The next big news story
a SUIT column by Chris Jungle

I've been thumbing through Hunter Thompson's book Hell's Angels, and there's one thing that stands perfectly clear. When the big hoopla from newspapers and magazines came out about the rowdy biker gang, there were only around one hundred members. The articles back in the 1960s depicting Hell's Angels as the ultimate terror along California highways blew up their reputation even though there were just a few handfuls of them. After the media blitz, the Hell's Angels began to grow into their press. Making money for posing tough and maintaining a bad boy persona. That was over 30 years ago, though. Let's look at the present.

There's a girl named Louise Woodward I've been trying to ignore, but the news keeps putting her story with the rest of the headlines. I know people who have baby-sitters, and a few who have had their children watched for several days by a someone. Suddenly, if you slap the name 'au pair' on the title and one of the kids ends up dead, it's apparently now important enough for me to get updates on the trial and the aftermath. Do we really care about the fate of this nineteen-year-old girl? Do we really think it's a story that affects the very fiber of our existence, or is it just something to talk about while we all sip beverages and fight off the potential silence for one more moment?

Why is this a big story? What happened to the kid in Mississippi who went to school and shot some of his classmates? I don't even remember his name because the story has been put on hold. How does the news decide which horrific example of human existence to broadcast or put into print? By interest? How long does interest last? I'm guessing about two weeks on average granted another amazing story doesn't come along to bump it.

That's all the news is. Stories which get told many different ways until a new story can come along and take its place. Fortunately, our short term memories don't even stop and say good-bye to the story getting bumped off the broadcast or no longer finds shelter in the newspapers. Good-bye story about girl who had a child, killed it, and stuffed it in the trash at the prom. So long El Nino predictions, we just didn't make any sense of you, did we? When was the last time we had a really good chat about OJ? Or Timothy McVeigh? Or Tupac? We used to talk about them all of the time, and those were good times, weren't they? Standing around proverbial campfires and water coolers, thumping our chests, and saying "You want to know what I think about it?" With grins on our faces, we told stories related and unrelated to what was on the news, and time was killed yet again.

Well, I'm putting all of the current stories an a big warning. Your days are numbered. We've got the Terry Nichols trial going on now with the Unibomber trial on deck, and it's going to take something special to keep up with the fresh new thing. So Iraq better escalate things if you really want the United States to pay attention to you. We've drawn all of our lines in the sand, so feel free to step over them. We can read about the armed conflicts and bombings nightly. If not, Saddam will end up like the Jon Benet story and a lot of people asking "What ever happened to that Saddam guy anyway?" Kind of like what we did after the first conflict in the Persian Gulf. Oooooo, I haven't said Persian Gulf in a long time. Say it with me: Persian Gulf, Persian Gulf, Persian Gulf. Can you feel the intensity rising? Remember the nightly pictures of Baghdad shooting off anti-aircraft missiles, and scuds and patriots, and the elite national guard? Maybe the best news story is revisiting an oldie but a goodie.

If all that dies down and fails to keep the public interest, we'll have to wait for the next big trial, the next big congregation of people to say they want to be better than they are, the next baby Jessica to be trapped in a tube, the next Hell's Angels, the next riot, the next Tournament of Roses Parade, the next drug war bust, the next immigrant debate, the next war, the next stock market crash, the next election, the next big murder, the next next, the next next next, and the next next next next. The media will give it to you as long as you say you're interested.

Chris Jungle went from being 'the next big thing' to a 'never should have mentioned' in a matter of minutes.

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