The nonexistence of good news

Where is the good news? That’s been the constant whine of war cheerleaders practically since the absurd, staged-for-the-cameras toppling of the Hussein statue. I cracked up when I listened to the Fox News anchors rambling on about the historic moment and how they had goosebumps watching approximately 35 Iraqi people performing a very bad reenactment of the Berlin Wall coming down.

Every time the camera pulled back, you could see that there was hardly anyone there; it wasn’t exactly the spontaneous mass movement of the sort that was seen in Berlin.

Anyhow, to ask the question is to completely miss the point. People have been making the same complaint about the local and national news for decades. News is, by functional definition, bad things happening to other people. We may think that Zarqawi getting killed is good news, but in truth, the only reason it is newsworthy is that it gives the media a chance to put another corpse on the cover.

There really isn’t any other practical definition of news, otherwise, we wouldn’t see coverage of a murder in Houston, a flood killing 20 in the Philippines and 20,000 dying in a train wreck in Bangladesh. None of these have any relation to our lives, except, of course, the ghoulish appeal of bad things happening to other people.

This is why it doesn’t matter how many Iraqi kids happily receive candy or how many hospitals and schools are built. No one cares and you can’t sell newspaper or television space by surrounding it with “good news”. There is no such thing as “good news” in the modern media, and the sooner you get that through your head the sooner you can begin to put the news in its proper perspective. Which is to say, ignoring most of it.