On the night before Good Friday, 1930, something extraordinary happened … something so remarkable and candid that it’s still talked about, 82 years later.
At that time, British newspapers didn’t publish from Good Friday until after Easter Sunday, so everybody turned to radio to find out what was going on.
On that Holy Thursday, a reporter for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) signed on and made this announcement: “There is no news tonight.”
Piano music followed.
True story. Sometimes, I wish I were back in 1930.
News stories will always be with us, and that’s good. They’re the lifeblood of newspapers, news magazines, TV, radio and the Internet. They satisfy an innate human hunger to make sense of the three-ring circus we call life, and to learn new things.
But important hard news stories don’t happen every 10 minutes. Some days, not much happens at all, but you’d never know that by watching the never-ending feeding frenzy caused by the Internet and 24-hour-a-day cable “news” programs.
For instance, a few weeks ago, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney remarked that he wasn’t worried about the very poor because the government has a safety net for them, and if there were holes in that safety net, he would work to close them. He added that he wasn’t worried about the very rich either; his biggest concern was the middle class.
I heard what he said, and yawned.
But for days, the airwaves were filled with “news” about how Mitt Romney was an unfeeling fat cat who didn’t care about poor folk. Is it any wonder that most of the nation’s brightest people would never think about running for public office?
Since time immemorial, people have been kidnapped, abducted, raped, molested and murdered. With few exceptions, those were local stories.
In today’s world, when there’s no “real” national news, you can always revisit the Laci Peterson case, the Natalie Holloway case, the Caylee Anthony case or some other easy-to-exploit, easy-to-speculate-upon tragedy. Hand a microphone to some windy “former prosecutor” and you’ve got yourself a prime-time hit.
Entertainment figures always have made news, but in the past such celebrities usually had some value to society. For instance, Ingrid Bergman was hounded out of Hollywood for having an extramarital affair and bearing a child out of wedlock, but at least Ingrid Bergman was a lovely, brilliant actress. The public had some rational reason to be interested in her.
But what have Kim Kardashian, Snooki Polizzi, JFK’s mistress and the other shameless self-promoters done to deserve five minutes of TV time, much less saturation coverage?
News abhors a vacuum, so when nothing important is happening, fluff fills the void. Even Brian Williams — an odd mix of pomposity and aw-shucks charm — now wastes time on the NBC Nightly News with YouTube videos of dogs ”talking” and bobbing their heads to the music.
A little piano music, please.
Danville native Kevin Cullen is a former Commercial-News reporter. Reach him at irishhiker@aol.com.
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