Los Gatos Weekly-Times The media overplays events again and again By Carl Heintze If there's anything television likes, it's a "media event." And if there ever was a media event, it was Mark McGwire's 60th homerun, tying the record set by the late Roger Maris. It was tailor-made for media attention: McGwire competing with another home run king; McGwire saying the right things at press conferences; and McGwire looking like an American hero. The country needed something to watch besides a doleful President Clinton and a smiley Monica Lewinsky. But TV has yet to learn its lesson. Editors still believe a visual story needs repeating. Primed for the big event--the blow that sent the ball over the fence and into history--TV caught and repeated the swing, the trot around the bases, McGwire hugging his son, the rival clapping his hands mildly and McGwire's gesture to the Maris family. Even as we were treated to constant repetitions of Monica's hug of Bill, one of the few, maybe the only picture of them together; even as with the Challenger explosion when mindless repeats of the rocket's failure went on and on, so did we see the Big Blast. ESPN showed it four times in five minutes. We saw the home run from right field, from left field, from behind home plate. We saw McGwire pick up his son, tastefully attired in Cardinal uniform. We saw it from the stands; we saw it from the field. We saw McGwire and Sosa hug; we saw them at their joint press conference. We saw McGwire in a sleeveless sweatshirt at his own press conference, designed perhaps to show off his drug-enhanced biceps. As with the Clinton story, when learned people spent a lot of time analyzing Monica's dress and its supposed stain; when other learned people speculated for at least 15 public minutes on whether fiberoptic cables were capable of accurately carrying the president's testimony to the grand jury, TV beat the story to death. Hitting a lot of home runs is certainly something of note. It's hardly earthshaking, however. More pressing are Russia's economic woes, the Serbs' pursuit of ethnic Albanians and the Irish peace. But none of these make for very interesting pictures. None are clear, visible examples of good defeating evil or of mighty arms batting a ball into the bleachers. TV doesn't like these kinds of stories. They're not visual enough, nor mindless or entertaining enough. For all those measures are how the news gets reported these days, and TV editors have yet to forget that when you've got a good story, you keep reporting it simply because it was good the first time. Like the film industry, which believes if a movie is well received, it ought to have a sequel (raise the Titanic, and let's sink it again!), TV news seems to believe that no story ever dies. It just gets done again. This philosophy now extends to air crashes. The airlines are our safest means of transportation, yet every plane crash, at least in the United States, gets covered as a major catastrophe. Far more people die each year in automobile accidents, but one or two deaths at a time are neither dramatic nor visual enough for TV. And so as with Mark McGwire, we are again and again given boats bobbing around on the sea, divers, sorrowing relatives at the seaside, endless speculations about "black boxes" and piles of wreckage heaped up for mournful examination by the National Transportation Safety Board. Day after day. OK, guys, let's try that shot one more time. Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times. [ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, September 23, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.