Delivering the News

The other day my six-year-old niece asked me ... the question. You know, the question all kids eventually ask and all adults squirm over answering.

"Uncle Jeremy, where does..." she said as I tensed up. "Where does news come from?"

My impulse was to send her to her parents. This kind of question was meant for mother and father figures, not uncles. But then I thought, "Hey, I'm a journalist. I can do this."

So I sat her down, and gathered my thoughts. I wanted to come up with an answer she'd accept, but one that wasn't too graphic. After all, I didn't want to scare my niece by traumatizing her with too much detail.

"Well, there's this stork," I said. But no, that wasn't right.

"When a mommy story loves a daddy story," I started. No, that wasn't right either.

Truth is, I told her, where the news comes from isn't really as important as what you do with it and how you present it.

Delivering the news is a tricky issue that's affected by venue, angle, audience, viewpoint, opinion and objective. Not a lot of that matters, of course, if you make your news up, which a lot of people do. The Onion, for example, makes up news, which is funny. So does The Inquirer, which is ridiculous; The Times, which is scandalous; and Visions, which is nauseating.

A lot of people think The New York Post makes up its news too. But that's not true, because The Post isn't news. Papers like The Post are so slanted to one side that they are tabloids of only commentary and editorials, even in what are supposed to be the most factual stories. Yet countless readers rely on conservative papers like The Post, and liberal ones too, as straight fact. Somehow we're surprised that our president considers our international situation as "us versus them" when media rivals are using that same catchphrase as their subliminal slogans.

But who reads newspapers anymore? The real battle to deliver the news is on television.

On CNN, the news comes from everywhere all at once at a million miles an hour, which is necessary because the average American has no attention span, and producers know that all it takes is a dull half-second for the drooling news junkies to turn to FOX or CBS.

For CNN, the competitive edge lies in 20 different news tickers at once and stories that drag on and look at every angle so repetitively that you swear you're watching something different three days later, when it's really nothing new.

The reason CNN is so overloaded is its fear of FOX, where news and entertainment merge and blur to form a string of train wrecks the American viewer just can't look away from. FOX, of course, stands for "Fear Of X," with X being anything from terrorism, to taxes, to SARS, to what the plumber might be doing when you're not looking.

FOX sets up its stories so the news is must-see-TV. And because of the nature of today's society and culture, it works. FOX news is a smash hit and everyone else is scrambling to catch up, even sometimes sacrificing accuracy for time and ratings. But then there's the question of what matters more, the quality of your news or how many people watch your news, and whether the former has anything to do with the latter.

After I told my niece that, however, I paused and thought for a moment. I was a news insider myself, yet I was talking from an outsider's point of view. Not only had I still not answered her basic question, but I hadn't offered my unique perspective.

Okay, I said, this is where news really comes from:

News today comes in the face of an apathetic, reading-challenged, reality show-addicted, headline-only generation that only picks up the paper for five seconds between classes, if at all, and doesn't realize nor appreciate what it takes to find relevant news and deliver it.

But the news still comes out because of the hard work and dedication by a handful of staff writers and editors who commit countless hours to cover campus news and events, write up stories, and edit their nights away in a yellow eyesore of an office in the Student Union, with their best reward being merely the satisfaction shared with colleagues when the issue goes into print.

"That's where news comes from?" said my niece. "But why would any students do all that, just to deliver the news?"

"Well," I said. "They can't do math."