No News = News

I generally prefer to write about current events. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because most people know something about the subject matter (as opposed to airline economics or the most efficient setup of a total transportation network). Maybe it’s just because I enjoy being able to follow a story to its conclusion. But for whatever reason, I like current events.

My regular readers (you are out there, I hope) will notice that my posting has been light lately. One of caveats of writing about current events is that I don’t like news articles that simply repeat what has already been said. To put it facetiously, I really don’t care if de Villepan of France has switched from American cheese to Swiss cheese in a protest against American hegemony. I already know that he has a severe dislike for America. Tell me something I don’t know.

Real news has been extremely sparse this week. Most every news site I visit is just simply repeating old news, maybe with a new little twist (“Today, America and Britain agreed that the proper pronunciation of the word been in the new UN resolution will be ‘ben’ instead of ‘bean.’ This is great progress on the oral argument front. Back to you, John”). I don’t want to be a real journalist who writes about the same thing over and over and over. So I don’t.

But I do have a theory about the volume of real news that is floating around. The more real news there is, the less is actually happening. The more the media acts like Pete the Repeat Parrot, the more is actually going on. I think this is because the media today knows that something is happening; they know it’s important. They just don’t know what it is. So they talk about the same two topics they think are important. In contrast, when there is a nice variety of stories floating around, it’s because the media doesn’t know where to even try to look for a story. So they create stories out the events of everyday life.

Real news is very quiet right now. We keep hearing the same things over and over again, on CNN, on Fox, on Drudge. It’s all the same news, all basically the same commentary. But those few little juicy tidbits that flow out (Fox (and now ABC)claiming Saddam is moving troops south and is readying his Scuds, the new “insanity and explosives summer camps” in Iraq) are enough to keep reminding me that something is happening, and probably very soon.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Baghdad fall before April 1. We’re in the calm before the storm. I’m sure that I’ll have a lot to write about - soon.