Not the Headlines--San Andreas Fault Warning

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The listening tube presents not the headlines.

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I'm Bob Woodley. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. When I was a broadcaster for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network in West Berlin in 1985, I said some stuff while I was a disc jockey that pissed off some people who were ranked much higher than I. So they put me in the news department so that I was forced to read from a script. Even though it was me who wrote the script. But I knew that someday I would get back on the air as a disc jockey. With that in mind, I found a story that I would keep to myself until my last day as a reporter and then go out with a bang. And that's exactly what I did. It was legendary, and maybe I'll tell you about it someday. But my point is that all reporters have stories in their back pocket that they're saving for the right moment. Not every story is topical. Not every story has immediacy. Some stories have a timeless quality that will shine through today, tomorrow, or next month, maybe even a hundred years from now. As is the case with the latest doom and gloom story circulating through the networks. Did you hear that the San Andreas Fault is under more stress than it's been in the last one thousand years? Here's the first thing I want to know. Who was keeping track of it a thousand years ago? A thousand years ago, algebra was new, so I don't think anybody had advanced to the level of measuring stress on a fault line yet. Regardless, the media thinks it's important to warn us that there might be an earthquake in California sometime soon. Yeah. Thanks for the warning, CNN and CBS. Where would we be without you? Well, in the case of an earthquake, as far away from structures as possible or in the doorway of a structure. I experienced multiple earthquakes while living in Southern California, including the Northridge quake back in the early 1990s. That was a doozy. But I gotta tell you, earthquakes are my favorite natural disaster. I'll take an earthquake over a flood or tornado or hurricane any day of the week. The earthquake is the lazy man's natural disaster. There are no sandbags to fill, no windows to board up, no snow to shovel. You simply ride it out and see how it ends. If you're riding in a car, you might not even know what happened. That's why people drive off of bridges that collapsed during the quake. They didn't even know. So it must be time to break out the story about the stress on the San Andreas Fault, otherwise, it could have waited another ten or fifty or hundred years. We may have gotten better at measuring stress, but we're still no better at predicting earthquakes. Having said that, we could have a major earthquake tomorrow, and there would be people raising their arms in jubilation at the coincidence. So why then is this keep it in the box story all of a sudden becoming a top story? Maybe it's because the media has to keep us on our toes. After all, the worst thing that can happen to the media is that nothing is happening. With a peace agreement between the US, Israel, and Iran and Lebanon, along with the expected drop in oil and gasoline prices and all of the other price drops that come with the drop on energy prices, as well as the job gains and low unemployment levels and the stock markets at an all-time high, people might just become complacent if there isn't some impending disaster they need to be warned about. There was a time when the news simply told us what happened. You could turn on the news radio station or a television station at certain times and learn what happened in the world today. But telling us what happened doesn't seem to be good enough anymore. Now, the news people also want to tell us what might happen. Here's the difference between telling us what might happen and what happened. If you tell us what happened, you need to be right. If you're telling us what might happen, you don't need to be right. That's not news. Should the news warn us of an approaching tornado? Sure. Should the news guess at what might happen anywhere between tomorrow and a hundred years from now? Probably not. But we see it more and more. Too many headlines warn us of what could happen instead of telling us what did happen. Then when you read the story, you discover that the headline was misleading, a form of clickbait. That's not serving the public as a media outlet is supposed to serve the public. Did the San Andreas fault become at its most stressed in a thousand years because Donald Trump became president of the United States? Or is it because the world may be on the cusp of an unprecedented era of peace in a way that the world has never before seen? The American and Israeli attack on Iran after nearly fifty years of Iranian terrorism have resulted in a peace plan that also included all of Iran's neighbors because Iran was foolish enough to think that attacking nearby countries would provoke a larger conflict. It didn't. Now Iran is frowned upon by all of the most powerful countries in the world, except for Russia and China, who have gracefully refrained from getting involved. The world is on the precipice of more peace on the planet than we've seen in a long time. The only thing standing in the way of the most peace since Adam and Eve is Russia's war with Ukraine. That's the worst thing that could happen to the media. Let me share a little story with you.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Hey, if he says something smart, you can support the show from the homepage.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

When I was a reporter for the Armed Forces Network in Berlin, it was my job to write and deliver four radio newscasts every weekday, as well as one television news story for the 6 p.m. TV News. In order to do that, we had a former German soldier from World War II named Vladimir Benz come in every morning at about 3.30 and translate any stories from the local Berlin newspapers, primarily the Berliner Morgan Post or Dertagess Spiegel, and Benz, as he liked to be called, would go through the papers, translate them from German to English, and then I would write them in broadcast style and deliver the morning radio news. Benz had been working for us since the end of World War II and knew six languages. He read dictionaries as a hobby. One Monday morning I come into the newsroom at AFN Berlin. As usual, I ask Benz what he's got for me, and he's sitting there looking at me as if he'd seen a ghost. There's no news, he says. I was like, come on, Benz, there's gotta be something. He says I went through everything. In a city of two million people, not a single heroin overdosed, not a single alarm went off all weekend. There was nothing in the papers. So I called my boss at 5 a.m., Sergeant Gaylord, and I say, Ben says there's no news. What do you want me to do? There was a long pause. And I hear him say, Is this a joke? I said, No, sir. And he said, recap Friday's news. I said, You got it. Sorry to bother you.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

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Imagine if that happened all the time. Every once in a while, the guy on the six o'clock news comes on and says, Uh, everything's cool right now, so we're going to show photographs and video of nature scenes for the next half hour with some occasional advertisements. Enjoy your day. Seems rather utopian, doesn't it? The funny thing is, nobody would believe it. But it happened once before to me. And Ben's. He felt worse than I did, and I'm the one who had to call the sergeant. I learned that as a journalist, it's a good idea to have a story in your back pocket in case you need one. So when the media pulls out a story it could have saved for another hundred years, like the San Andreas Fault story, you might want to take that as a sign that most of the rest is under control and there's nothing to see. And if the earthquake of the millennia isn't a big enough story, there's always the reflecting pool at the National Mall. Find all listening tube content at thelisteningtube.com. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm Bob Woodley for Thou ad Infinitum.