A time and place for cute.

December 27, 2002

There’s this woman on CNN — Jeanne Moos — who I’ve never been able to tolerate. She does these terrible “quirky cute” human interest stories that were usually trivial but were also frequently insulting to the person or people she was covering. (here she puts a live rabbit in a contrabass saxaphone. Why? It’s cute. People like her are the reason I stopped watching news on television.

Unfortunately, that kind of reporting has infected the Washington Post. In today’s edition, a flowery sacchrine account of a man deported because local police thought he was the Beltway Sniper. The flowery, heartrending, poetic language mask the real issues nicely.

The village he is from, Estanzuela, barely qualifies as even that. Here, in the center, is the church. Here, in front of the church, is the field where people come to sell the food they grow, except no one buys much because no one has much money. Here, spreading over hills and fields, are the little stucco and mud houses of a thousand or so people … Here is his mother, small and grayed; here is the school his father wouldn’t let him attend; here is the spot where he last saw his father, who, drunk again, went off to the town of Zacualpa…

More suited to Faulkner than reporting.

And then there’s this story about balding bears. The bears are mange-ridden for no immediately apparent reason. Lack of fur means they’re easy targets for bugs and other environmental hazards, and many of the bears have scratched themselves raw. The Post manages to turn this story of ecological disaster and animal suffering into something cute:

The bald bears have been compared to giant rats or bizarre, outsize kangaroos. But Cunningham said they seem to be generally healthy, aside from the considerable annoyance and constant discomfort of mosquito bites and scratches that have damaged the skin of some bears so much they resemble burn victims [... ] So, there is no way that Cunningham could think of the Ocala’s bald bears as ugly. Neither, it seems, do the other bears. Even the most scarred among them appear to be mating normally, prompting some investigators to reason that, looks aside, “there is someone for everyone out there.”

and

As the sun lowers, Marwick goes back to the roughhewn wood house he designed and glances out the window. Somewhere out there, a funny-looking bear is scratching a nasty itch and there’s nothing he can do about it.

This is journalism? Save us. There’s a time and a place for cute; unfortunately, the news section isn’t it. I wish we could treat serious issues with a bit more gravity.

Posted in Archived Unsorted