By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

I’m going to start out this New Year on a positive note. This first “To Whom it May Concern” of 2007 will be a harbinger of a year of positive and happy columns from yours truly, the turning over of a new happy Prozac-covered leaf. Oh, who the hell am I kidding? Here’s the latest thing irritating me, the dramatization of news.

You’ll have to forgive me if details have changed since I wrote this but some mountain climbers got lost and died on Mount Hood in Oregon and that is tragic. The pain being endured by the loved ones of the deceased climbers must be tremendous and the concern of Oregonians and people from the region around Mount Hood is understandable. The 24/7 coverage of the story by the national media is not.

It seems like national news correspondents, especially those on the cable news networks, jump at any opportunity to don their North Face parkas and report from rescue headquarters on the dangers of nature. I could get on a tangent rant on the danger of nature versus the danger of man, but I’ll save that for a future tirade. The national saturation of what is purely a regional story shows that drama and not news is the mission statement of most of today’s news networks.

How does the loss of these climbers impact the daily lives of people outside of Oregon? At the same time these climbers perished doing something they love, how many people died nationwide from things they couldn’t help? How many new medical advances, financial trends and global political shifts happened, that at some level will affect most Americans’ lives, in the same period of time FOX News was showing a computer model of Mount Hood with simulated climbers, looking strikingly like the pricing game “Cliff Hanger” played by contestants on “The Price is Right”?

The story is regionally significant and of interest to specialty magazines and Web sites focused on climbing and mountaineering in general, but to choose it above the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy, national politics and the story about Miss USA’s sex romps and underage drinking is a failing in the job of a news network. It might just seem like I’m upset that they didn’t use their same graphic abilities to better enlighten us to what did go on in that apartment between Tara Connor and Miss Teen USA, but I’m also upset the “gate keepers” of old have abandoned their posts and have been replaced by programmers better suited to developing programming for the E! Channel.

Those who decide what is and what isn’t news have a big responsibility to the nation and especially those on the broadcast channels that use airwaves held in the public trust. If they want to mention a story like the Mount Hood climbers in a news of the nation round up, I think that is defendable, but if that story takes over with pan-channel focus, they need to qualify themselves as drama and not news networks.

Every year there are hundreds of stories of local tragedy that do not receive coverage from the national networks. Why? The criterion of sexiness and setting are becoming as important in creating a newscast as they are in scripting a drama, and that is a bad trend and we the consumers are at fault. If the consumers of news will begin to demand a return to substance over sensationalism then maybe the pendulum will swing back and news stories will gain a foothold again in newscasts.

On a positive 2007 note I am happy that everyone from Miss USA to Rupert Murdoch keeping making bad decisions, so I have something to be negative about – and that is a positive thing.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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