would launch into an explanation or description that they didn’t want to hear. At this point, and just prior to the national election, I was ready to throw up my hands and say the same thing, and then I began to wonder: Do we have too much information? In the past I was almost sure we never had enough, but maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Perhaps, we have too much of the wrong kind of information.

We used to blame everything on the media. “They’ve gone too far,” we would say. Everything seemed to be overstated or repetitively stated or even trivialized. These days it’s difficult to blame “the media” because they have become ubiquitous — they’re everywhere and accessible everywhere. Not only do we have the morning, noon and nightly news, but we have news available on the computer, even our cell phones and always in the car if we just push the right buttons.

However, it’s seldom good news and often inaccurate news with our media friends telling viewers “You heard it here first.” Who cares if that media outlet was first? Do you ever remember which news outlet gave you that piece of information before the others? And was it accurate and true, unbiased and actually helpful? Case in point: Our attorney general, Michael Mukasey, collapsed at a dinner recently. Of course one of the media outlets was taping the dinner and caught the incident on tape. As I watched “the news,” that morning, the clip of tape was played over and over and over, at least five times, to match the amount of air time it took the news person to finish the report. To keep from being “talking heads,” they should be called “repeaters.” The news director repeats a segment as often as needed until the talker finishes. In that case, it was too much information and not enough video.

Like so much of what we see and hear on our news outlets, we have any number of bytes but not enough real information to give us a complete picture from which to respond. And, sometimes that’s not possible, especially if the news is “developing” or the story continues to unfold after the reporting is completed.

Sometimes, I believe, the news media can increase or intensify the results of an event. No one can dispute that foreclosures on homes are increasing with more to come, and unemployment numbers are rising with each passing day. The news media didn’t create this crisis, but I believe, at this point, we are getting too much information of only one kind, and without the good news that the folks who created the crisis will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, the news reverberates in the psyches of those scrambling to find a way out. What to do? Start reporting on where people can go for help, and start harping on the “pay as you go” plan before excessive holiday spending becomes the oft-repeated after Christmas story “at the top of the news.”