Editorial: The sexy truth about the American attention span

Frontiersman editorial board

One way to track public sentiment in the U.S. is to watch how stories move up and down the news pages, Web pages or news broadcasts. The media pay close attention to how news is "playing" among readers, surfers and viewers, and the news, like popular novels or other products, is often moved up or down on the shelf according to how it's being received.

By watching a story rise or fall in its placement, we can get a fairly good idea of what people are paying attention to, and what's important to people.

With that in mind, it's interesting to compare some of the biggest stories of recent years. It's pretty clear that most Americans like their news to be as simple, human and lurid as possible. As things begin to get tricky, complex and subtle, we begin to lose interest, and the story falls down the page. When Bill Clinton had an extramarital affair with a young intern, and then lied about it for any number of reasons that are likely obvious to the average person, the news remained at the top of the page for nearly two years. It was a simple story -- the sort of thing that makes a great movie of the week. It was like a reality show about sleazy couples doing trashy things and getting caught. Readers and viewers can figure that out pretty quickly, and they like that.

Right now, during a presidential campaign season no less, we are in the midst of special commission hearings to determine the reasons that lead to the war in Iraq. What's at stake here is nothing less than the credibility of our national security agencies and of the president's administration. It seems, for those who have paid attention to the tedious hearings, there was an alarming degree of either incompetence or of deceit at the highest levels of our government. If we could handle subtlety -- if our attention spans afforded us the patience to examine complex stories about things that really matter -- we might learn lessons that would help us improve the way our government functions. We might also find ways to solve problems that don't involve the deaths of U.S. troops whose primary function is to defend the United States, not to affect regime change in foreign countries.

The hearings are still going on, though the stories are on the third or fourth tier of the national news. The findings will be important, no matter what they are. Though it's not as exciting, the reasons we go to war are actually more important than the sex lives of public figures. We hope people will help drive the important headlines to the top of the page.