I realize that this is Foolishness of the first order but let your mind wander with me a moment…
We all know by now that the people in the news reporting business truly believe that Good News Is No News. Most of us have heard the defense for this line of thinking which goes something like this …
It is not of any interest to the reading public to report all the cats that did not get caught up in trees today.
They may have a point. A newspaper that reported only good news would probably not survive. It still does not keep me from yearning to see a few good news headlines just for the heck of it.
If you have read this far, it means that you did let your mind wander with me, as I requested in the first paragraph above. Please stay and mind wander with me a little longer…
What if one day the newspapers of the world woke up and found there was No Bad News To Be Found Anywhere. What would they do? …
• Would they not publish a paper at all?
• Would they be required by union contracts to publish their newspapers and we would find bundles of newspapers with nothing printed on the pages thrown on our front lawns?
• With tears in their eyes, would they publish only good news?
• Would they falsify some bad news?
• Would their collective heads explode?
A Day With No Bad News might be interesting, it might be boring, it might be neat but I really think it would be all of these possibilities.
Would I kid u?
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
What If Nothing Bad Happened?
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3 comments:
Beginning with the cavemen, in our human lives today "what-ifs" are an inevitable eternal part of our being. Rationalizing their existence is infinitely futile. Whether by word-of-moutn or print, a substantial part of we the people will slways be inevitably and persistently interested in the bad news first, ...and if your newspapwer doesn't print the negative, the readers will buy somewhere else. That is the nature of the beast.
Newspapers pander to the deeply felt and closely guarded secret that humans, for some reason/s, NEED to hear or see "bad news". Newspapers, magazines, books, movies, events, all make most of their money off that need to gawk at "bad news". Why is that? Perhaps we "civilized" humans are not so far removed from our "uncivilized" cavemen ancesters. Survival was uppermost on their minds. So knowledge of others "bad news" was not so bad to know. The "bad news" of others often meant that personal survival was enhanced. You know, "Your loss is my gain"! I know, we have gained more compassion as the years have speeded by, witness our response to Haiti. But what has been our response to the other millions of genocide victims throughout the world. Sometimes we help, most times we read about it and sigh. We then thank God it's not us, then we go about the day holding on to our survival. At least we made it through another day ok.
I love good news! I loved reading all the good stories that happened this week, and there were tons of them this week. I don't want to read about the bombers - I want to read about how people helped each other, how the community really rallied together, and I don't think I'm alone in this - so here's to a day with nothing wrong or bad, and to happy stories, even about cats who managed to get down trees all by themselves. :-)
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