When I first got into this journalism business, back in 1978, there was this wonderful cynicism that permeated the newsroom of The Milwaukee Sentinel.
We were all nice, optimistic people when the workday ended and we repaired, en masse, to Major Goolsby's to take the edge off the day. We were actually quite pleasant to be around. Lively, even.
But in that newsroom and on deadline, it was a completely different beast that looked back from the mirror.
It was a cynic.
It was a skeptic.
It was a non-believer.
The only belief any reporter had was that whoever he or she was interviewing for the story of the day was lying. Maybe not a lot, maybe not a mortal sin, but certainly enough to skew the story into the best possible light for themselves.
You were wary.
You questioned everything.
It was a trait that, over the years, I've lost, but then again, so has most of journalism.
And I miss it.
I especially missed it last Thursday, when a balloon went skittering across the Colorado sky, supposedly, with a six year old boy aboard.
There was a part of me that kept screaming, "This stinks -- we're being scammed!" But the rest of me wouldn't listen. A kid's life was at stake, wasn't it? Part of me questioned if a balloon that size could actually lift, as easily as it appeared, a 40-pound, six year old boy. I kept my questions to myself, though, as I wasn't an aeronautical expert. I thought, outloud, that the kid was hiding someplace in the house, scared out of his wits, in trouble with Dad, but who could think of something like that as the drama unfolded on the high def screens of Colorado?
Frankly, I couldn't conceive of a stunt brazen enough to suck the world in and create a new definition of "reality tv." Who could? I mean -- what parent would put his children in this sort of situation for potential profit?
I was as captivated by the pictures as you were and fully absorbed the manic energy rush of the newsroom, that insatiable drive to get it all on the air -- first.
And, yet --
The family pulled the media around by the nose and we let them do it. The Sheriff says he "used" the media in order to get what he needed out of the family. And we let HIM do it.
What this story needed, even as it unfolded so quickly over a few hours on a Thursday afternoon, was a blast of that old cynicism. Someone having the guts to say, "I don't believe this -- show me." To the family, to the sheriff. As it happened.
The instant news cycle doesn't often allow that sort of time to check, ponder and probe. In fact, none of that attitude cropped up until much later as the story finally began falling apart of its own volition.
Rather than question what we were seeing, we ate it up to rush it on the air, and spewed it out in the hopes of catching as many eyeballs as possible in the process. What we left behind, what we forgot, was the essential cynicism of journalism, the notion that "I just don't quite believe you."
We forgot that essential idea with a weather balloon. And we continually forget it with politicians and economists and pundits and spokesfolks, parents and cops and teachers and celebrities, reality tv and food safety and auto safety and sports teams and anything else that winds it way through the morass of the media and into a headline.
We take what we're told at face value. We certainly did on Thursday.
And it doesn't do anyone in society one damned bit of good.
