shouting loudly

On November 3, Malachi Ritscher set himself on fire near a Chicago expressway in protest of the Iraq war. Police couldn’t definitively identify him for days. A friend later got a package in the mail with an explanation, a will, and a key to Ritscher’s apartment.

The story hit the AP on November 26, and the headline was, “Protester Immolation Virtually Unnoticed.” You may have been unaware until reading this very blog post.

Ritscher posted his intentions and an obituary on his website. No matter your ideology, read both. The domain registration is paid through 2009, which suggests forethought but not particularly careful planning. (I would have paid through 2099 and explicitly donated the site’s content to the public domain.)

The story is remarkable, and he comes across as lucid and sincere. Reviews on the action are mixed, of course, ranging from worship (“I heard you, Malachi“), to regret (“more good to us alive than dead“), to cynical, partisan dismissal of Ritscher and the small hint of media coverage of his story (“AP: Lionizing an Anti-war Activist’s Suicide“). I, personally, am moved, but this post seeks to explore the media vacuum surrounding the story.

Many commentators have expressed outrage that the media never covered this story properly, yet I disagree with the standard explanation of partisan bias.

I have earned press coverage, working with a reporter who actually wrote the story, only to get buried because somebody more powerful wanted it buried. It happens. This just isn’t an example.

The TV news networks are happy to bury stories on social activism and they do so all the time to save room for ham-handed cross promotions of other media properties. Yet Ritscher’s death is orders of magnitude more newsworthy than a rally or march–and even basic activism makes it into the paper as long as the numbers are there and the organizations do some basic media work.

Ritscher’s story, however, never really broke. Even the Chicago Tribune let this story get stale with little more than a peep, a fact lamented by this indy paper story that helped bring more attention to the story. BoingBoing covered it on November 8, but the only major media reporters cribbing their notes work at the “tech” desk.

Partisan bias may play a role, but it is not a sufficient explanation for a veritable 3-week blackout. In part, the problem is that all media outlets have become addicted to cheap content.

(I’m also guilty, of course. How much do you think we bloggers spend on news gathering? Why bother when you can link? Why even read the rest of the net when there’s BoingBoing or DailyKos or Drudge? Newspapers rely on press releases and wire services, and local TV news desks have been known to plagiarize the morning paper’s news without so much as a follow up call to verify that the paper got it right. But I digress.)

Ritscher’s story took people-power to explain, and the reporters have all bein laid off.

The other part of the problem is timing. News cycles move on, and if it’s yesterday’s news, a station or paper would generally rather let it go than show up late to the scene, even if they know that it’s otherwise worth covering. It took days before anybody noticed that he was missing, and therefore it took days before the police (the requisite officials who can explain the story on the news) knew what to say about it.

If the media have to write a story from scratch (for large swathes, the AP story is like a cut-and-paste of the blogosphere’s collective coverage), if it takes patience to understand what happened, if it takes historical context–oh, and if it’s right before national elections–good luck. Because you’re news story just won’t be news.

Even if you set yourself on fire near an expressway in a major city to protest an increasingly unpopular war.

Now, that says something terrible about the news media, but it does not illustrate ideological bias at the editorial desk.