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A ruinous rumination on media matters

By Ed Goldman

In the media , “L.A.” doesn’t only stand for Los Angeles—or even, without the periods, as the postal abbreviation for Louisiana. It also means “local angle.”

When I worked for newspapers (you remember those) I was frequently assigned to write a local-angle story that would accompany a national or even global one. This meant that if the stock market crashed into smithereens, whatever those are, my job would be to find a neighborhood mom-and-pop store and interview the owners about how that big story was affecting them. Often, not at all.

It’s one of the reasons we love and hate the news business. Another is Tucker Carlson but we’ll save that for a future column.

In the meantime, even more obnoxious than Carlson has been the local-angle coverage of the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the commendably rapid apprehension of his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione. While Mangione was still eluding capture, news networks began flooding us with stories about how fed up so many people are with the insurance industry. Excuse me?

I half-expect that in the coming days some disgruntled customers who bought whole-life insurance—as an “investment instrument,” poor souls—will begin to extol Mangione as a latter-day Robin Hood. This is what people did in the 1930s when bank-robbers Bonnie and Clyde Barrow gunned their way through the Depression Era south before being cut down in the clichéd (but accurate) descriptor “hail of bullets” (reportedly, 167 of them; I’m guessing that once a bullet count passes four, it graduates to a “hail”).

But come on. Turning the Manhattan murder of a 50-year-old husband and father into a cry for lower rates on our home-and-auto policies seems a bit of a morbidly moral stretch. For example, I have no intention of harming the CEOs of the credit card companies who robo-phone me eight times per day (no exaggeration) when I fall behind in my payments. Anyway, whom would I target: a speed-dialing robot? That would be as useless as engaging in a conversation with them, which can happen when a company uses a voice that asks questions and pauses in anticipation of your answer. When you realize, about three questions in, that you’ve been affably chatting with an android, “Was my face red!” doesn’t begin to encapsulate the sense of personal humiliation, spiritual violation and other over-the-top expressions of outrage you feel. (Especially if you used the moment to ask the robot to coffee “after we’re done here.”)

Some years ago—specifically, in the 1990s—when O.J. Simpson was accused and arrested for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, someone started ringing my bell frantically one afternoon. The intensity of the visitor was no doubt compounded by the fact that I haven’t had a working doorbell in any of my homes for decades—first by fluke, then by choice. (There are few more gratifying sights than watching frustrated Jehova’s Witnesses leave your doorstep.) Meanwhile, my little dog, Camellia, who could see the visitor through the gauze curtain in our living room, was barking so loudly and incessantly I thought it’d behoove me to walk downstairs and see who was at the door.

It was a young, local-TV reporter I vaguely recognized and she was so apoplectic by the time I greeted her that she screamed all at once: 

“AreyourelatedtoRonGoldman?HejustgotshotbyO.J.Simpson?”

“No,” I said, “I’m not.”