August: The media’s Silly Season
Come August, the institutions to which the media devotes most if its time and toil are closed and gone fishin’ — the government, the schools, the courts, big business. All that’s left is the Red Sox and Tom Brady’s unfortunate haircut.
The British media, for 150 years, have been calling August the Silly Season, defined by Merriam Webster Online as “a period (as late summer) when the mass media often focus on trivial or frivolous matters for lack of major news stories.”
Two examples:
- As of noon on Thursday, Google News listed 2,940 articles — that’s right, from 2,940 different news outlets — on Brett Favre reporting to the training camp of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings.
- A scant 833 articles from 833 different news outlets reported that Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler has been chosen (through what rigorous screening process I don’t know) as a judge on “American Idol.”
Here in Boston, the fervor to report every last available detail and every response to the jail suicide of so-called Craigslist Killer Philip Markoff continues with Silly Season abandon.
Boston.com has created a multimedia package of 31 stories, five videos, a photo gallery with 27 images, and an interactive timeline. I count at least a half–dozen stories and three videos since Sunday. The rest is backstory and the history of the case — far more than I feel any craving to know.
The Boston Herald and its website have published 18 stories in just the past four days about Markoff’s suicide and the case. Markoff made the Herald’s front page twice (Monday and Tuesday). The only other person to make the Herald’s front page twice in the past week was Steven Tyler. Him again.
Every TV news show in Boston has devoted package after package, day after day, to the story. Today, Fox25’s website trumpets an EXCLUSIVE: three low-resolution photos taken inside the Markoff’s jail cell. The photos reveal nothing we didn't already know.
Meanwhile, the Boston Police Department reports that in the past week there has been at least one homicide, 10 non-fatal shootings and five non-fatal stabbings in Boston.
Of course the murder of Julissa Brisman was big news, and it should have been. That a clean-cut, high-achieving medical student was arrested and charged with her murder was so unusual that it, too, deserved major play. Markoff’s suicide on Saturday night deserved page-one, top-of-the-newscast treatment.
But story after story, day after day, when there’s no news? It is interesting to note that the Markoff story no longer makes the “Most Read” or “Most E-mailed” lists on the majority of Boston news organization websites. The public recognizes the Silly Season for what it is.
I suppose it could be worse. We could be British, the people who invented the Silly Season. Today, over morning coffee, we’d be reading about Ratzilla.
Follow Mark Leccese on Twitter at @mleccese.
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About the author
Mark Leccese, a journalism professor at Emerson College, covered Massachusetts politics, business and the arts for more than 25 years as a newspaper reporter, editor and magazine writer. He has More »Recent blog posts
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