The Good News Is There Is Bad News

How often journalists hear this lament: Why so much death and disaster? Why can’t you give us more good news?

Whenever such queries come my way, I knit my brow, stroke my chin and reply: Don’t be ridiculous! We publish too much good news as it is!

Think: What horrors have you recently come across in the Food section? Or Fashion? What about all those happy stories about people who collect stuff and what about those prison reform programs?

All right. I am being disingenuous. Readers are right. The paper is full of bad tidings. It has to be. They are the mother’s milk of the media, as necessary to news-hounds as mud is to pigs.

Whose temperature really rises upon learning that Europe’s finance ministers have loosened the system’s ties to the Deutsch mark? (That’s good news for France and England, in case you were wondering.) Or that Reggie Jackson has been inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame? Wouldn’t we really rather read about the recent arrest of Heidi Fleiss, Madam to the Stars?

Good news by itself is so frightfully boring. Remember hearing some years back about the Good News newspaper in England? It printed only smile-inducing material and was distributed for free? Dead now. Went broke.

I rest my case.

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It is, in general, the bad news that keeps me running out to my yard each morning to fetch the paper. In the safety of my dining room, I can feast on the misdeeds of others: Who is behaving wretchedly now? Will it have any effect on my life? I can pass judgment, shed tears, feel smugly superior--all for the cost of the morning paper.

For instance, I would rather sexual harassment not exist, but I very much enjoy the sense of outrage I experience when reading accounts of Councilman Nate Holden’s recent travails. (He has been accused of sexual harassment by three former aides.) Maybe some people don’t like reading about a politician’s problems--but I do. Did he really fondle and ogle those women? And was he serious when he asked the City Council last week to pay for his legal costs as he defends himself against the charges?

Gotta love it.

The Menendez murder trial is another piece of bad news that is captivating the city. Who is not fascinated by the story of Lyle and Erik Menendez, self-made orphans now throwing themselves on the mercy of the courts? Who does not have an opinion about their claims that sexual and emotional abuse led them to commit such a hideous act? The pull on our psyches is enormous: We want to believe in their defense, not because it holds water (it doesn’t) but because we do not want to believe children kill their mothers and fathers for money. It couldn’t happen to me, could it?

The outrages visited on children by parents is also compelling bad news. This week, for instance, hearts all over the country broke for little Jessica DeBoer, who is now little Anna Lee Jacqueline Clausen Schmidt, reclaimed by her biological parents.

Her would-be adoptive parents, Jan and Roberta DeBoer, struggled to keep Anna despite the fact that the baby’s biological mother changed her mind within weeks of her birth, and the fact that the biological father never consented to the adoption. Why did the DeBoers toss such loaded dice, considering the stakes? Would I have done the same thing? And how would it feel to be the biological parents, vilified by many because they have fought for their baby?

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When people complain about newspapers full of bad news, they aren’t talking about natural disasters such as the Great Flood of 1993. What they are resisting are the outrageous, inane ways in which people treat each other, be it bloodshed in Bosnia or no-win custody struggles.

The issue is not whether these things occur, but whether readers want to be exposed to them. Do you want to eat breakfast while perusing a news item, say, about the Washington D.C.-area man whose allegedly abused wife recently cut off a critical part of his anatomy as he slept?

No! said a lot of people about that one. I really don’t want to read about this!

Others--including any number of my colleagues--couldn’t get enough.

But you didn’t read that story here first. In fact, you didn’t read it here at all. This newspaper, saving appetites all over town, refrained from running the item.

We do have standards, you know.

That should come as good news.