The World Bank Has No News

When I swear that I won't be writing about current events, just as reaction to stories, I am eliminating a huge wellspring of thoughts I have every day. I read the news, see headlines, see sections of television news, and all that good crap, so I am constantly bombarded with things desperately in need of comment. I could just write a blog wherein I did nothing but link to news articles and then comment on them. It would be brilliant, innovative, and easy to write, because there's no paucity of topics. The fact that every single person on the planet already writes a blog like this should be no deterrent.

But I'm not doing that. So when I mention the fact that I have seen, in various shapes and colors, at least three feature stories about Paul Wolfowitz wearing socks with holes in them on the Internet and TV, I am not mentioning that because I want to comment. I could care less whether Paul Wolfowitz is an ugly, penny-pinching creep who makes me want to send him to Iraq to serve on the front line. I don't care. It's really not that funny.

That's actually the crux of my comment; it's not that funny. So why is it huge, capital letter news? The news media, of all stripes, seems bound and determined to report things that don't matter. Paul Wolfowitz has holes in his socks? Hold the presses! Woman fights off puma? This just in! People dying the world over? Meh.

We all know why this is; the news media have to be entertaining, and people dying isn't. When a war goes on for longer than our attention spans (and no, I'm not talking about Iraq, I was thinking more along the lines of Chechnya or Darfur or various other forgotten conflicts) we don't want to read any more about it, because frankly, it's all more of the same. People killed. Bombs. Victories, defeats, turnabouts. The papers could print the same story on a war every single day and it would probably still hold true.

News isn't entertainment. But entertainment is what sells. So we get lots of hole-y socks and celebrity news, and we also get self-fulfilling prophecies. The news organizations feel that we have forgotten about a topic, so they push those stories back, and as a result, we forget about the topic. Where are the investigative journalists? Where is Watergate now? It's not that our new scandals are incomprehensible, it's that no one bothers to inform the public about them.

I'm not saying that the Almighty Dollar buys silence. I don't think it's as calculated as that, which is, if anything, more alarming. It should worry us that trends, controlled by no one, are pushing us away from transparency, from actual news. I'm worried.

And for the record, I have holes in my socks too, so I hope I'm not photographed going into a mosque. Actually, in our current climate, I hope I'm not photographed going into a mosque for a lot of reasons.