Looking Beyond the Hype

The new obsession is Gina Grant. Before Gina came into the picture, we were obsessed (and we still are) with O.J. Simpson. These are the people and the issues that everyone talks about, writes about and with which their thoughts are preoccupied. If these are the "big" issues of the 1990s, then we must be living in a pretty sad time.

Over lunch last week, my friend was telling me how she had just been to Gov Docs and was reading the headlines of The Crimson of 25 years ago for her Vietnam class. She could not stop talking about all the interesting stuff she had read about and the great quality of writing she had seen. She was most impressed with the personal passion and strong conviction with which she felt the writers presented their arguments. We began having a serious discussion about America's role in the Vietnam War, and about the sexual revolution. But that was last week. This week, she read The Crimson of Friday, April 14. And so at lunch we had a serious discussion about how Kirkland House should have a larger juice selection.

Where is the passion in today's journalism that was so prevalent 25 years ago? Are there no "real" issues like the ones that were so important in the 1960s and 1970s? Perhaps we should face the reality that back then, times were more exciting: the sexual revolution, race riots and of course, the Vietnam War. Not enough could be said in those times about those issues. So many different and unique insights and perspectives were given by journalists that people actually enjoyed reading about the same issues over and over again.

Journalism was important and passionate then because these ideas and ideologies were so fresh. But sex and promiscuity are not new in our society. Although many scars remain, the Vietnam War is over and done with. One cannot convincingly argue that there is no racism in the world, but journalists are unwilling to discuss a subject which is felt by many to be mundane. This leads me to believe that the lack of strong and impactful journalism is due to a lack of strong and impactful issues.

Understandably, journalists resort to writing about the people and the things that seem to be important in their time, like Gina Grant and O.J. Simpson. And it should not be ignored that these are in fact important and provocative issues: after all, the Simpson affair is probably the biggest and most influential trial in legal history. The question of whether or not a high school student convicted of killing her mother should attend Harvard is certainly a question that affects Harvard students and faculty quite strongly.

Journalists rarely go beyond the recognition of the obvious effects of these affairs. Contrary to the 1960s and 1970s, we do not dig deep into the "why's" and the "how's" of what we feel and what this all means for our society. Are the issues of domestic violence and the strength of the family which dominate our culture in the 1990s comparable in importance to racism and war which dominated our culture years ago? Journalists and the rest of society seem to say no. I disagree.

It is to some extent the responsibility of the media to inform society about important statistics and information on what is going on. I want to read and hear about the prevalence of dometsic violence and the cases of matricide beyond what happens on and what directly affects this campus. We need to provoke students (who were such an important and influential component of the excitement of the 1960s and 1970s) to think, react, protest and write with the same passion that was felt by students back then.

As journalists and as young people, we have the potential to make the 1990s just as exciting and as historical as the 1960s, not because of O.J. Simpson or Gina Grant, but because we recognize that these two cases are manifestations of concerns and issues much deeper than we are presently willing to concede or explore. With this knowledge, we too can become excited about our society and recover what has been lost by journalism over the past 25 years--passion.

Nancy Raine Reyes' column appears on alternate Saturdays.