News as Entertainment

I watched NBC's Nightly News tonight. What I saw bothered me. They had two stories that weren't "news" by any stretch of the imagination:

• The disappearance of an Asian American female student working on a doctor's degree at Yale. The story admitted that the police still hadn't decided if this was a "runaway bride" or a crime. So why does it deserve a few minutes on national news? Oh... human interest. People have sympathy for the young, for the pretty, for females gone missing. But each day there are hundreds of people who go missing. Most are runaway youth. A few are senile old folks. Some are people just dropping out of view. And maybe 10 each day are people "disappeared" by a killer. So why a story about a "possible" young woman who may or may not have been murdered?


• The "return" of a WWII bomber pilot to search for his pilots wings that he buried in the wall of some house in Germany when first detained in the summer of 1944. He didn't find it. Even if he had, who cares? Is this really important enough to take up mintues on a national "news" broadcast?

What I didn't see was any substantive discussion of the health care debate. Oh, I saw a quick pan of a crowd of maybe a hundred thousand in the streets of Washington. And an all-too-familiar snippet of Obama giving a worn out "speech" to supporters in Minnesota. But where are the facts?

The American public needs to understand the health care situation in the US. They need to hear different political viewpoints so that they can discover where their own view lies. They need facts so that they can adjust their prejudices to facts. They need informed opinion to help move them up from prejudice to opinion based on fact. But the "news" doesn't provide this.

I don't expect the national news to be a university lecture. But they could replace a lot of fluff with real content that is meaningful and useful in the healthcare debate. Everybody loves to wring their hands over apathy in the electorate and how misinformed the voting public is. But if you don't give people facts and opinions. If you don't expose them to various viewpoints. You can't have an educated electorate. And without an educated electorate, "democracy" is a joke. It is a descent into demogogy, the very thing that the early Athenian elite railed against. They didn't want the lower classes to have any real political input because they viewed them as ignorant. You fix this not by denying people a vote. You fix it by providing them with real information. The news media has a responsibility. Sadly, US media sees its job as "entertainment", not informing an electorate.