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| How much was danger really known? |
I remember in college, a mass communications instructor saying that big league ball teams got so much "free advertising" on the evening news broadcasts. It was the 1970s when a lot of academia pushed memes about insensitive capitalism. A fellow student who was ahead of his time, who did not buy into the faddish left-oriented thinking, spoke up and said "the reason those scores are reported is that people want to know them."
You might say the customer is always right.
I guess we cannot be surprised that the media got entranced by the sub topic. The fact that it was connected to the fabled Titanic made this, you might say, a slam-dunk.
So some people were willing to pay a quarter-million bucks to go underwater and never come up again. To be in a death trap contraption. To see an old deteriorated ship at ocean's floor, pictures of which are readily available.
You remember the movie sensation "Titanic." Several previous movies did just as good a job telling the story. The new one looked sharper because it was new of course. The one with a young David McCallum was black and white.
A surprisingly good one was put out under the Nazi regime of WWII, if you can believe it. I had heard about that for a long time, never thought I would actually see it. Then it turned up on YouTube. There is nothing immoral about watching this movie in terms of its content. Nothing suggesting genocide. There's a German character who is the hero, of course. Part of the idea was to point finger at the excesses of U.S. capitalism - greed. Maybe such finger-pointing can be justifiable sometimes. The Titanic's captain was under pressure to get to New York City under a certain impressive timetable, the historical account goes.
We all know that however much we all admire capitalism, it ought never negate basic good sense accentuating safety. Capitalism is nothing more than our economic system, the best one there is for ensuring an optimal quality of life. My generation began showing skepticism because we suspected our economic system fed into the unforgivable Vietnam war. Again, capitalism is merely an economic system. It recognizes the essential reality that people are motivated to work and develop systems out of their own personal desire for a comfortable life.
But spending a quarter million to go way under water in a death trap? We ought to exercise sound basic judgment if we value our lives. We should have exercised sound judgment to make sure the U.S. would not get mired in a war like in Vietnam. I would argue that it would never happen to us today. Our new media with the countless voices and meritocracy would ensure that truth and wisdom rise to the surface.
People climb Mount Everest. Maybe fail and end up like the dudes in the tiny underwater death trap. The big headline of this morning (Saturday) wonders if the bodies can ever be recovered. Were they just vaporized? Can we be certain their deaths were instant?
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| This is the prize |
Very often the media gets in some trouble for issues of taste related to how a tragedy like this gets covered. Oh my, there was a particular incident in connection with the sub disaster. It involved the "NewsNation" TV network. I am able to follow what is happening with TV news just by having YouTube.
So, I learned that there was an outcry against a particular means by which NewsNation was electing to cover the tragedy. This was before we knew the ultimate fate. I mean, before the general public knew the absolute fate - apparently the U.S. Navy learned of it long before. "NewsNation" decided to put a little clock in the corner of the screen to show how much oxygen the five dudes had left.
I'm sure the NewsNation people knew there might be some offended reaction.
Covering tragedies is always like this. Some critics come forward in an oftentimes holier-than-thou way. I came to appreciate this in absolute spades when the goalpost incident happened in 2005 at our University of Minnesota-Morris. As a media person you can never know when a situation like this will arise. I got up on the morning of the game in question with barely a thought about UMM football. My only knowledge was that the Homecoming game was that day and I had to budget some time to be there. Beyond that I absolutely did not care at all.
This was an extremely small-college football game. I sometimes wonder why fans are interested at all. Why don't they stay at home and watch the Division I teams play on TV? Well I can't explain all the fine points of human behavior. In my commercial media days I just had to react to those fine points.
If a couple thousand people wanted to fill the UMM P.E. Center and create an atmosphere like pandemonium for a high school basketball game, that's just the way it was. To a large extent I just pretended to go along with the premise that these games were so hugely important. In the media we are reactive.
The UMM goalpost incident became almost immediately uncomfortable for me because I was not there when it happened. I would later be upbraided by newspaper management for that. Stupid hindsight on the part of newspaper management of course. Everyone was thrown on their heels by the goalpost incident. An attorney later conducted a formal investigation.
For certain, no one within UMM actually wanted something bad to happen that day. So I'm not sure why the attorney needed to roll up his sleeves. It was Charlie Glasrud. Obviously no charges ever resulted. People had to give their explanations for why they didn't think the goalpost stunt would endanger anyone. So I heard the following: "We just felt the goalpost would gradually bend over first." Even if that's what you thought previous to the incident, you had to start re-thinking real fast when the students assembled on the goalpost bars and the bars started wobbling.
Limited images for posterity
We all got to see video of the tragic scene just one precious time, on KSTP-TV. It is not on YouTube today. I sort of wish it was. If someone had used their VCR thing to record the KSTP report, it could be salvaged for today. I'm almost embarrassed that there was so little photo and video documentation for posterity. The deficiency underscores what an out-of-the-way place we are in Morris, maybe a little desolate.
You think Moscow, Idaho, is desolate? The people who criticize Moscow ought not even come to Morris. We're an afterthought. Nevertheless, we have this outstanding liberal arts institution here.
Look out, the enrollment issue here might get worse. There is no guarantee it will get better. Donald Trump chased away all the foreign students. This handicaps us. Might threaten the institution's long-term existence. I can't rule that out. So be ready to answer for that, all you Bible-toting Trump supporters of the Morris area. Be ready to deal with the economic consequences.
Yours truly became an issue with the goalpost incident because I quoted, in the Morris newspaper, from an article on the ESPN2 website. "Websites" were still a thing in 2005 before "social media" took over so much. I got in trouble because of quoted material, so there's an irony there.
Put yourselves in our shoes
Did I realize the sensitivity? Frankly no, I didn't. One thing you all must realize about the media: we are often under so much pressure to simply fill space or fill time, in other words to get the job done. My chief critic argued in print that I should have "picked up the phone" to try to obtain more. Which prompts the question: How much is the local media even obligated to provide the labor for covering things in relation to UMM?
I remember thinking that the odds were practically nil of the UMM football coach wanting to answer his personal phone for the rest of the weekend. Obviously it was a weekend. These were the days when people actually answered their phones instead of relying on caller ID to see if it was someone they wanted to talk to. The new approach had begun by 2005 but was not fully the norm yet. Just like the Internet itself was in a rather formative state.
The rest is history
The dagger as far as my career was concerned was a letter to the editor from a Morris physician, Dr. Busian. The "Dr." prefix gave his arguments weight whether they really had merit or not.
Today I look back and feel I was in a no-win situation. In retrospect maybe I should have ignored the goalpost incident, just done whatever it took to "fill space" in the sports section. When all else fails, "fill space." The old Earl Wilson syndicated feature had the well-known purpose of being "filler" in the big city newspapers.
Any finger-pointing relative to the goalpost incident really should have been within UMM itself. No one intended any tragedy. So I guess we're talking negligence and bad judgment. No letters to the editor appeared on that front, ironically. But yours truly got hung out to dry. Within a year after that I had been cast adrift. My departure was not a pleasant experience.
Seemed such an unfortunate end to a career in which I had made so many sacrifices. Only a fool would think that a company is going to owe you any favors at the end. A business is an organism that ultimately looks out for its own interests, just like the company that promoted trips on the sub to see the old sunken ship.
The Morris newspaper was owned at the time by Forum Communications. What happened to that company here?
When I was a kid we could use our breakfast cereal "box tops" to get a little plastic submarine that we could get to actually "dive" in the bathtub. Neat.
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| Putting your life in the hands of this? |
The earlier Titanic movies had done the job thoroughly telling the story, I felt. Any further plowing into that would just be cynical, exploitative. We are vicarious in our movie seats. We have the comfort of knowing that however painful and tragic are the events on the screen, it surely won't affect us. We breathe a sigh of relief.
That iceberg is counting up victims still today, the way it looks. Hey you guys, you won't be able to spend any of your money if you're dead.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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