The Less I Remember Maybe I’m Better Off
By Ray Hanania
Southwest News-Herald Newspaper Friday Nv. 8, 2013
JFK Tour of KSC (Photo credit: NASA on The Commons)
Why is it that I remember exactly where I was 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but I can’t remember what I did last week?
Don’t tell me… it’s just age.
I remember the JFK killing like it was yesterday. I remember where I was when Princess Di was killed, and I didn’t even care about her. And, I remember exactly what I was doing when terrorists struck the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
Isn’t that the problem with life? We remember the tragedies more than we remember the good?
I blame it on the news media. Yes, the big bad boogiemen of social mayhem, the mainstream news media. I’m not talking about the community news media, like this newspaper. The community news media writes about the tragedies but they also write about the community events that more directly influence our lives.
The big bad media do not. No. The big bad news media writes like a car driving on the Stevenson Expressway, which slows down to slowly soak in the tragedy of a car crash on the side of the road. Like a gaper’s block. Yes, the mainstream, major news media is like a gaper’s block. A group of vehicles that are slowing down and causing a major traffic jam so that the drivers can gape and gawk at someone else’s tragedy.
The JFK murder was a media gaper’s block, and so was the killing of Princess Di (You know she was murdered by the Royal Family). The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 were different, of course, but it was the media that replayed over and over and over again the planes crashing into the buildings and the buildings collapsing and the poor people who jumped to their deaths rather than die in the horrendous fires.
Behind the faces of sorrow that many in the media feigned that day, and the others, you knew this is exactly what journalists today live for.
Shouldn’t we have memories of the great moments in our lives and in our communities, more than just the horrific tragedies?
I admit, I was a part of that ugly media for many years, though most of my focus was on covering Chicago City Hall during its most tumultuous times. These days, City Hall news is as lame as its coverage. Boring.
The best thing that ever happened to me was to exit from the clutches of the media demon. I rolled up my sleeves and found real work offering communications services and freelance writing to clients around the world.
But the memories embedded in my mind on Nov. 22, 1963, and on the subsequent tragic dates, can’t be erased. They were hammered into us by a media that knows that blood and gore sell, and Boy Scout stories do not.
And there is something wrong with that.
What we should be reading about in the media evil doers (borrowing President Bush’s famous phrase describing the terrorists) are stories about who we are and what we do in our communities. Too many of the so-called controversies are worthless drivel concocted by hypocritically shocked “journalists” who not only exaggerate and lie, but also have lost the skill of writing.
Yes. Today’s big daily newspaper journalists don’t know how to write. The more their talent erodes, the more they must compensate with fabricated controversies.
I remember that day when JFK was murdered. I wish I didn’t.
(Ray Hanania is an award winning columnist. You may reach him at http://www.TheMediaOasis.com and follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/RayHanania.)
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