In other news

So. Did you hear the pope died?

I bet you did. In fact, I'm nearly sure of it.

According to TVEyes, a digital media monitoring service, the word pope was mentioned a staggering 8,321 times by the combination of National Public Radio and the major television outlets from Friday morning until midnight Sunday -- that's once every 30 seconds. Fox News alone mentioned him over 2,000 times. And according to Eric Boehlert of salon.com, Sunday's major newspapers were little different. The Detroit Free Press ran 11 stories about the death of the pope; my hometown Baltimore Sun ran 14. The Los Angeles Times had 15 articles on the pope, including an obituary spanning 7,339 words, 10 times the length of this column space. The New York Times ran 16, and Long Island's Newsday ran 41.

There were some times this weekend when the story seemed ever-present: Pick up a newspaper, turn on the TV, even sign on to AOL Instant Messenger, and you were guaranteed to read something about the pope. It was nearly impossible not to.

But I bet you didn't hear about the Republican senator who, on the Senate floor, rationalized the recent murders of federal court judges and their families, saying that it could be directly traced to the people's frustration with what he termed "political decisions," like those in the Terri Schiavo case and the recent banning of juvenile execution. And I bet you didn't hear about the latest large attack by insurgents in Iraq, in which 40 American soldiers were injured. The speaker of the House essentially giving up on the Social Security changes that have been a major issue for President Bush? Probably didn't hear about that either.

Of course the death of the pope is an important story: He is a vital figure for millions of Catholics, as well as a respected world leader, and his actions and decisions played a vital part in shaping the post-Cold War world.

But think about the word news. The very word implies that any news is, well, new. And that's what the news should be -- important and newsworthy precisely because it is something you don't already know. But after the actual death of the pope, very little happened. He was moved to public viewing, and that was about it. There wasn't, during the days of wall-to-wall coverage, an election of a new pope or even any solid information on who might be elected. There was absolutely nothing unexpected about the story, nothing new to report, and yet it somehow merited round-the-clock coverage, at the expense of breaking stories that continued to develop in unexpected and important ways.

The constant attention paid to the death of the pope, much like the media frenzy that surrounded the death of Terri Schiavo, is hardly surprising. "If it bleeds, it leads," is the familiar motto of many a news organization, and any of those organizations' ratings and circulation will be vastly improved by a story where the bleeder is someone beloved the world over.

Conservatives will tell you that the problem with our media is a pronounced liberal bias, but they're wrong. The real problem with today's news isn't a subjective and largely false notion of bias: It's money. Once, the important part of the news was the story; now it's the potential profit in the story.

It's cheap to cover the death of the pope or Terri Schiavo or the court case of Michael Jackson. Plant a talking head in front of the hospital or courtroom, and you're done. But break the story of Watergate? That takes months of hard work by a team of reporters dedicated to a story that may never pan out, and even if it does, may never get widespread attention. That's time news organizations are no longer willing to give.

Expansive coverage of a single important issue, like the death of a pope, is not automatically a bad thing. It's when that coverage comes at the expense of other news, news that can help shape popular opinion and government action, that we start to have a problem. And we've been seeing that more and more lately. Slowly but surely, that is taking its toll on our media and on us. It's why our elected officials, the supposed guardians of our rights and freedoms, should stand up and finally take action to reverse, rather than assist, the trend of media conglomeration.

Alex Koppelman is a senior individualized major in the College from Baltimore and former editor-in-chief of 34th Street Magazine. Rock the Casbah appears on Thursdays.

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