Did you hear the big news?

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Note from a World Watcher - Criticism of media coverage of popular and important topics

Serious newspapers don't often run banner headlines in 96-point type. Only a few events in the past century have warranted such attention: the end of World War II, the Kennedy assassination, the Moon landing.

On January 18, 2004, a story broke that ranks in importance at least with those giant events and may ultimately prove more momentous than any of them. It didn't get a huge banner, though. In many papers and newscasts, it apparently wasn't mentioned at all. In the Washington Post, it appeared only at the bottom of the first page, under this modest headline: "Warming May Threaten 37% of Species by 2050."

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When a big story breaks, it normally makes waves for days. It spreads to the inside pages, op-ed pages, blogs, and talk shows, and is duly acknowledged by the late-night comedians. The fate of a story, in other words, is not just determined by headline size but by "legs." Is this a story that will stick in people's easily distracted minds long enough to be really marketable?

Sometimes an event doesn't get a big headline initially, but still has enough legs to score a media touchdown. The Janet Jackson bared-breast incident, witnessed by 80 million people on the Super Bowl half-time show in January, didn't dominate front pages the next day but quickly captivated the sports and pop-culture media. It provoked "outraged" responses from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Football League (NFL), both of which were shocked, shocked that anything so inappropriate should have appeared on family TV. Of course, this was the same FCC that has done nothing to stem the lucrative display of blood-splattering TV violence in American family rooms and has slavishly supported the continuing consolidation of the communications giants that profit richly from such violence. The NFL sits at the very top of this bread-and-circus economy, which markets ritual violence as the most desirable of male vocations, and which has never seemed very concerned about why so many of the athletes it rewards for their proficiency at such violence are subsequently arrested for actual rape and assault.

You might argue that TV football is just a harmless distraction from all the bad news we have to hear, and that we shouldn't read too much into it. But then, what do we make of the fact that many major universities have allowed football to become the principal thing for which they are known? How many of us associate the...