Opinion : What what matters most often does not in modern media

One of the ways in which modern America media fails is this: We spend way too little time writing about things that matter, and way too much time writing about people who don't.

One of my favorite media guys, Charles Osgood, declared his daily radio show an "OJ-free zone" during that celebrity media circus 16 years ago. We need a lot more celebrity free zones -- especially from the "mainstream media," those networks who boast of having the best news coverage.

But instead, we have our top news people showing the same clips of celebrities walking into court over and over during the same "news" show and asking pointless about their sexual preferences.

Most of the time, it's merely annoyingly pointless when our news shows focus on celebrities who have done nothing seriously signficant, instead of asking tough questions like "Why is there a water shortage in a state surrounded by an ocean?"

But sometimes, the results can be catastrophic.

And it starts with a story from exactly 10 years ago this month.

But first, a basic Journalism 101 Lesson.

I shared this with my Junior Journalists when we began our work this year

Remember these initials: UNIPACT.

They are the first letters of the seven factors that make something worthy of being labeled as "news." Every story has at least one of these; the best stories will have several of them:

Unusualness

Proximity

Impact
Prominence
Amount
Conflict
Timeliness

To briefly summarize:

Stories that make the news do so because, at least in the mind of the editor or producer, they are unusual (man bites dog), happen close to our audience, impact us, happen to someone we know, deal with what something costs us as individuals or taxpayers, deal with a disagreement, and/or are happening now.

However, it's easier to read (and write) about something that happens to someone famous, especially if someone famous does something really stupid. It's much more difficult to write about something impacts our readers. It's not as entertaining as writing about some empty-headed "celebrity;" and it -- to be quite blunt -- it takes more hard work.

That's where our story begins, 10 years ago.

March 2001. The same New York City Courthouse. Two trials. Two different cases. Two outcomes.

You probably heard about one of those trials, in March of 2001.

Chances are, you did not hear about the other one, until later.

Trial 1: Rapper Sean "Puffy" Combs (yes, I know: he changed his name; that does not matter now) was on trial for a shooting incident in which nobody was killed. He was not even accused of shooting or injuring anyone. But for that trial, which ended in March of 2001, the courtroom was packed with reporters.

Trial 2: Four men were on trial for killing dozens of Americans in two countries. They were members of Al-Qaeda. The trial, in fact, was called "USA v UBL (Usama bin Laden)." The four men were charged with blowing up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The trial lasted 76 days.

Hardly anyone noticed. Maybe a couple of reporters, four or five at most, were on hand.

It seems impossible now. But before 9/11, tell me: Would you have paid attention and not changed the channel or turned the page after you got to the words "Africa" and "embassy?"

The people who tell editors what to put on their pages, and producers what to put on their programs would have told them, "No, they would not." They would have been sadly correct.

During the rapper's trial, on March 1, 2001, the celebrity testified that it was not his gun the police had found the night of the incident.

During the terrorists' trial, on March 1, 2001, U.S Ambassador Prudence Bushnell, described the explosion and the procession of crying, bleeding people trying to leave the damaged building via the stairs. Bushnell said she could not tell whether the blood she saw and felt on herself was hers, or if it had come from the person behind her.

In the rapper's trial, the defense presented closing arguments on March 13, 2001.

In the embassy bombing trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Butler read the names of those who died in the bombing. No, none of the members of the media from the rapper's trial stuck around to learn about the Americans whom members of al-qaeda had killed. They were racing back to the office so they could be the first to tell a story that had virtually no impact on anyone who would read or watch it.

Dozens of reporters were there to hear the rapper; hardly any were there to hear the ambassador, or to hear the names of Americans who died while serving their country.

The bombing trial lasted another four months; the defendants were found guilty. Sentencing was set for the middle of September, just a mile away from the World Trade Center.

I don't have to tell you why the sentencing was delayed until October 2001.

We should be angry at the fact that the media did not pay more attention to the terrorism trial. It's inexcusable to fill a courtroom full of reporters for a celebrity trial that involved no deaths, and to ignore the trial of men accused of killing dozens and injuring thousands.

But the people who made the choice to send their reporters to the rapper's trial, and not the terrorists' did so for one reason: They knew which trial Americans would prefer to see.

It's essential that our media start focusing on the things that matter, and not people who don't. But as long as we keep watching the latter, we will not see the former.