by Gene Colllier
Gene Collier is a features columnist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

In the practiced, reflexive, establishment media, we do what we do because that's what we do. It is the era of Jurassic Park journalism, I like to lecture, in which we are all so taken with what we can create and how fast and how slick we engineer it, that the issue of whether or not we should do it gets kicked under the bed for the amusement of niggling dust-bunny academics.

Well, guess what -- it's time to crawl under there again, if for nothing better than to see how careless we are.

What are we doing, for example, flushing a Neanderthal out of the Major League Players Association, and playing his paranoia as legitimate social commentary?

Nowhere in the bonfire of the inanities that roared around the John Rocker situation was there a protracted media soul-sweep on the question of whether Sports Illustrated might have taken a hard look at the bigoted ravings of a rockhead relief pitcher and decided they were just too stupid to inject into the national discourse. National discourse benefited not by as much as one hypothetical molecule from Rocker's contribution, and the magazine knew it wouldn't. S.I. could deliver his hurtful twaddle, therefore it would. Should got kicked under the bed.

In other words, journalists have a responsibility to consider who is speaking. When I need some measured outlook on AIDS awareness, Asian women, African-Americans, or immigration policy, I generally don't go to the Atlanta Braves bullpen. Even if I couldn't get out of the way of Rocker's harangue, I'd still ignore it.

The upshot of Rocker's disseminated idiocy was that Major League Baseball ordered psychological testing for him. Will anyone order psychological testing for the media?

Only a borderline psychotic would look over the tape of a Florida TV station's interview with Pensacola dishwasher Mickey Hill, the mother of Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh, and decide that it should be allowed to escape from an editing suite.

"Yeah, it was a big event, but so was the O.J. Simpson trial," Hill began in a little blitz of imbecilic remarks that appeared in USA Today in December. "Every bombing or shooting is a big case. Plane crashes -- there's more people killed in a plane crash than was in Oklahoma City. I mean I do feel sorry for them . . . but . . . let's get it out of our mind."

Again, the mindless implanted in our minds, and in this case, telling us what to clear out of there -- one hundred and sixty-eight dead at the hands of her son, many of them children, and hundreds more hurt, just because Tim's opinion of the government wasn't real favorable.

Is this what we're supposed to be doing? Laying out Mickey Hill's perspective so that it can be felt in Oklahoma City?

The media, Mickey Hill said, "grabbed [the story] and right away made a big deal out of it, they ruined our whole family's reputation, ruined our lives."

I'm sure we'd plead guilty to making "a big deal" out of the worst act of terrorism ever on U.S. soil. While there won't be much hand-wringing over whether we should have thrown Oklahoma City into national briefs and filled with another NASCAR profile, we instantly recognize Hill's comments as so devoid of reason they border on the pathetic. And yet we frame those comments for mass distribution as though they were in themselves a worthy news story. Unfortunately, stories like this never run under a headline like florida woman just unbelievably stupid.

One would hope the legitimate media's insistence on trying to harvest knowledge from barren fields is not a response to the proliferation of "infotainment" venues throughout the culture. Even a subtle deterioration in standards doesn't mean we have to disassemble the profession into the set of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Maher, the ABC late-night celebrity maven, is funny and informed, but as the basis for Politically Incorrect, he assembles a four-person panel of the largely uninformed, or at least monstrously inexpert.

I'll admit to being intrigued by this format for a couple of weeks, but very quickly I got to wondering why I was listening to a loud treatment of, for example, the gays-in-the-military issue by the likes of Pauly Shore, Mary J. Blige, and one of those actresses with three names.

Life is too short for that, and that's what our audience has to think when we give them John Rocker on diversity, when we give them Mickey Hill on grief management.

I've run into some honorable backlash for this view from highly esteemed colleagues who scold me that we need to scour all corners for opinion, that it fulfills our mission toward some ultimate truth. But while such scouring is certainly a noble pursuit, that does not, can not, obligate us to spread the inane.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe