David McElroy

When I was a little boy, I was an avid newspaper reader. As far back as I can remember, I would scour the newspaper every day, looking at the stories, pictures and (especially) “the funnies.” It always amazed me to realize that there was exactly enough news to fill all the pages.

When I finally started working on newspapers myself, I found out the awful truth. Stories were savagely cut to fit the space available. If an ad size changed, a story had to change to fit the space left over. The news wasn’t the primary purpose of the paper. The ads were. The news content existed only to attract readers to look at the ads.

The New York Times’ famous slogan is, “All the news that’s fit to print,” but when I was an editor, we sometimes said our slogan was, “All the news that fits, we print.”

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’m increasingly aware that the explosion of available “news hole” for media outlets hasn’t resulted in better news for the public. Instead, it’s resulted in financially struggling media companies spreading their resources even thinner — which has produced shallow content with little original reporting and even less in the way of context.

Here’s an example. The local newspaper here is a typical medium-big metro newspaper owned by the Newhouse chain (with the same poorly designed website that all of the Newhouse papers use). I read a story there earlier today that’s a perfect example of news outlets just filling up space. Take a look. It’s called, “Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport sees less traffic in October, November.” Interesting, huh?

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As soon as Barack Obama signs the legislation passed by Congress, you can be arrested by the government on mere suspicion of “terrorist” wrongdoing and sent to a military prison — with no rights and no ability to demand a trial. Is there any more certain signal that we’ve become a police state?

The people who supported the bill claim that it won’t do anything other than formalize what is already recognized as a president’s power to detain people on mere suspicion. They claim this power is somehow needed in the “war on terror.” (Have you ever noticed that the things the government does starting with “war on” never end? There was the “war on poverty,” the “war on drugs,” the “war on terror.” Maybe the real target of these wars is us.)

The White House has said that Obama will sign the legislation, even though he claims he doesn’t want the expanded power to detain people without trial. In fact, he claims he won’t use the power. I assume he has good intentions on that point. But what happens when the next terror attack happens and there’s political pressure on a president to “do something”? It will be too late then.

Unlike many people, I don’t see this as a secret plot by Obama or anyone else to bring about a police state. I think it’s the work of people who believe they’re doing the right thing and don’t understand the unintended consequences that can come from their reckless and irresponsible actions. Their good intentions aren’t going to help you, though, when you’re being arrested and sent to prison indefinitely without trial — simply because someone made a mistake and thought you did something wrong.

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It’s a modern consumer gadget phenomenon. A company such as Apple will announce an updated version of last year’s product, and people rush out to buy the new model — while their perfectly functioning old product is still just fine. Why?

I’ve thought about this before, but it’s on my mind today because of a discussion related to Wednesday’s story about iPads in schools. A commenter brought up the question of why people today seem to feel the need for the latest of everything. Why is it that a 10-year-old car is unacceptable to some people, even if it still runs perfectly and has no other problems? Why is furniture that’s perfectly functional tossed out for something new? And why was that iPhone 4 from last year replaced in October with an iPhone 4S?

I suppose you can explain a lot of this by calling it an appeal to fashion — in consumer societies that are fabulously wealthy by any standard the world has known before. By historical standards, we have excess wealth in our pockets, excess time on our hands and excess choices to spend them on. I haven’t studied consumer psychology on this, but I have a theory about what causes people to replace things so quickly. Let me run it by you and you tell me what you think.

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