DETERMINING WHICH media outlet has provided us the dumbest Martha Stewart coverage would be a prodigious task, but the newspaper in Norfolk would have to be in the running.
In last Saturday's edition, The Virginian-Pilot put the story of Martha's release from prison in a giant feature-page-looking centerpiece package on A1, tying it together with a headline reading "Freedom. A good thing."
Gaudy display copy highlighted "what she missed" ("the idea of cappuccino"), "what she wore" ("an ecru quilted coat and matching knit scarf, dark pants and boots"), and "what she said" ("It was kind of nice to have a rest from the material things").
Maybe I'm not cool enough to appreciate the paper's ironic approach to presenting this story. Perhaps I should have understood that the package's orange backdrop was a way of signaling to readers: "Boy, isn't this a bunch of cheese?"
But even if we assume that the Pilot's editors and designers were just trying to be hip, it's reasonable to ask whether a responsible newspaper should devote much of its front page to Martha's release, no matter how the story is presented.
After all, it's not as if she's the only figure exemplifying strong womanhood who's being kept under house arrest. Way over on the other side of the world, in a place called Burma (or sometimes Myanmar), there's a woman named Aung San Suu Kyi.
She's the rightful leader of her country, but after her pro-democracy party scored a landslide election victory in 1990, the junta running Burma decided it had grown rather fond of having absolute power, so it annulled the election and put Suu Kyi under house arrest. She's been confined to her home most of the time since then.
Suu Kyi thinks freedom is "a good thing," too, and would like to have a little more of it for herself and her people. Once, addressing those of us lucky enough to live in democratic nations, she pleaded, "Please use your freedom to promote ours."
That seems like a fairly modest request--and it's one that should resonate with journalists in free societies. But for too many American media workers, "freedom" is a much cooler concept when it applies to Martha than to the world's most famous political prisoner and 43 million other people somewhere in Asia.
After enduring the Martha spectacle, I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if the U.S. commercial media showed just a fraction of the interest in Suu Kyi that it has showed in America's homemaking maven. Would Suu Kyi be free? Would Burma be farther along on the road to liberty?
Our commercial media's implicit response to such questions is "Who cares? How would covering Burma help our bottom line? No one wants news about foreign places and people with funny names. We'll use our money to give Americans what they want, not what they need to understand the world."
Wall-to-wall MarthaLeave it to the fake news on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" to drive home that point. In a skit earlier this week, "correspondent" Rob Corddry reported from MarthaCenter 2600, a faux control room from which the "Daily Show" could coordinate its round-the-clock "surveillance" of Martha.
Perplexed by Corddry's whereabouts, "anchorman" Jon Stewart asked, "Rob, aren't you supposed to be in Lebanon?" To which Corddry responded, "Did you know that for the price of a flight to Lebanon, you can get a MarthaCenter 2600--or two MarthaCenter 1300s?"
That's how the network news works these days, diverting resources from important international stories to give us more and more tabloid journalism. In his new book "Bad News," former CBS News senior foreign correspondent Tom Fenton laments the downward slide of network reporting toward tawdry entertainment, a trend he says has been imposed by "corporate bean counters" who see news divisions merely as cash cows.
International news has taken the biggest hit, Fenton says. In the decade before 9/11, he recalls, "I had seen so many of my stories rejected, so many proposed trips in search of news turned down by executives more interested in furthering their careers by coming in under budget than in breaking real news, that I had almost given up."
In the mid-1990s, Fenton had a chance to interview some obscure Islamist lunatic named Osama bin Laden. But his bosses weren't interested, so he never met with the man who would become the world's Public Enemy No. 1.
While most "Daily Show" viewers may understand that network news is the real joke, the dismal truth is that most Americans still get the bulk of their national and international news from TV.
Multi-media fluffTo make matters worse, an awful lot of newspaper editors take their cues from what they've been seeing all day on the boob tube. So what you get is an amplifying effect; print journalists come to share the same assumptions as the networks about what to shovel your way. As a result, you not only get all Martha, all the time on TV, you also get her splashed all over the front page of your local newspaper.
And what gets lost amid the celebrity circuses? Last week during the Martha hoopla, two reports were issued that indicate some of what our media systematically underplay or ignore.
The Lancet medical journal reported that 10,000 newborns--nearly all of them in poor countries--die every day. Most of these deaths could be averted with simple, cost-effective measures such as tetanus shots for pregnant women, access to clean baby deliveries, extra care for low-birth-weight infants, and antibiotics for neonatal infections. The additional global cost would be about $4 billion per year.
Another report by women's-rights activists concluded that many women around the world are more repressed, more marginalized, and less healthy than they were 10 years ago.
That's all very sad, you might say, but why does it matter to us?
For starters, there's the moral argument. Most of us believe we ought to try to prevent as much of the suffering in this world as we can. To work toward that end, however, we have to be aware of the nature and scope of that suffering, as well as the range of possible solutions that might avert at least some of it. That's where the news media are supposed to help us out.
There's also the self-interest argument. Think about it: Are we really safer in a world where many women continue to be second-class citizens--or worse? (Consider Taliban-ruled Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia.) Are we more secure when there are vast swaths of this planet where mothers and young children die from easily preventable causes? Does the hopelessness that prevails in such places work in the favor of terrorist groups seeking new recruits?
Maybe some intrepid reporters can see if Martha has any answers to these questions.
RICK MERCIER is a writer and editor for The Free Lance-Star.