Weak-end News
I’m just gonna hazzard a guess that I’m right about this, because it’s only a surmise. But if you are a fellow news-traveler who watches the wires regularly, you can almost tell when Friday afternoon rolls around on the East Coast. The headlines stop changing as quickly. By mid-afternoon West Coast time, it’s like every editor in New York has put up a screen saver that says "went to head" and has slipped away for a coupla elbow-bending cold ones at the local quafferia.
The reason you see a change of pace, I suggest, is that the first string personnel have ended their week, probably a little early, to lengthen the Friday mingle "hour", while the second string who handle the weekend duties get back up to speed on what be happenin’. And ya gotta know that people who start their schedule on Friday afternoon are usually not at the top of their game. Either they are working their way up to prime time, or are on their way down to overnights. It’s not a game.
Our Ameri-centric view of the world says important news happens during the business day, because that’s sorta the orderly way to do things. Few people call press conferences in the evening, for example, because the media won’t be there. Unless they find Chandra Levy, of course. Otherwise, all "newsworthy" events are scheduled for daylight, and early in the day so that the television assignment editors will dispatch a camera, if there isn’t any serious competition like cars in a ditch or picketers at "Hooters". (Schools, too, are similarly set to accommodate the flow of the business day.)
If you watch the flow of events, you know that late Friday is when the prevaricators and subverters issue terse press releases with important information obfuscated with flack-fellated corporate gobbledygook. These are the business problems and scandals — the indictment of executives, disastrous earnings reports, and environmental catastrophes. Politicians also dump their bad news out on Friday afternoons. They believe that by the time Monday rolls around, the press will have flogged the item all it can, unless there’s a massive if unexpected public response over the weekend. They hope bigger stories will draw attention away, and it won’t get mentioned on the Sunday talk shows.
Saturday nights are also a good time to get the bad news out, but there are limits. Remember The Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon order Attorney General Elliott Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox? Richardson refused, so Nixon fired him. Justice number-two man William Ruckleshaus also refused and was also fired. Robert Bork became A.G. when he agreed to fire Cox. It played out on national television on a Saturday night. And America watched. It took three hours to reach a Western Union operator to send a telegram to Senator Jacob Javits, calling for Nixon’s impeachment. Ahh, the good-ole days.
Now the Sunday morning news interview programs provide a modicum of new or newly-reiterated positions, but while they are often used for political bantering, most of what seeps out of the Beltway-cinched broadcasts is the same-ole tit-tatting party propaganda. Of course, only the faithful and sheep think this charade has meaning, but then again, millions watch Sally and Ricki and Montel.
You would think that globalization threatens the staid M-F/9-5 syndrome, but it probably doesn’t. Consider that the folks who make the decisions on the East Coast don’t bother to update their vision of the news, even when events change, unless it’s absolutely necessary, leaving West Coasters to suffer hours-old slop. Another strike against a world view is our own neo-xenophobic lack of interest in anything overseas that requires more than two points of IQ to comprehend.
The bottom line is that in order to remain informed, you have to search for updated, accurate information. The Internet is an excellent source, though it is still necessary to wade through the mountains of chaff to find the wheat. Which are often the better wire services like Reuters. And if you enjoy watching history written before your eyes, the story is out there.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.