Dawn of Media revisited

In "Reading Media" (see the Back Booth) terms, stories don’t get any bigger than what has happened, and is happening, to New Orleans.

The Definition of News – anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo – is operating like a piano roll, continually in motion and constantly striking new keys in a massive concerto of the New Orleans blues.

And every new change adds in some way to the ongoing threat. As bad as the news has become, there hangs over the city an ominous threat of how bad it could get. It is one of those situations beyond the power of the media to describe, particularly the television media. I keep watching for one reporter to emerge who can put together simple words in an elegant way that shows an intellectual and emotional attachment to what is happening.

Instead, the words are pale and frustrated, and the reporters know it, and they flail openly in their attempts to find a passage to their emotions. They have very little practice for this, but I wish at least they were more intellectually equipped to rise to story-of-the-century opportunities. I wish Charles Kuralt was in New Orleans.

Scenes and stories from New Orleans provide the spooky opportunity to travel back hundreds of thousands of years, to the time of the formation of the Twelve News Values in the Toolbox, created by unprotected people living on the ground with survival their only purpose. "New Orleans After Katrina" provides us a living, instant view of the beating heart of the news that was born in "The Dawn of Media." Conflict, Disaster, Prominence, Proximity, Human Interest, Consequence, Information, Demographics. Humanity’s values of news are on display on our television screens in all their mute, primitive reality.

New Orleans, even more than 9/11, shows how helpless, how motionless, humans are, against the news values in their original strength. Conflict totally erases Progress, and Prominence cowers before Disaster. More than anything, humanity in New Orleans needs a leader. Always, humans unsure of their survival have needed someone who believes in survival and will move toward where he thinks it is, so at least the people will have someone and something to follow, and be reassured by the simple act of moving.

And always, there are humans preying on humans. We are watching a news story unique in its originality. Watching it isn’t easy, and it shows what survival is really like, no food, no water, no protection, no direction, with violence all around. It is a unique opportunity for anyone curious about how to read media, to witness media where it originated, with humanity locked in its eternal battle to survive.