You know that feeling you get when you stop in Sprüngli on Saturday afternoon, look at the pastries, order one to go with your coffee, then, after you’ve eaten it and the waitress has removed the evidence, you sneak back to the counter and get a second one? Usually, you do it only when you’re alone; after all, would you want your friends, your spouse, to know what sort of person you really are, what piggy appetites lurk behind that calm exterior?
My behavior is similar whenever I watch CNN. I do it only when I am alone; because I’ve never had a television, I have to do it outside of my own home; and the aftermath is always a cloying sense that I’ve eaten so many empty calories that in a short time, I am going to feel faintly sick.
Over the years I’ve become accustomed to the banal excesses of CNN, the grim solemnity with which the newscasters greet every event, no matter how trivial. In the past they have irritated me, the way a whining child in the next train carriage will, but a week ago they went too far and pushed me over the edge with choking disgust.
I speak of the Egypt Air disaster and of those poor devils who fell, rocklike, to their instant deaths in the Atlantic. I first heard of it on CNN, only a few hours after the first news reports had come in. It was quickly told: originating airport, time, location, probable number of people on board. Left unclear was the cause of the crash or the nationalities of the dead. Because the flight had originated in LA and New York, it was probable that many of them were American, and the final destination, Cairo, was enough to allow an inference that many others would be Egyptian.
In the various CNN centers, the various talking heads, faces tight in that standard-issue look of grief and high importance that television news presenters, I am sure, are trained to adopt, repeated this paltry information, then turned things over to colleagues in different places, who proceeded to repeat the same few facts. Interspersed with this were film clips of a New England harbor, navy ships, and large swathes of empty sea. We also saw the facades of various airports, the unmanned check-in desks of Egypt Air.
Suddenly we were alerted that CNN, less than half an hour from now, was going to provide us with a ninety-minute “special” about the disaster. As news of this was given, we saw shots of dark-skinned people wearing funny clothing (you know, women in abayas, men in dresses) arriving at the Cairo airport. Many of them were tight-faced with the sort of solemn grief that the television presenters had been simulating for the past fifteen minutes. Some of the women, faces torn apart with agony, collapsed into the arms of the people around them. And, at this, I realized what we were probably going to get ninety minutes of: grief. Hey, look, real tears, real grief, people who will show us real pain. Let’s sit right here, sipping our beers, finishing off the second sandwich, and right in our own living rooms we can see real people suffer pain.
Even a week later those pornographers of pain were still banging away at it: Coptic mourning in exotic Cairo, even a Muslim ceremony right there on Nantucket Island. And because these were the relatives and friends of people who died, by gosh, those have got to be real tears. This is not journalism and it is not news. It is ghoulish voyeurism, an insult to those asked to watch it as well as to those shown. I’ll never stop going to Sprüngli but I have stopped watching CNN.