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The Non-Story Story
"Nothing to see here, please move along"
It's a great quote from the old days of slashdot, along with "all your X belong to me" and "I, for one, welcome our new X overlords"
I loved those little memes, although by now they've played out their usefulness, instead turning into little social ticks.
But I was amazed to see this quote making a big comeback in the last few weeks.
When people got outraged at TSA's new naked scanners and groping policy, hordes of people showed up and said "nothing to see here, please move along"
When the recent elections in the U.S. changed the balance of political power political pundits on TV said "nothing to see here, please move along"
When Wikileaks dumped hundreds of thousands of State Department documents on the internet, the first thing I heard was "nothing to see here, please move along"
It's amazing the amount of non-stories that get passed off for news any more.
Perhaps it's just me? I know from reading other people's political posts on Facebook that it's easy to get caught up in some political cause or another, becoming deeply worried (almost obsessing, really) about the sea otters in Malaysia, or the role of hedge funds in world capitalization. Certainly there are lots of very small stories that people get worked up about that just aren't that important. And frack, everybody agrees that we already have too much cable news and the 24-hour-conflictatron. (Love Jon Stewart's phrase. It's a keeper)
But I would think that any of these stories would be important historically -- the tightening of security, the change of political power, the release of tons of classified docs. And I'm not talking about ranting about these things. God knows we have enough of that already. I'm just talking about trying to look at them with some sort of dispassionate clinical eye. These are important things that we should take note of, no matter what our personal opinions might be.
Perhaps it's just that people are very uncomfortable talking about certain things and just wish they'd all go away.
Trying to figure out how much security is good, and how much is bad? Trying to figure out what type of message American voters have sent? Trying to determine what is a beneficial release of secrets and what is a harmful one? These are all difficult questions, and they don't have easy to grasp answers. They make people's brains hurt. They challenge easily-held beliefs. There are no slogans or jingles to guide us here.
Nothing to see here, please move along.
That makes much more sense.
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