Flies

Lots of flies out there.

They are there all the time, but they have been easy to see the last several days because of the Virginia Tech carnage. Flies go to carnage. They settled by the millions around the television coverage from Virginia Tech.

The media is obligated to report the news, and the killings were a huge story: the worst massacre in United States history.

Unfortunately, stories like this in America have become so common that a media template has developed. Day One: discovery, bulletins, amateur video, people and police running, breathless reporting of unconfirmed information, general excitement, a breaking story going forward at breakneck speed, an afternoon media conference with no real information reported, event logos with background music showing up on television screens by early evening. Day Two: the shooter identified, nothing more known, investigation, national media figures arriving, Day One videos replayed, video of investigators coming and going, replays of video of investigators coming and going, talking heads blah blah. Day Three: day of mourning, profiling victims, ceremony, presidential visit, plumbing of social ills, influence of media.

In this story, Day Three has a twist: the shooter is media-savvy enough to send a press kit to NBC, and NBC uses some of it, infuriating millions and escalating the already obvious feelings among many that they wish the media would just leave. The networks are in fact ready to leave; they are losing money on live coverage as soon as the soap opera hours start. Coverage shifts exclusively to cable. By Day Four, just like the Super Bowl, the media starts to cover itself. The Times critiques television, worrying about network news anchors behaving like national grief counselors instead of professional journalists, calling it the “Anderson Cooperization of the news.”

The media deserves the criticism, and the growing resentment, in a public service sense. In the business sense, the media is only doing its job, which is to turn a profit. Any media organization, news or entertainment, must make money or it will go out of business. Thus the First Law of Media: The media is a business. At Virginia Tech, the media was obligated to report the news; it was also obligated to the First Law of Media. In the television media business, executives don’t want to spend money on a product unless they have good reason to believe the product will attract a minimum of 10 million sets of eyeballs.

Flies are reliable customers. They are usually dependable for a minimum of 10 million sets of eyeballs, or whatever the minimum is to stay in the black; it varies from media business to media business. The number is always manageable, relatively small. Ten million people is only three percent of the U.S. population.

There is a bit of fly in most of us. An attraction to the hot, bloody palette of violence, and its residue. Carnage, death, waste, trash, putrifaction. Personally, by the time I was 12, because of what I had seen in movies, I had killed hundreds of men, in the gulches, back alleys and foxholes around the 400 block of Poplar Street. Though I put down my weapons then, and my focus turned to girls, I continued to patronize fly flicks right up until “Robocop,” which was not about people at all, but about guns and exploding flesh. I am not that much of a fly. I haven’t been to a fly flick since.

There was “Robocop II,” though, meaning the presence of a sufficient repeat audience, and from what I read, the fly flick genre has enjoyed growth, as has fly material in radio, music, books and television. By Day Four last week, it was a hot topic. Was the shooter a fly? Probably, but millions of people are flies, who would never shoot anyone.

This isn’t a story about the shooter or the media. It is about the audience, and the media staying in business. You may remember “Lord of the Flies,” a short 1950s novel about this subject. The fly in a group of boys started to emerge when they were stranded on an island. At the end, two boys were dead and the fly psyche was about to prevail, when an adult showed up. In that instant, with the appearance of order, in a cymbal crash of symbolism, the savage, bloodthirsty flies reverted to little boys with painted faces.

They were returned to the orderly world, where dwelled, lo the irony, a fly population ominously growing in the adult world that prompted William Golding to write the book in the first place. Last week on Day Four, the inventory of present-day media fly products was the talking heads hot topic. What does that mean to us, on our island of 2007?