More focus on the major news of the world is a good thing

The front-page headline in The Spokesman- Review on July 16, 2001, read: “Capital feasts on Condit case.” Remember Gary Condit and the missing intern from his congressional office? Three summers ago, the media were feasting on the case. When Connie Chung got the exclusive interview with Condit, the story led some newscasts.

Something positive has come of the tragedy of Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq. The media, and our society, no longer feast so ravenously on junk news. The Scott Peterson trial has been going on for weeks in California.

Rumors say that Michael Jackson hired a surrogate to birth him quadruplets. (He denies this.)

Kobe Bryant’s trial for alleged rape begins next month. And Martha, poor jailbird Martha.

The media are not ignoring these stories.

But the stories don’t lead TV news reports and are mercifully short when they do show up. Often, these stories don’t make it into the newspapers at all.

Junk news has been usurped by real news. Soldiers and civilians killed in Iraq. The mess in Sudan. The Democratic National Convention in Boston. The “9/11 Commission Report” became an instant bestseller after its release Thursday. No stained dress anywhere in the report.

A study by the Readership Institute at Northwestern University showed that the war has prompted consumers to follow the news more often and more closely, both in newspapers and on television.

The words serious and substance are synonyms for gravitas, a word that appears more and more in the media these days.

I believe that the words we repeat in our culture provide clues to what’s really going on. In the ‘90s, everyone was having a bad-hair day or dwelled in hell of some kind, such as Houseguest Hell. Feature stories often began with this cliché: “There’s some good news and some bad news. First, the good news…”

I’m a news junkie.

So I needed to test my gravitas theory on people who are not. Monday I met up with a moms play group at Splash Down in the Spokane Valley. My grown nieces, Jessica and Nichole, are young mothers who belong to the group that meets once a week at kid-friendly places.

Some weeks I escape the seriousness of the newsroom by joining them on my lunch hour.

The five play-group women range in age from 28 to 38. Among them, they have 10 children age 5 and under. The women all have college degrees and worked outside the home after finishing college.

Now they’re full-time moms or work part-time jobs from home. They do not have a diaper pin of extra time. They are in that stage of life best explained by a friend who said: “I put that house project down when my baby cried one morning, and I returned to it 17 years later.”

These women do not read newspapers. They do not watch cable television news. They get most of their news from other people or the “10 at 10” and “11 at 11” broadcast news segments.

I didn’t tell them the focus of this column. Instead I asked them their thoughts on Scott Peterson, the man accused of killing his pregnant wife Laci. They couldn’t quite remember which case it was and confused it with the current story of the pregnant woman missing in Utah. The conversation about Scott Peterson lasted about two minutes.

Then I asked them their thoughts on Iraq. The discussion went on for 20 minutes. When I revealed I was writing about the change in news since Sept. 11, 2001, they agreed they’d noticed it too, despite their spare media diets.

“Before Sept. 11, the news had useless things that happened here. When someone fell down on their skateboard, we used to hear about it,” said Deb Horecka in only a half-joking way.

“Now it’s more about the world.”

In the movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” Michael Moore puts down President Bush for being on vacation the entire August before Sept. 11. I loved the film but thought the vacation criticism unfair. We were all on vacation pre-Sept. 11, the 23 million of us who watched that August 2001 interview between Connie Chung and Gary Condit.

Now we’re more about the world. And this is the good news.