The fallen trees beat

One time freshman year, after a night of festivities, I entered my dorm room, struggled to get my eyes adjusted and emptied my pockets on the end table. I leaned toward the bottom bunk only to have a very Goldilocks-esque moment of discovering somebody sleeping in my bed. Then I realized the bed was against a different wall and I was in the wrong room.\nEmbarrassed, and wondering where the hell I was, I quickly gathered my things and made like a bandit for the door. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to make like a real bandit and deal with the police, or even the inhabitants of the room, because nobody ever woke up. No harm, no foul. \nThis memory (that I am positive at least 10 percent of the campus can relate to) came flushing back when I read a New York Times article titled “Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein.” Apparently 170 Swiss soldiers made like drunken college freshmen last week and wandered across the border to Liechtenstein in the darkness of night, each packing an unloaded, but very real, assault rifle. \nHere’s what gets me about the whole ordeal: Nobody ever had to know. Not a single Liechtensteiner ever saw, heard or even sensed the presence of the dreaded Swiss Army – capable of invading, killing, pillaging, removing splinters, picking teeth and opening bottles of wine. Nonetheless, there is the story on the main page of the New York Times’ Web site. \nIt begs the question: If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it belong in the New York Times?\nThere seems to be a growing presence of stories about (ultimately) nothing finding their way into the “news.” Sports take the cake in this category with their “So-and-so still not traded” headlines that might as well say, “Nothing has changed, but don’t forget that you learned nothing first, right here, on ESPN.”\nThe news is about action. It’s evidence that humanity exists, not that it doesn’t. For every story about somebody doing or not doing something that nobody knew or cared about in the first place, there is an accomplishment left undocumented. \nEvery day people die in Darfur. And every day other people save lives in Darfur. Now I’m not calling for daily Darfur digests, it’s just evidence that there are significant actions out there more worthy of the collective consciousness than nothingness.\nThis nothing-news only furthers the all-too-common conception that the media mislead people. We have a headline where the subject is a country and the verb is “invade,” but the story contains quotes that read “it’s not a problem” and “it’s not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something.”\nI understand the great Liechtenstein conquest of 2007 carries a certain comedic element, but so does a half-tanked teenager using the light of his cell phone to find his keys in a stranger’s room. And consider the parallel. Imagine the front-page Indiana Daily Student story: “Student breaks into room; only dignity reported missing.” Now that’s news!