"THE" MEDIA

   Many years ago I was an announcer at a medium-to-small-sized radio station and I got a call from a woman, evidently (from background noise) sitting at the kitchen table with her husband or son.  Eventually I discovered that she wanted to know how to submit an announcement for a fund raiser being held by a community group of which she was a member, but she didn't know how to ask about it in so precise a way.  She framed the question:

 "Um, where do you get your news?"

   At the outset, I'd suspected that it was about local group announcements, since one break earlier I'd given a few on the air.   But I couldn't resist the humorous and philosophical promise of treating the question literally.  My response:

 "Oh, we just kind of make it up as we go along."

   There was laughter from her and a response along the lines of "That makes sense" from the other person in the room, but the reason it was funny (in the "recognition" sense of funny rather than "ha ha" funny) was, from my knowledge, this:  in a very minor sense it's true.  Not the major sense of the conspiracy theorist, but of the editor or the announcer on the shift.

   Our station subscribed to a national news service that sent a teletype feed to, not an actual teletype but a computer printer.  The announcer (as in the earlier teletype days) tore the wire copy off with a straightedge to separate the stories, then placed them in groups on the copy table according to story type: national, state, foreign, sports, humor and so on.  One chose 6 stories per news break from the 40 to 50 that were provided by the wire.  Therefore, I was in a position to affect what people heard.  I couldn't ethically change the facts or copy, but if I considered a story unpalatable in some way, I simply dropped it into the trash.  I could be overruled by the News Editor or Program Director but that was only about five percent of the time.  

   It was months before I realized that I was a living refutation of hundreds upon hundreds of stories and theories that a pundit once called "The Conspiracy Theory Of History", in which some small group's biases or agendas fomed the destinies of men and nations.  We as people certainly can be biased or act according to agenda or plan, but no one was standing over me as I trashed a story.  We can choose among news programs as to which style of delivery we prefer, but I was both amused and relieved to discover, as I made the joke with those callers, that the ominous and threatening uncertainties of media came down to making light of simple options in the news programs at a regional radio station in central Texas.  Our information and futures are under our control, not to mention that it's a free country.  If information seems tainted to us, we can either use other sources, or at least turn the station off.

4/26/2009