Apples, Oranges and Other Fruit

You’ve already heard me join the chorus of those who think CNN has spent too much time on the story of the missing Malaysian airliner. But I want to be clear: it doesn’t mean it’s not a big – and fascinating -- story. I’m only questioning the time spent on it with no new significant facts.

I wonder if there are really “better” stories than others. You can complain all you want about why more time hasn’t been spent on the Washington mudslide or Russia’s ambitions in Ukraine, or for that matter, the ongoing war in Syria, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced all over the Middle East, which some are calling the great tragedy of this century. It definitely qualifies as that so far.

But can we really compare all these things? Journalism involves the editorial judgment of human beings, who are never going to agree completely on what is most important. It’s also about timing. There was a moderate earthquake in L.A. last night, and for several hours, it was the top story for millions in that area, and made national headlines.

The missing airplane story fascinates on many levels, in addition to being a tragic story of families’ loss. We do love a good mystery -- though there are those who would say that the mystery is getting better billing than what’s happening in the lives of those surviving families.

But solving the first part of the mystery – the whereabouts of the presumably downed plane -- is actually the question those families need answered the most right now. They can hardly be blamed, after three weeks of not having that question answered, for coming up with the conclusion that they’re being lied to or that there’s some sort of conspiracy.

We have also heard the term “disaster porn,” for those of us (I’m pleading guilty) who are drawn to those kinds of stories. Am I getting my cheap adrenaline rushes on the shoulders of others’ losses? Perhaps, but the time will certainly come when the shoes will be on my own feet. And separating “disaster porn” coverage from legitimate concern about victims is not as easy as one would think – though most discerning news consumers know that kind of “porn” when they see it.

As for the missing plane, that first answer those families have been seeking may only be hours away. But exactly what happened to Flight 370 will be a mystery for a long time to come. It’s the story that will keep on giving. There will be books and movies.

It seems like no coincidence that there have been Amelia Earhart specials on other channels this week.

Good Grief

While watching the unfolding drama of the missing, and now officially presumed lost, Malaysian airliner, I was a little put off to see so many pictures of grieving family members shown by the news media. What actually constitutes good taste in such coverage?

As a news reporter, I was often called upon to cover the aftermath of tragedy – fatal traffic accidents, house fires and the like. The last thing I ever wanted to do was approach a distraught surviving family member and try to get a comment – but I took it to be part of the job. A lot of the time, as perhaps you’d expect, the answer was, “No thanks,” – and usually more forceful expressions thereof.

But I began to notice a distinct difference in the responses I got from different groups of people. If the survivors were white, they usually wanted nothing to do with the news media. They made us feel like vultures (easy in my case). But Latino survivors seemed to have little compunction about talking. It almost seemed as if the survivor wanted to talk about the departed. What was unpleasant to one was therapeutic for the other.

Now this is an impression – I don’t really have the standing to draw some well-researched ethnic or cultural conclusion. But am I completely wrong in my suspicion that attitudes toward response to death may differ accordingly?

Memorial services in some cultures aren’t subdued events, what some of us would judge as quiet and respectful. People make noise! In some cases, people attending such events are actually hired to make it. You don’t get any points for a stiff upper lip.

In our ultra-connected world, the trend seems to be shifting toward the public end of the spectrum and away from the private. When someone dies accidentally, it’s the norm now to see candles and flowers pile up at the site of the tragedy, depending on the esteem in which the deceased was held, and even see crowds of mourners gather, who are happy to let their grief show. More and more, it seems to be a shared experience -- and media consumers expect it to be.

I am one of those people who don’t do death very well. I am not good at words of comfort and tend to be very careful when dealing with anyone who has suffered a loss. Usually, if I try to say anything profound, it sounds silly and blows up in my face. The worst was trying to get that comment out of that survivor and be “sensitive” at the same time. Nobody was ever fooled about what I was doing.

But it’s like any exercise in human relations: you have to let the other person guide you. And when it cones to grief, there are indeed different strokes for different folks.

Selfie Consciousness

I did my first selfie a couple of weeks ago. I was in a hair salon, and since my regular stylist was off (isn’t this beginning to sound a little much already?), I let an apprentice stylist, who had only recently acquired her cosmetology license, take care of me. While this was happening, I thought a picture of me in the salon chair with her working on me might be fun for Facebook posting, so I tried to take a picture in the salon mirror while I was sitting in the chair. It didn’t work. But the 20-something woman was thrilled to be in the photo with me, and showed me how to put the smartphone camera in reverse mode. Done! So I posted it, and the selfie was well-received – in fact, the highest-grossing post in my FB experience so far. Already, I’m using Hollywood expressions like “grossing,” although that could be taken another way entirely.

So what exactly has happened to me? Do I need therapy?

Look, I am not a kid. I was born in one of the Truman administrations. There was no easy technology for selfies – consequently, the word did not exist – and even if there were, how many of us would have been doing it then? Unless we were headed for a movie or modeling career, we just weren’t raised to think that way.

I still feel a little strange when having to pose for photos, usually during holiday seasons. Most of the time, I don’t feel like smiling in photos, but force myself to do it anyway. Do you know why the people in all those Victorian-era photos never smiled? I used to think, well, it was the Victorian era, what exactly was there to smile about? Of course, it wasn’t because all our forebears were sourpusses. Smiling for photographs simply hadn’t been invented yet.

Maybe it’s me. I like photography, but don’ t feel compelled to take pictures of people. On a trip once, I wanted to take a picture of an iconic Northern California bridge near Big Sur. An attractive young woman was sitting on a rock overlooking the scene. When she saw I was about to take a picture, she turned around and put on her best 10,000-watt smile. I told her to turn back around again and look at the bridge. I just needed her for perspective. Talk about sourpusses.

But getting back to selfies.  The older generations may castigate the younger ones for being too self-absorbed and believing that everyone else cares about the trivialities of their lives, starting with pictures of themselves in every conceivable setting – or function. But motive is important. Is it about making an impression, or is it about genuine sharing? It’s probably a mixture.

A lot of it has to do with a sense of the audience. If you’re beautiful, it’s easy, nobody is going to complain, as long as you have the material to selfie with – selfie away! Most of us, though, don’t have it that easy – we have to think about the interest/entertainment value of what it is we’re posting. If it’s boring, the poster will be accused of self-absorption, but if it’s done with grace and style, the poster will be asked for more, even develop a following.

When all is said and done, I think the “sharing” world of social media is a good thing. It’s teaching us we have a lot more in common than what separates us – we’re just not as unique as we think we are. But it’s also teaching us what to share, when to share it, and how often. Yes, we all have to learn a little showbiz.

Babbling On

The disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 souls (as they say in aviation) aboard, will constitute one of the most fascinating stories of 2014 – maybe even the decade. But it’s an unusual journalistic challenge for the cable news channels: when to cover it, and when to put it on the shelf temporarily and talk about something else – anything else!

There seems to be no shortage of ex-pilots, aviation experts and others willing to share their theories. We’re learning an awful lot about how the Boeing 777 works, even how to reprogram the plane’s flight computer – I think there are some 8-year-olds out there who could do it. And there are all the fancy interactive maps, etc.

And then an actual “fact” advancing the story swims by, and all the channels leap on it. More often than not, the “fact” contradicts yesterday’s “fact” and prompts a whole new round of appearances for the experts. And sometimes they disagree. I heard one of them complaining that there were too many wild theories out there about conspiracies, etc. in the plane’s disappearance. Another expert countered that he actually believed at least one of these was credible, and that no door should be closed on anything. Who would have thought that Al Qaida folks would train as pilots and fly planes into the World Trade Center towers? Good point.

But at this writing, we still don’t know much of anything, and we may not know much more for a long time. It took two years for searchers to find what was left of the French airliner that fell into the Atlantic east of Brazil. This story is not like an earthquake, a court case, or a terrorist incident like the Boston Marathon bombing, which affect a large number of people and come with multiple witnesses, and facts that are flowing almost too fast to digest.

To my mind, a cardinal principle of broadcasting is, the longer you spend time live on-air talking about something for which you have no additional facts, the more likely you’re going to say something controversial, insensitive, or just plain stupid. I speak from experience!

The other night, a news anchor, introducing an aviation expert of Irish descent, first wished him a happy St. Patrick’s Day. As if the obligatory bow to this fellow’s ancestry was going to squeeze more information out of him. And remember, the story involves the disappearance or loss of 239 human beings, so wasn’t that greeting a little odd? A mystery, I guess, is more compelling than a tragedy.

Let’s face it. There are other stories going on in the world that aren’t necessarily more important to an audience (that’s an editorial judgment), but at least supply us with new information as they unfold. Ukraine. Venezuela. Syria. Auto recalls. Would we have more – or less – respect for a news outlet that cuts back on coverage of a fascinating mystery like this missing airliner until there’s a substantial break in the story? Or at least just report a new fact and spare us the babble unless it's worth massaging?

This is one of those cases, it seems to me, where you can’t go wall-to-wall without quite knowing where the other wall is.

The Ties That Bind

Today is the 25^th anniversary of the World Wide Web, and it actually has someone credited with inventing it: Sir Tim Bemers-Lee, who is also credited with creating the first software to browse it with. I swear, I thought the Web was older than that (and I know there’s a difference of some kind between the WWW and the Internet, but don’t ask me to explain it). And where exactly does Al Gore fit in?

I had always been of the opinion, perhaps since childhood, that human beings have this irresistible drive to be connected, and that wireless communication made life dramatically easier. Via amateur radio, I was able to talk to folks all over the world, but there were so many low-level practical uses. Example: two hams could agree to meet for coffee. If one were late, he could let the other know by radio; if he got lost, the other could “talk him in.” Decades before cell phones.

For journalists, Web connectedness is, of course, indispensable. It wasn’t all that long ago that when there was an earthquake in Southern California, where I lived, I had the devil of a time getting a magnitude and location on it. I had to rush to the newsroom and call Cal Tech and hope there was somebody there who could read the meters and talk to me – and if it were early in the morning, the on-duty seismology tech usually wasn’t in an accommodating mood. Eventually, our local emergency manager got a pager that would display the Richter scale reading and the location automatically. I wanted one. He told me it cost $25,000. These days, I get alerted to big earthquakes all over the world, by email, for free (beyond the cost of the Internet connection).

A retired newsman I know recently visited Myanmar (Burma), and was able to send those of us on his friend list real-time photos of that beautiful country. He reminded me that it wasn’t all that long ago that war correspondents in Southeast Asia risked their necks just to get a few feet of battle film transported to a place where the major TV networks had access to it.

We all know how social media have changed relationships. There’s the old joke about two Facebook friends meeting for lunch and being bored to death -- so up-to-date on each others’ lives that they had nothing to say.

Perhaps that shows how this lovely connectedness has an invisible price. We can add all the wires, towers, satellites and bandwidth we want to make connections more and more real, but in the end, we have to accept that it’s all artificial tethering, and while incredibly useful, is only a substitute for real human contact.

Maybe it’s like this: Did you ever visit a place of great beauty with your camera, and were so concerned about getting pictures of it that you neglected to actually experience it? I’ve often thought that sometimes, you have to go back to the place  – without your camera -- just to soak it in.

But look, I’m not talking about unplugging here, not by a long shot, just recognizing that we have a constant challenge before us: putting all this electronic interaction in its place, and remembering that it’s part of life, not a substitute for it.

Hey Kids, What Time Is It?

“…asks Buffalo Bob, turning over in his grave (if you know who that is, you know how much time has passed!). Not nearly as simple a question as it sounds.

We have just gone through the semi-annual ritual of adjusting our clocks between Standard Time and Daylight Savings, with the usual casualties today. Church congregations were likely smaller, as at least some of the faithful weren’t so, in failing to set clocks ahead for DST, thereby missing the service, or at least the sermon. Darn.

The fist fights over the time changes are usually more intense in the spring, since being early (the consequences of failing to “fall back”) are usually less severe than being late, from failing to Spring Forward. Today, the newspaper in the city where I once worked apparently posted the wrong clock graphic and had to issue a correction, sheepishly admitting that it should have asked readers if they had remembered to push their clocks forward, presumably instead of the other way. Whoops.

Even the mnemonic devices are suspect, since Congress fussed with the start and finish of Daylight Saving, and now we actually Spring Forward before spring itself has sprung. Many of my electronic devices had time change codes built in before the extensions were approved by our esteemed representatives. And then there are Arizona and Hawaii, that don’t recognize DST. Sounds like a hot mess to me.

Trusting legislatures with standard-setting is a dicey proposition anyway. There is, of course, the famous story of how the Indiana legislature almost established the value of “pi” as 3.2, rather than the 3.1417… we all grew up with. A few irate math professors were able to talk them out of it at the last minute back in 1897. So what else is new? You would think most human female functions are relatively standard, but a surprising number of male legislators haven’t read the manual.

Look, I love DST, since as a child I was able to go outside and play for a couple of hours after dinner, then see the fireflies arrive before I went to bed.

But enough sentimental nonsense, right? There are many things in life that shouldn’t be standardized, but there are many things that should. Like time, which happens to all of us. If the legislatures want something to do, how about requiring us to use a 24-hour clock and Greenwich Mean Time for official purposes. Of course, if you were calling someone in a distant place, you’d have to know what time of day sun-wise it was so as not to wake them up (but don’t we sort of have to do that anyway?).

OK, well that’s my opinion, and I’m stickin’ to it. And my opinions, as my dear readers in this space know, are worth their weight in bitcoin.

Free Associations

I listened with great appreciation to Bette Midler singing “Wind Beneath My Wings” at the Oscars Sunday night. I’m a little embarrassed at exposing my schlocky sentimental taste in music, but there you go – I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs out there. But I see many of you heading for the exits. Why?

Aside from some not sharing my taste in schlock, this song has been co-opted by funerals. When you get to a certain age, you go to more funerals than weddings, and there’s a much-better-than-even chance you will hear this song at a funeral service. Especially in the UK, where it’s said to be among the top five most-requested songs at memorial events. The usage was likely prompted by the movie “Beaches,” where it was the background at a cemetery scene.

Oddly enough, the word “death” doesn’t appear in the lyrics, and there’s really nothing about the words that would suggest it’s intended for funerals, but most of you are sick of this song because you’ve heard it too often, and, in this case, not on pleasant occasions.

I’d like to complain about this, except most songs seem to have associations with events. The associations can be personal or collective. War seems to have an especially collective associative quality, even when the lyrics don’t actually talk about war. “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places,” sang Vera Lynn. It’s the quintessential World War II ditty, but there’s nothing military about the words. The Vietnam War seemed to have a lot of these. Jim Morrison and the Doors lit our fire. Even the Gulf War – which we won, as I recall – seemed to have its own song, “From a Distance,” also sung by Ms. Midler -- though the lyrics of this one did concern war and peace. Curiously, Iraq and Afghanistan don’t seem to have signature songs, or am I missing something?

Individual associations, of course, vary widely. A friend who is a major Frank Sinatra fan could not stand Mr. S’s version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” because it was played over the jarring scene in “The Execution of Private Slovik,” where Martin Sheen is felled by a firing squad. In a personal example, as a child I knew “Swan Lake” as the theme music to the 1931 version of the movie “Dracula” before I knew it was Tchaikovsky’s ballet classic. OK, well I was depraved on accounta I was deprived, as the delinquent teen says in “West Side Story.”

Most married couples have “their song,” but the most cheerful music can sometimes be ruined by a tragic association, like a fatal traffic accident or a devastating storm. That’s how we’re wired. It only takes a few bars, or the first notes from a particular voice, to transport us instantly back to our ”big events.”

Getting back to the starting point here, though, I wish there could be a moratorium on the funeral usage of “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Some of you might actually get to like it again.

The Envelope, Please

We’re at it again! We only just got through with the Olympics. Here come the Oscars.

Last night, I did a Facebook post about how I’d seen both “12 Years a Slave” and “Gravity,” and allowed as how after all was said and done, I liked “Gravity” better. I will leave it to you to decide if I’m a cold fish or not. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for “Slave” when I saw it, but there you go.

Tonight we go to an Oscar party, and part of the annual routine is, we turn in our ballots ahead of time with our Oscar picks in every category, including the obscure ones. The individual who gets the most right wins a prize and a small money pot.

One thing you learn really early in this game is that if you go with what you like, you lose. This is more like picking stocks. If you want to win, you don’t fall in love with anything. Some in this party group watch all the preliminary awards shows and read all the critics’ picks before making their choices. There are those who just can’t play games. They’re always in it to win it.

When you think about it, taking two or more disparate works of art and having to decide which one “wins” is a little silly. I liked one movie better than the other, maybe because I was in the mood for one and not for the other. Are Academy politics – which is now what the Oscars are about – any loftier as criteria?

The Oscars have spawned all kinds of wannabe awards ceremonies. I myself attended banquets as a broadcaster and won quite a few trophies for my work in that field. The first year I won, everyone had to give speeches, and the small-market awards were at the end, so my speech was after midnight, and most people had gone home, There were so few left in the audience that I offered to take them all out for breakfast.

But name me an industry, club, school, or even pastime that doesn’t have an awards show. I once had to cover a luncheon of a professional organization in the town where I was working, and I’m sure that everyone attending got an award. In fact, at one point the emcee/presenter had to leave the podium and sit down so someone else could give HIM an award.

It’s a privilege to be alive. We don’t necessarily need a trophy or a badge to validate it.

But not watch the Oscars? Are you kidding?