Human Interest Stories AKA News For Profit

I’ve often wondered how ordinary people become instant TV stars in a matter of moments. Is it due to the immediateness of television or the determination that 15 minutes of fame no matter the response is better than 15 minutes of silence?

Take for example this past week in Chicago the mother of a dead 15-year old boy who collapsed and died after playing a simple game of basketball at a friend’s house. The boy’s parent “allegedly” (even though I heard it on WBBM NewsRadio 780 A.M.) said, “He was determined to make it to the NBA.”

A lot of good that does now that the young teen is dead, right?

Was it a status quo move that made his mother decide to make such an outrageous claim or was it just one of those instances that she used her dead son as a pawn for her own selfishness to gain herself a spot in the limelight? I’ll take the latter over the former any day of the week.

There seem to be a weird trend toward that lately, more so, at least within the last decade, although some editors and publishers might call those kinds of outpourings “blurtatations,” all part of the human interest stories they try to write or produce.

Human interest stories. Hmm, I wonder about that. It seems sort of odd to me; I mean is there some publisher, editor or reporter out there in media-land making up a predetermined question so all the interviewee has to say “yes” or “no,” thereby making the answer seem less premeditated than it really is?

The easy answer to the above self-imposed question is obviously, yes. It’s a lousy way to sell newspapers, write and produce stories and also have answers that are way too obviously assumed, when the writer knows darn well what the answer will be.

It makes a goods soundbite and both soundbites, good quotes in newspapers and visually-vocal news broadcasts sells a lot of good ad space. Funny sort of thing, it used to be that news was news and news was not for profit.

That was of course, until giant corporations started buying up any or all newspapers, radio stations and visual broadcast mediums and tell them how to run their newsrooms like a business, not a newsroom.

And pray tell how have they survived this long by pulling crap like this?

By making stories that are normally negative into positive; telling people things like; green forests will automatically grow back in abundance after they’ve been burned to the ground; McDonald’s French fries still taste great after being dropped on the restaurant floor and stepped on by employees; staged press conferences in Iraq with soldiers holding up cue cards for other soldiers to follow in order to make our wonderful enemy combatent president George Bush look as if he knows what he's accomplishing over there, other than securing oil fields. It runs the gamut, but the bottom line is put a positive public relations spin and the negatives will suddenly stop messing up behind-the-scene strategies.

Go Hollywood! Bright lights! Everyone is always happy and there is always a happy ending to a downfall, just like the way it’s portrayed in politically correct Disney movies!

That sort of stuff that I refer to as “mass media trickeration,” doesn’t sit well with this writer, for certain. So what can we as viewers and listeners do? Plenty!

You can boycott the sponsors that help them pay for the airtime. Believe me, once the puppet-strings or the panic buttons are no longer pulled or pushed, things will be so much better, you’ll see.

Unless of course, you like happy newscasters like Katie Couric in her corporate baboon dress reading words off a teletype at one thousand words a minute or a few cue cards taped to a camera, telling you to stay with her for an exciting news story about the puppy population explosion post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

Oh how I long for the days of Walter Cronkite.