Oh My God! We're All Gonna Die!

On a nightly basis, you turn to the news, and the above is pretty much the headline you get. Okay, maybe it's a little bit of an exaggeration. But not by much. Currently the headline might be: "Oh My God! We're All Gonna Be Broke!" Congress is trying to pass a debt ceiling increase. And the talking heads in the news asure us that if they don't raise the debt ceiling, the U.S. will default on its financial obligations, the markets will collapse, government employees won't get paid, and, since the world will lose faith in the U.S. dollar, we will all by extension become poor. I suspect that instead, what will happen is that something will pass in Congress, get signed by the President, and within less than a month we will have all forgotten that we supposedly came so close to the precipice of economic catastrophe. By then, however, there will be another Crisis that will make us feel that Oh My God! We're All Gonna Die!

The United States is a country with a free press and a capitalistic mind-set. Our free press pays its bills by becoming for-profit institutions. Perhaps rightly so, no one wants to watch a news reader dryly recite the day's news in a monotone voice. Well, I guess NPR can get away with it (and I suspect the reason they can is because they provide an "alternative" to the bombastic bloviation the others provide). But most of the other news sources ramp up their stories to Crisis levels. "If it bleeds, it leads," goes the old saying. Such is the competitive nature of the 24-hour news cycle (actually, it's probably more like 12-16 hours, with the rebroadcasting of previously aired programming). If the news producer can instill enough anxiety in their viewers so that they'll stick to the news to see What Happens Next, then that producer has another tick in the Nielsen Ratings and more advertising dollars coming in. Those viewers can always DVR that episode of Dancing With the Stars anyway.

Such instillation of a Crisis or Conflict is common in fiction. In fact, many would argue that fiction MUST have a central conflict in order to even be called a story. Whatever the case, conflict is one of the main engines that make a story a page-turner/clicker. "I must find out What Happens Next." Turn the page. "Oh My God! The Character's Gonna Die!" Click the page turning button. "Whew! I didn't think she'd defeat the alien overlord and save the galaxy till the end." Buy the next book by that thrilling science fiction author.

I often wonder how close the news is to actual reality. News and fiction, sadly, have much in common.