The so-called dog days of summer are approaching, and what do we have to show for them? The fireflies have emerged in New York City, a wonderful species of bug that I never had the luck to see as a child. The weather, too, has been very pleasant, exchanging the damp heat for balmy, room-temperature days. Meanwhile, though, we city folk are being forced to consume the daily vomit that is being passed along as news.
A missing Washington, D.C. intern has a name and a face that have appeared in the news almost every day since her disappearance 11 weeks ago. The story of Chandra Levy at least is better than New York's new favorite: that of a young, good-looking New York public relations executive (referred to as "Lizzy") who backed her sport-utility vehicle into a crowd outside a house in the Hamptons. Her face (actually, more often her whole body) appears in the tabloids every day.
What is it about summer that pushes tabloids (and increasingly often, more reputable local newspapers and television news stations) toward the sensational? There are certainly enough "real" stories to fill the front pages of newspapers and nightly news broadcasts, from the missile defense shield to impending changes in immigration laws.
Somehow, I think it's the other way around. The real question to ask: what is it about summer that wets our appetite for tabloid news? Local media outlets know what their consumers want. Lizzie Grubman and Chandra Levy sell papers.
So does Robert Iler, an actor who plays Anthony Soprano, Jr. on The Sopranos. On the show, he was recently expelled from his high school for cheating. In the news, he recently was arrested for stealing. Iler and The Sopranos are hugely popular in New York in the spring, when program airs; in the summer, life apparently imitates art in more than one way.
As the number of big-news stories slightly decreases in the summer, the heat (even if room-temperature) seems to get under our skin and heightens our awareness of celebrities, local executives, and interns.
Sure, we aren't exactly turned off when it comes to celebrity news during the rest of the year. The New York Post, in fact, has embraced this idea by hiring Col Allan, the editor of the celebrity heavy Daily Telegraph in Sydney, as its new editor. Next to Lizzie on the Post's Tuesday front page: "Secret Mafia Love Tapes," a story about John Gotti's son-in-law's romance with an "acid-tongued girlfriend."
Some may brush that story off with the wave of a relatively elitist hand, but the fact is that more people in New York will read that story than will read most other stories.
And that's a shame. Most New Yorkers seem to have missed the best feel-good story of the summer when the Brooklyn Cyclones (a minor-league team in the New York Mets organization) swept the Staten Island Yankees last weekend in a home-and-home series. "The ferry series" it was called--no subway series, sure, but more pure and more summer than any baseball game played by professional teams the last few months.
While Grubman and Levy and Gotti fill the front pages, the boys of summer continue plodding along. The story of the Cyclones, of course, is one that got quite a bit of attention. For the first time in almost 45 years, Brooklyn hosted a baseball game when the Cyclones' new stadium opened about a month ago.
And when the Cyclones (whose hats feature the old, classic Brooklyn Dodgers 'B' linked to the red, styled Cyclones' 'C') hosted and beat the Yankees, all in New York seemed right again. Although there seemed to be no bad blood between the two--the two mascots, Sam the Seagull and the Scooter the Holy Cow, performed coordinated dances--in stark contrast to the rivalry of their professional counterparts, all in New York seemed right again. But the story was buried.
The image of a child sitting in the stands of a minor-league baseball stadium in Coney Island is more New York to me than the story of Lizzie Grubman's trying to run over people she called "white trash." But perhaps I'm being idealistic and unrealistic. I'll stick with the fireflies.