Story of the Day: A Recipe for Sizzle

A common refrain of network news executives and their anchors is that they’d like to spend more time on substantive issues or events if they could, but they are forced to focus on news that matters most to their viewers. At best, this defense makes them enablers – akin to the parent who plies an obese child with Twinkies, Big Gulps and bologna sandwiches because that’s what he enjoys eating. 

Of course, the ability to shape what viewers deem important is largely controlled by these same news execs and anchors. Their audience doesn't naturally feel that a couple of people lost in an Oregon forest or another missing Caucasian woman demand more attention than a spike in violence in the ongoing genocide in Darfur, where women are commonly raped and then slaughtered along with their children, where over 200,000 people have already been ethnically cleansed, yet still no sense of urgency emanates from anchor desks. But when 24-hour networks and nightly newscasts saturate their broadcasts with the story of two human lives lost in a wooded fortress or one young woman’s disappearance – interviewing loved ones and friends, rescue workers, law enforcement officials, splashing sentimental photos across the screen and emoting every step along the way – they certainly send a message to their viewing audience that these are bigger stories.

Moreover, it’s not merely catastrophic global events like Darfur that receive little coverage; network news execs and anchors claim they are hamstrung from focusing on domestic issues as well. Not enough “sizzle” they say. Healthcare (gets more attention during a campaign year but inevitably returns to the backburner post-election). Poverty (ditto; and, at the moment, it wouldn’t even be part of the current political discourse without John Edwards). Education (see previous ditto). Yet, arguably, these three issues affect more Americans, more directly, than any other. And, like it or not, all of us – rich, poor and everyone in between – do have a stake in seeing these three issues addressed with a combination of innovation, pragmatism and candor. 

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert’s op-ed “Stepping on the Dream” shows, by example, why it’s more than the issue or event being covered; rather, it’s how it is covered, the substantive nature of the presentation and quality of context provided, that allows audiences (or, in this case, readers) to shape well-informed decisions or opinions. 

Herbert’s latest piece zeroes in on the shameful lack of government support for the college bound, or college aspiring, amid increasingly skyrocketing tuitions. He begins, “One of the weirder things at work these days is the fact that we’re making it more difficult for American youngsters to afford college at a time when a college education is a virtual prerequisite for establishing and maintaining a middle-class standard of living.”

You know, that middle-class that every national candidate and mainstream pundits like to discuss each campaign season, that broad swath of Americans re-anointed “the backbone of our society” every two years, in between their ever-accelerating extinction. So, right from the start, Herbert gives the context that makes this story vital and then proceeds to tease out why this matters to all of us. And not because he’s liberal – even if he might be – but because he supports his premise with undeniable truths that really have nothing to do with ideology. (Something of which his fellow Times columnist David Brooks seems totally incapable.) This isn’t a liberal or conservative issue.

Young men and women are leaving college with debt loads that would break the back of a mule. Families in many cases are taking out second mortgages, loading up credit cards and raiding 401(k)s to supplement the students’ first wave of debt, the ubiquitous college loan.

At the same time, many thousands of well-qualified young men and women are being shut out of college, denied the benefits and satisfactions of higher education, because they can’t meet the ever-escalating costs.

You want a recipe for making the U.S. less competitive over the next few decades? This is it.

Think this issue doesn’t contain enough sizzle for Americans? Just ask the millions touched by this problem. 

Along with their degree, most graduates leave college now with a loan obligation that will hover over them for years, maybe decades. Student loans have decisively overtaken grants as the primary form of financial aid for undergraduates.

Two-thirds of all graduates now leave college with some form of debt. The average amount is close to $20,000. Some owe many times that.

Herbert goes on to quote from Tamara Draut’s book Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead:

"Back in the 1970s, before college became essential to securing a middle-class lifestyle, our government did a great job of helping students pay for school. Students from modest economic backgrounds received almost free tuition through Pell grants, and middle-class households could still afford to pay for their kids’ college.”

Since then, tuition at public and private universities has soared while government support for higher education, other than student loan programs, has diminished.

Then Herbert crystallizes the underlying, self-defeating absurdity of such a system:

This is a wonderful example of extreme stupidity. America will pony up a trillion or two for a president who goes to war on a whim, but can’t find the money to adequately educate its young. History has shown that these kinds of destructive trade-offs are early clues to a society in decline.

It’s a statement that many – arguably most – in the mainstream media reflexively label “liberal” or “anti-war,” when, in reality, it’s just common sense. Moreover, it contextualizes the issue of college intuition while further contextualizing just one of the myriad additional costs of this war. Both, like so many issues and events in our country and the world, are inextricably linked; they don’t happen in isolation from one another – it’s just that they’re almost invariably reported that way.

Herbert then provides a deeper portrait of the deleterious impact that this not only has on the dreams of young adults but also on the progress of our country:

The kids who graduate with enormous debt burdens — $40,000, $80,000, $100,000 or more — face a range of uncomfortable and even debilitating consequences, the first of which is the persistent anxiety over how their loans are to be repaid.

I’ve spoken recently with a number of law students who have already decided to go into corporate practice because their first choice — public interest law — would not pay enough to cover their loans. Many students have turned their backs on teaching for the same reason.

At that stage of life, you shouldn’t have to choose between a job you would love and one that you would take simply because it would pay the bills. Talk about stepping on a dream.

There are also plenty of cases of students who have postponed marriage or buying a home or having children because of their college loan obligations.

And then there are those who never see a graduation day. There’s no way of telling what talents have been squandered, or what great benefits to society have been lost, because bright students who were unable to afford the costs have been forced to leave college, or never went to college at all.

In a nation as rich as ours, it should be easy to pay for college. For some reason, we find it easier to pay for wars.

It’s not left. Just right. With plenty of sizzle.

Stepping on the Dream, by Bob Herbert
The New York Times

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A Recipe for Sizzle