When a Mississippi school bus driver passed out from an asthma attack on a four-lane highway, two sixth-graders saved the day. Jackson Casnave, 12, jumped up to grab the steering wheel. Darrius Clark, also 12, worked the brakes. The two children got the bus safely to the side of the road, put it in park, and shut the engine off while another child (Darrius’s sister, Kayleigh, 13) called 911. Everybody’s safe. The driver is OK.
One could argue that, since no one was injured, this is not a big news story. I would say it’s a big news story because nobody got hurt. And I’d put it on the front page. Or, in terms of cable TV news, I’d put it at the top of the hour. Bump the panel discussion of political consultants and get me some pictures of these kids and some menacing B-roll of the highway.
Stories like this “sell papers,” we used to say back when selling papers was still a thing. But the news for the news here isn’t just that people like good news, it’s that we all need news that reminds us of goodness. Specifically, news that reminds us of the goodness that can happen when people — in this case, very young people — come together in a crisis.
Nearly all discussion of “political bias” in journalism is beside the point. It’s not about partisanship or polarization. It’s not about whether a cable news program has a panel debate with three conservatives and one liberal (Fox) or a panel debate with three liberals and one conservative (MSNewname). It’s about what gets reported as Good News and what gets reported as Bad News.
Right-wing media casts its dark spell on its viewers by training them to regard Bad News as good and Good News as bad. It teaches them to resent Good News for anyone other than themselves and thus to perceive it as a bad thing. And thus it also teaches them to view Bad News for anyone other than themselves as a good thing because, by some weird zero-sum magic, that must be what it means. This leaves its viewers mixed-up and miserable.
Part of the solution for such ensorcelled viewers is to help them reset and recalibrate with baseline Good News stories that even years of resentment-training won’t enable them to perceive otherwise. This school bus story is a helpful example because it cannot easily be made to fit into the zero-sum lie that right-wing media uses to trick its viewers into resenting Good News and twisting what’s good and what’s bad. Tell them about how a couple of 12-year-olds saved a runaway school bus and they will, for a moment, be happy for other people and happy about other people. They will, for a moment, and for the first moment in a long time, feel allowed to be happy.
And then you have a chance to build on that by telling them about, say, a school-lunch program that feeds kids. The momentary reconnection to their neighbors that they felt when hearing the school bus story might possibly make them ever so slightly more capable of recognizing that this story, too, is Good News, and should also make them happy. And they may be ever so slightly more receptive to the possibility that such Good News could make them happy instead of making them angry and resentful and miserable due to the perverse choice of pretending that the school lunch program is, somehow, Bad News.
In my religious tradition, the phrase “Good News” also refers to what my people regard as the very best Good News of all. The Good News — the “Gospel” — that Jesus of Nazareth preached is the same Good News that the book of Isaiah reported centuries before:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
(That’s Jesus himself reading from Isaiah in Luke 4.)
Jubilee is Good News. It is the Good News. It is a template for what Good News looks like.
Ah, but is it really? asks the right-wing “news” reader and the right-wing pundit. Life is a zero-sum game of musical chairs — a Hobbesian war of all against all –and you can’t have winners without losers. Are you sure that Jubilee doesn’t make you a loser?
Jubilee means the cancellation of all debts — that’s Bad News for creditors! Jubilee is Bad News for landlords and loan-sharks and payday lenders. And that means it’s probably Bad News for your 401k. So it’s Bad News for you!
“Proclaim liberty throughout the land”? Uh-oh. More Bad News. Better lock your doors because now there are all these freed prisoners and liberated slaves running around. You’re in danger! And what do you think is going to happen to your grocery prices now that those freed slaves have to be paid for their labor?
Also, that blind man whose sight was just restored? He’s probably gunning for your job. How is that “Good News” for you? How will you feed your family?
That may seem absurd, but this is how it works. This is how you train people to be so resentful and fearful and miserable that they come to view a poor woman from Central America picking stoop crops for 12 hours a day at a sub-minimum wage as a dangerous threat. It’s how they’ve come to choose to pretend to believe that anything good that happens to that woman must be Bad News for them, somehow. And that anything bad that happens to her must be Good News for them, somehow.
That’s perverse and stupid and bonkers, but it’s where they’re at because it’s what they’ve been trained to choose to pretend to believe. And so Jubilee terrifies them. If someone suggests good news for the poor and setting the oppressed free, they’ll rely on all that training and try their hardest to hear that as somehow Bad News. And they’ll probably try to push that person off a cliff on the edge of town.
Baby steps. First give them some Good News that they won’t find any easy way of twisting into Bad News, then build on that.
I’m not suggesting that we could quickly or easily fix this by getting rid of all of those cable news panel debates among political consultants and replacing them with more reporting on stories like the school bus story above. But I think it would help.
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