No News Is Good News

4/30/2010

People who´ve known me for awhile know that I´m an outspoken critic of Local News in Southeast Michigan. While that hasn´t changed (especially since the last time I saw Local 4, they had switched over to broadcasting in HD, with horrifying results for the visibility of the make-up jobs of all the newscasters, men and women alike), I have to admit that local news in Nicaragua is worse to the point of being funny.

My host family watches two channels a lot: The Bible Network, and Acción Diez (or Action News 10). In an effort to spend more time with them, I´ve watched a lot of these two channels lately. You would think watching people claim that Jesus cured their incurable diseases, then faint onstage after being ¨Touched by the Holy Spirit¨ would get old after awhile, but for my family, it does not.

Nor does watching Acción Diez, less surprisingly. Its charms are those of watching a train wreck in motion when it´s reporting on its top stories, as well as plenty of minute, slightly-out-of-place details available for the careful observer to enjoy. Like the small children running around or staring at the camera in almost every interview involving women. The constant police siren blare that plays in the background, which is like Accion Diez's calling card. The stiff way the anchors stand in front of static backgrounds, for lack of screens capable of showing interesting graphics over their shoulders, as is the favored format in the U.S.

But these nuances pale in comparison to the bombastic headline stories. The cliché about local news in the U.S. is ¨If it bleeds, it leads;¨ in Nicaragua, ¨If it bleeds, you get to see the corpse.¨

Consider what I watched just today. The top story at 1 o´clock was about a guy who got shot in the head after a disagreement involving cell phones and the exchange of Mp3s in Managua. In Detroit, if this happened, channel 4 would be on the scene to talk to crying friends and family members, perhaps showing recent photos of the deceased, possibly showing the location where the crime occured after it was cleaned up. In Nicaragua, we were treated to a full minute of various shots of the body lying bleeding in the gutter, the cell phone which reportedly caused the altercation lying broken next to the victim´s head. They cut away to a police officer who confirmed, as we could all see for ourselves, that the victim had been shot in the head, and corroborated the report that the attacker had been attempting either steal the victim´s phone, or coerce him into giving the assailant some Mp3s. A brief shot back to the blood puddling in the gutter, and we´re back to the studio.

It made me wonder where the mothers' groups in Nicaragua were, when in the U.S. they´d have been up in arms about exposing their small children to graphic depictions of senseless carnage. Apparently, people here have bigger things to worry about.

The second story was even harder to look away from than the first. A thief had slashed a man´s knee open with a machete, and proceeded to rob him of whatever cargo he had been carrying. Now, in the U.S., this simply never would have happened (machetes aren´t exactly available at every corner store, like they just about literally are here in Nicaragua. What? People got a lotta weeds to hack through, and no lawnmowers), but if it had, we might have spoken with the victim in the hospital, who could have taken us through what happened to him, and maybe seen him take some painful steps while guided around by a hospital nurse. In Nicaragua, Acción Diez interviewed him WHILE HE WAS BLEEDING ON THE GROUND. Clearly either already on morphine or possibly having achieved that natural chemical high that kicks in after you´ve had something incredibly painful happen to you, the man slowly and lucidly talked about being robbed while using his hands to make his knee, which is attached to him only by a thin strip of flesh on its back side, talk, the way kids do with old shoes that have been worn out in the front, while blood ran out the sides of his wound. Only after about thirty excruciating seconds of this does the camera mercifully cut away to a shot of paramedics bandaging the knee, followed by a shot of some grafitti on the wall behind the man that reads ¨Jesus Viene¨ (Jesus is coming), before showing the man loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher, and then cutting back to the studio.

Political protests are more fun on Nicaraguan news, too. In the U.S., what I remember are a lot of aerial views of fires, where mostly what you see is smoke, and people milling around. Maybe you get a street-level view if the protestors are marching peacefully carrying witty signs. On Acción Diez, the Taxistas´ Huelga (taxi-drivers´ strike) in La Paz Centro León was broadcast at the beginning of January from the perspective of someone who seemed to actually be participating in said strike. So you got to see the shirtless man pour gasoline onto the front of the (probably old and disabled) taxi before lighting it on fire right outside the mayor´s office. You got to hear the mob of people chanting incoherently in the street. It felt like a rock could get hurled at the camera at any moment, ending the transmission in a burst of static, which is what would have happened in a movie. Nicaraguan news is a lot like that, but not quite that cliched.

Anyway. I have more relevant things to share, but I felt like this discourse was at least not too boring for the general public, and the topic continues to captivate me personally. And consequently make part of my brain crave the intellectual-type news stories I devour every time I get online from Slate, 538, and the NY Times.