#26 | January 14 - 28, 1998  

by Abram Kalashnikov

A big story is the same thing to a reporter that a gold strike is to a prospecter or a sweet deal is to a businessman. When he gets onto one, he feels validated, titillated, and empowered. He's no longer just another loser looking for an angle. He's ahead of the pack, confident, someone to be envied, someone whose services are worth paying for.

It doesn't matter if the big story is actually a developing calamity. Bad news makes careers as well as good news-even better, in fact. That's why so many reporters were thankful for Bosnia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union played itself out, it provided a convenient new vehicle for campaigning for a Pulitzer Prize. Once enough Muslims were slaughtered, in fact, it was virtually guaranteed that someone there was going to get one-provided judges had enough "harrowing accounts" to work with.

Readers may not be aware of it, but no hack worth his spell-checker isn't conscious of his blood-lust for bad news. You try to hide it, but it almost always spills out of its own accord-particularly because editors tend to encourage the instinct. That's why one of the most common angles on foreign-news features is the "Things may not suck enough for you to care now, but they might soon," story.

Dave Carpenter of the Associated Press last week complied with a classic "Things might suck" story, about the emerging drug trading zone in Central Asia. In the piece, Carpenter uses a lead technique which I call the foreign-lead-o-matic, which incidentally is commonly used with the "Things might suck" story. The standard form of this lead is as follows:

"EXOTIC BYLINE TOWN, Exotic Byline nation-Far beyond the (obscure geographical feature) in the (unnecessary modifiers) region, where (a timeless obscure local nature phenomena) occurs (unnecessary modifiers), primitive and underfunded local authorities are fighting a losing battle against (a new and detestable social or physical contagion) which threatens our more civilized way of life."

The lead-o-matic never fails the hardworking hack; his editors will eat it up every time. Carpenter's version went like this:

"OSH, Kyrgyzstan-High in the jagged Pamir mountains, where wolves and snow leopards prowl a desolate no man's land, small squads of men are fighting a losing battle against a rising tide of opium and heroin sweeping toward the West."

Carpenter, a practiced wire writer, handles the lead form effortlessly, but he still has a problem: even after his scary, ring-around-the-collar opening sentence, he senses his reader isn't quite concerned enough about this whole Central Asian drug thing.

So to sell the story, he needs to up the fear level. Things already suck in the lead, but because the action takes place in remote Kyrgyztan, things have to suck beyond everyone's wildest dreams in order for the average American, who couldn't find Kyrgyzstan on a map in ten billion years, to care at all about the story. So he works his way to the inevitable superlative:

"But authorities admit the hauls are only a fraction of what gets through-an amount they won't even estimate.

"'This region is not yet as big in trafficking as Colombia or the Golden triangle [of Burma, Laos, and Thailand], but it has all the ingredients to become the worst drug trafficking zone in the world,' says Srinivasa Reddy, an expert in [sic] Uzbekistan for the United Nations Drug Control Program.'"

These quotes are the journalistic equivalent of borrowing on a bond issue. The journalist asks you to care now (and therefore continue to fund his career) by promising that you will care later. This is one of the oldest tricks in the business, and one of the big reasons why Western readers are so sensation-hungry-they've come to expect to be presented with an endless barrage of fears and thrills, even if the fears and thrills are only potential and not actual.

Frank Brown of the Moscow Times offered another version of the "We promise things will suck" deal in a recent piece on "Mountain Jews":

"After thriving for centuries in Azerbaijan, Dagestan and the North Caucasus-where they were vastly outnumbered by Moslems and Christians-and surviving WWII and 70 years of anti-religious Soviet rule, the Mountain Jews now face a growing threat to their existence as a distinct people."

Brown here does a good job of converting a story about timeless adherence to a religious faith-the type of story which does not sell-into a story of conflict, change, and "growing threat," the type that does.

A different and less inherently satisfying version of the "Things might suck" remote foreign story is the "growing threat" political story.

While the fear factor in the former is introduced mainly to titillate the bored Western reader's appetite for sensation, in the latter it usually gets wedged in there to nudge the reader toward a particular point of view. The result is an irritating corrective that most people dutifully swallow with their newspapers like the bitter aftertaste in cough syrup. Reliable Times of London bureau chief Richard Beeston did the honors in a recent story on a Yeltsin speech denouncing reform:

"If Mr Yeltsin makes good his threats and warnings to the reformers in his Government, the coming year could start with a political and economic crisis as the country slows its gradual move towards the free market and the Kremlin sheds its reformers."

Some reporters are in such a hurry to make things suck that they will endow inanimate objects with the power of terrified speech, as Adam Tanner of Reuters proved last month:

"MOSCOW (Reuters)-Russia, which for generations has blamed foreign armies and spies for many of its woes, said on Thursday a faltering economy was the greatest threat to national security."

Human beings will always have a certain number of fears and the world will probably always have a certain population of reporters. But when reporters increase the number of fears and human fears increase the number of reporters-now that's something really scary. And that's no blarney.