The Media’s Excessive Vatican Coverage: Is It Too Much?
Yahoo
The recently-released photo of a Reuters photographer testing his new super-zoom lens atop a roof overlooking St. Peter’s Square in hopes of capturing an image of the eventually-to-be-elected Pontiff waving from the Papal balcony was, for me the final straw in the obsessive coverage of the goings on at the Vatican. Seriously? A lens that rivals the Hubble Space Telescope is needed to get a shot of the new Pope?
It’s not the lens, per se, that bothers me (I’d love to own one—but I’m already paying one mortgage); it’s the wall-to-wall-to-fresco-covered-ceiling media frenzy that has escaped the bounds of normalcy. Even in this day of bizarre Bieber coverage, Kate baby-bump bulletins, and the breaking news that conservative scold Elizabeth Hasselbeck is (or is not) leaving the View, the non-stop standups from every possible location in Vatican City and the surrounding hills defy logic and sleep.
C’mon, media, face it; we know enough about the process: Aging Pope calls it quits, takes off red Prada shoes, flies off in neat helicopter, door are sealed, rings are scratched, cardinals collect, conclave assembles, they vote, votes are burned, no winner yet—black smoke (sort of)—repeat, finally a winner—white smoke—out on the balcony, waves, crowd cheers.
There you have it in 50 words. A one-minute lesson if spoken slowly. I got most of this from watching The Shoes of the Fisherman back in 1968, when news anchor George Faber, played with appropriate solemnity by David Janssen, outlined the whole thing in five minutes. Anthony Quinn as the newly-elected Pope from Ukraine lends a bit of intrigue that rivals most of today’s media guesses as to where Pope Benedict’s XVI’s successor will come from. And the movie takes just 162 minutes to get us from one Pope to the next.
But 162 minutes to the media covering a Papal election is a mere blink in the current grind of the 24 hour news cycle. So much more MUST apparently be told, and every news outlet in the world is just raring to tell us, and tell us, and tell us.
The swollen river of breathless reportage is spilling over into social media villages as well, as Dave Bauder of AP writes, “White smoke or black smoke, maybe it’s easier just to wait for a text message that a new pope has been elected.” In the meantime, it’s worth avoiding the hype. After all, why read the same handful of stories rewritten every day over the course of the papal conclave when you can just get it all by catching an Anthony Quinn movie on Netflix?
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