February 21, 2002
Two sporting events have been in the news lately, and not so much for the sports themselves but for things unrelated to the playing of the games.
When a big event happens, the news business generates two types of stories, the main bar, the chief story that is an overview of what happened; and several sidebars, which is where details both important and trivial are expanded upon.
Sometimes, the sidebars become main stories in and of themselves, and that has been the case with the Super Bowl and Olympics, where the security surrounding the events is being treated with almost the same level of intensity as the events themselves.
I saw this on TV news channels that ran stories gushing about the security at the Super Bowl, and how tight it was, on the Associated Press wire and on new Web sites. Those photos or video sequences of armed men in camouflage fatigues, barbed wire, and people passing through metal detectors and being searched may have made people feel good, but they made me worried.
The Super Bowl seemed to be irrelevant. Sure, there were the sidebars in the sports section on game strategy in the Super Bowl and, afterward, analysis of the game. But the security aspect was the main event.
In the Olympics, too, we hear occasionally about favorites to win certain events, and their diseases and personal problems, but security seems to be all that matters otherwise.
I realize that in light of Sept. 11, security has become a concern everywhere, but I wonder if its being overdone. Granted, such views leave one open to accusations, and Ive heard more times than ever, You cant be too careful.
Yet the glorification of security seems designed to accustom us to the presence of armed and uniformed troops at public events, something that may enhance security, or may lessen it as well.
Back when the dot-com boom was big news, there was a class of business news story that some in the business dubbed wealth porn or financial porn. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, these are news stories that don't simply observe the positive cash flow into our Gucci billfolds/Kate Spade purses but make excessively broad generalizations and blindly venerate money.
Now, the hype has toned down as many of those executives profiled are spending more time with their families or testifying or taking the Fifth before Congress, and many of those companies and their employees -- have become history.
In the same vein, I guess we need to get ready for security porn, in which we get to see and hear about every security innovation imaginative humans can figure out and blindly venerate it as the answer to every security problem in existence, though such exposure might defeat the whole purpose of security.
Still, security is obviously good for business the security business.
I read once that in the 80s we were all supposed to get rich selling each other cheeseburgers. My corollary is that in the 90s we were supposed to get rich selling stock to each other, and I suppose in the 00s well all get rich guarding, or being guarded by, each other.
Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com.
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