Snow is in the forecast for the Mid-Atlantic tonight and tomorrow, and the machinery of journalism, on television and in print, is humming along. Images and accounts of the public ransacking supermarkets for milk, bread, and toilet paper cannot be far off. We have seen it all before.
Having seen it all before, I come to realize, is the whole point with local news, which is often less about news than a ritualization of the mundane.
Oh, when we have news, when an Episcopal bishop is accused of a hit-and-run fatality while driving drunk, or when a former Ravens cheerleader is accused of seducing one of her son's teenage classmates, the public will batten on it. But much local coverage is just as predictable and repetitious as the run-on-toilet-paper-before-the-white-death-gets-us stories that recur every winter.
You can count on it in all seasons. The people camped out in front of some big-box store awaiting the Black Friday bargains. The people in swimsuits or peculiar costumes dashing into the Chesapeake Bay for the Polar Bear Plunge. The people lining up at the post office with their tax returns as midnight looms on April 15. You have seen it all before; what's more, you have come to count on it.
This predictable local coverage is the journalistic equivalent of phatic speech, the kind of innocuous chatter intended to serve as social lubrication rather than convey information, small talk. The reader scans the paper, perhaps not looking beyond the headlines, and is reassured to see that all is in place and running routinely in the world. Then to the sports page.
Look, for example, at a typical homicide brief. Unless it is for some reason an exceptional murder, we learn very little about the victim other than the manner and location of the death, and often nothing about the perpetrator beyond a description so sketchy that it could be applied to hundreds, even thousands, of people. What the story conveys to the reader is (a) Baltimore is as violent today as it was yesterday, (b) the killing took place in the kind of place where killings in Baltimore usually take place, (c) the police are doing what they can to combat crime, and (d) the world has not shifted on its axis.
But if something genuinely interesting should happen, we'll happily tell you about that, too.