"The Deeper You Dig, Any Story Collapses.” That maxim is attributed to Cy Romanoff, who ran the local news wire in the city of Chicago many years ago. …
In fact, most of life is played out in shades of gray. When you start digging into any supposed scandal you usually find that the bad guy is not all that bad; the good guy not all that good, and often the supposed villain is not really a villain at all. Such subtleties, though fascinating to uncover, don’t make for the kind of clear-cut morality plays that are the staple of the major news shows. The producer frequently finds he no longer has “a story.”From the article by Barry Lando, posted today. For me, as a sociologist, the "subtleties" are the story, the story of how things really work. How are we ever going to make sense of conflict in Ukraine, or the rise of phenomena such as Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain, or "Charlie Hebdo," or anything else that matters, if we have only black and white caricatures in our repertoire?
Nowadays, if you hunt, you can find investigators of subtlety — though not on prime time TV news. Analysts, not actors, posing sharper questions rather than looking for facile answers. I try to be one of them. And CounterPunch in one place to look for them.
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