Is It a News Story or Not?

Song 223: This week's addition to the playlist is Just Another Movie by Timbuk 3, written by Pat MacDonald. The weekend before an election seems like a good time to post this song, even though it's not a presidential election, which won't happen for another 2 years. Jeff Larson and his buddy and former neighbor Craig Rigglesford were both big fans of the Greetings from Timbuk 3 LP, and both of them praised it so highly that I felt I had to get to know the record better. In doing so, this song quickly became a favorite, even though initially the social critique about TV replacing reality for the viewers sounded a bit exaggerated to me (it no longer does, and hasn't for a long time). In one section of the song the recording includes what sounds like a TV broadcast, with a moderator asking the question, "Who controls the media?" At the time I first heard the recording, in the mid-80s, the question sounded ridiculous to me, as I naively believed the U.S. media to be too diverse to fall under the control of any one person, or group of people. As a musician, I understood the basic hype factor of the music press, but it never occurred to me that the mainstream press essentially functioned in a similar way. The question from the song resonated in my mind, though, and then one morning in 1993, I began to understand the answer to it. At the time, I listened to a news station every day while going through my morning routine, and so every morning I heard a story about Iraq, as had been the case for years. Then, the day Bill Clinton took the oath of office, I heard no stories about Iraq whatsoever -- suddenly, Iraq was not news. I felt pretty good about that, and I sensed that as long as BC was president, there wouldn't be another Iraq war. During the next 8 years, Iraq would occasionally pop up in the news, but not like it had during the GHWB years. Of course, starting on inauguration day of 2001, Iraq was once again headline news every day, and I sensed that another Iraq war would happen within a year or 2. On 1/20/93, the question in this song started to take on a deeper meaning to me, and I thought about the track quite often as I began to better understand the workings of the U.S. media. Then on 1/20/01, I had a quick reminder about what I had learned 8 years earlier, and with the continued passage of time, the words on this recording make even more sense than they did almost 3 decades ago.