ASA May 2011 AN Column
Paul L. Doughty, Contributing Editor and Secretary

“Breaking News” for Anthropology

What fun! Springtime flowers, trees, birds and baseball arrived in Florida as I write in early March. It is hard to believe that another academic year slipped by. Beyond academe, stunning events occur on a daily, seemingly hourly basis. We are deluged with information, appropriately described as “breaking news” that often glues us to the TV screen. A small sample came via email from a colleague, Alice Kehoe, about a voracious Milwaukee sinkhole that was “eating a car!” At first I thought that her Wisconsin state governor did more than break the unions or be embarrassed by a prankster’s phone call.

Nevertheless, the car’s disappearance was simply a sideshow: many thousands had been angrily demonstrating in Madison, state senators were in hiding, and representatives of the “middle class” were occupying the state Capitol as nasty debates ensued.

That was a minor event compared to Egypt and Tunisia as dictators were pushed out of power, or forces in Libya were using mercenaries to retain power. The Afghan and Iraq wars had to compete with yet other events. My local newspaper featured grass fires consuming Oklahoma, bus passengers killed in a New York City accident, a coal mine blast in China killed 19 miners. Several deaths, rapes and robberies, and Charlie Sheen’s misadventures, were also reported in some detail. And then the “record breaking” Japanese earthquake and tsunami tumbled buildings and washed cars, houses and cities away, killing thousands and causing nuclear power plants to create their own headlines. The tsunami even pushed the Somali pirates and the Australian floods out of print.

This spring was a feast for bad news fans, whose preferred genre dominates the media. By actual count over four days, 62% of the all headlined items in my local newspaper consisted of bad happenings and of the remaining 38%, most referred to sports (“good stuff”) at 25% of the total news content. US readers are not alone in this proclivity as popular media elsewhere seems to have the same preoccupations. A journalism colleague reminded me, “bad news sells.”

Or is it that our civilization has a specialized “bad news culture” that functions to buoy the spirits of those depressed by the distasteful affairs and actions far away? People can feel and sympathize with the plight of victims, while being thankful it wasn’t them. Such sentiments induce some to make donations of assistance: by putting one’s left-over change in a relief fund box next to the restaurant or gas station cash register, any sense of “good fortune guilt” goes away.

A glance through our journals, like American Anthropologist, reveals a gradual increase through time in articles and books that analyze topics that might