COUNTRY HUMOR

All the news that's fit
By Jack S. Bray

Do you recall back 30 years or so ago, when Walter Cronkite, then the CBS Evening News anchor, was voted “The most trusted man in America?”

Well, the news business has fallen on hard times since then. In the past three decades, journalism’s standing has dropped to a hunkering position. In terms of professional credibility, journalism ranks just behind politicians and just ahead of used-car salesmen. And it’s not hard to understand why.

Take the early reporting of the devastation caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The destruction wrought by nature’s fury certainly deserved coverage, and TV news networks and big-city newspapers sent mobs of reporters to the Gulf Coast. But the copy they reported from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas was news only by the widest stretches of imagination.

First off was the anticipated death toll they bandied about from Hurricane Katrina and its attendant flooding of New Orleans was inflated. The body count would be at least 10,000, we were told in early reports. Besides, rapes, robberies and murders were rampant in the Superdome, with nary a cop in sight. We were told it was mayhem of Biblical proportions.

As it turned out, very little of that early “news” out of the Gulf could be believed. At last count, the death toll in all three states, from all causes related to the huge storms, stands at less than 1,000. Follow-up reports failed to find a single victim of rape, mugging or robbery. It was a modern-day version of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”; journalistic overkill, couched in the current news mantra of “scare hell out of the people first sort it out for accuracy later.”

Worse, the idea today seems to be, if you can’t find the news you want to report, manufacture it.

It’s the new journalism; the cult of the victim report, complete with low, hushed tones and a sob in the throat of the reporter. It’s as if the Geraldo Rivera school is graduating all the reporters nowadays. Where Walter Cronkite sat in front of the camera and read the news in an unemotional, gravelly voice, current news figures do more emoting than you’d see in a Grade B movie. I think it’s called letting the reporter put his or her own “passion” into the story.

Well, I, for one, don’t need my news leavened with somebody else’s passion. Just give me the facts and let me decide whether I want to get passionate about what I have heard or read. But get the facts first, please. Not many news consumers remember who broke a story first, but all of us remember who screwed up a story.

It’s awful enough that nearly 1,000 people lost their lives in the recent Gulf hurricanes, let alone being informed that the death toll would be 10 times that number.  No wonder the news profession has sunk to such a low ebb in the opinions of many people.

Walter Cronkite, where are you when we need you so badly?

Rules for 2006
By Mitch Jayne

I’m trying to remember a few rules in this year of 2006, which might come in handy. They are the same rules I have tried to remember in nearly every year previous, with varying luck and you’d think I would have mastered them by now. But as several generations of old philosophers have pointed out to us, it’s always the small things that elude humans.

For example, “turn the bottle, not the cork” is a rule older than written history but it’s way too simple a principle to give mind room. I had to have a kid remind me that this is simple physics. I expect most of us will continue to try to turn the little hub instead of the big wheel until corks become extinct or we all die out. It’s human nature.

Long before filters were added to cigarettes, I watched my dad tamp down the tobacco on the end he intended to puff on so grains wouldn’t get in his mouth. He almost invariably went to talking during this careful process and lit the end he’d just packed, which, as a child, intrigued me. Kids are better than adults at seeing what makes no sense, being used to learning. The old saying that “a burnt child shuns the fire” points out the fact that adults, on the other hand, will find fifty ways to burn, scald and roast parts of their anatomy all their lives.

Now, after 60 years of watching myself light the filter end of cigarettes, I realize that the simple rules are easiest to break. Rules like: use your legs to lift, not your back; pull the plug, not the electric cord; put your eye glasses where you can find them without your eye glasses; check the toilet paper roll before – not after – you’re seated; heat the stuck jar lid not the jar, to loosen it; light a fire from the bottom, not the top. The low joist you forgot to duck going down the basement stairs will still be there on your way up. A lawnmower can throw a rock farther than you can, and the clothesline you chinned yourself on mowing under it is probably not going to move.

What a lot we humans have to remember, and usually in inverse proportion to it’s importance. We all know, for example, that we will find a lost tool when we don’t need it, and that colored duct tape is not better for any purpose but finding the tape in the first place. We also know that a nail is a small target for a hammer, but continually let our brain select a bigger one like a thumb. Looks like we’d have instinct to learn the rules.

All this to remind you that when most of us, if asked, would say that peace on earth is a good idea, we still can’t even remember how to get a cork out of a jug that’s already been opened, much less figure out peace. Maybe somebody should ask a good-natured little kid how he’d do it.