Did you notice the frankly-religious component of the evening news broadcasts on Thursday night, when all three anchors were in Minneapolis? Brian Williams choked up as he spoke of the "expired souls" who were under water, then gave what we used to call a "soul shake" to a Mpls Fire official, congratulating midwesterners for being so strong and midwestern. Katie Couric ended her broadcast with a homily on Why it happened to these people, the same god-works-in-mysterious-ways note hit by Charlie Gibson when he did a take on Thornton Wilder’s classic about a similar episode, The Bridge Over the San Luis Rey.
My first response to such open religiosity is, Just the facts. In a complex, gripping story about infrastructure, do we really need our anchors talking about unseen forces? Since when are the dead "expired souls"? Why are reporters wool-gathering about fate? My next response is, We must want this from them, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it. Television has collapsed the world. And evidently this is what now passes for a sense of community: the feeling when watching the nightly news that we are all Americans. Praise the airwaves.
