From Jane McManus:
With too many tragedies to report in such a short period of time — Newtown, the Boston bombings, Hurricane Sandy, the deadly explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant and others — there seems to be a desire to move straight from the tragic to the silver lining.I have nothing against the woman who found her dog in the rubble, or the few horses that survived a direct hit of an F5 tornado at the Orr Family Farm.
But in an everything-happens-for-a-reason culture, where happy aphorisms greet you every time you log onto a social media site, the premature positivity feels forced. I know polls constantly tell station managers that the public wants good news, not so much bad news. But news itself doesn’t have a point of view, it just is — when reported objectively.
But once the cloud of national news outlets descend and the news cycle is all day long, you can see how the same threads get teased from the wreckage.
No wonder Camus thought that America lacked a sense of the tragic for in the US, whenever shit happens, the news story rarely focuses on the agony and the consequences to avoid being about fatality, tragedy and its meaninglessness instead of survival and triumph over adversity.



