Here’s a crazy thought for the summer

Your humble blogger is procrastinating his packing preparing for a family vacation.  So, according to Jonathan Bernstein, Kevin Drum and Brendan Nyhan, is the political press corps.  Bernstein explains:

[The summer] creates a whole lot of reporters with little to report on – and a whole lot of empty time on the cable news networks, the newspapers, the blogs, the new talk radio shows and the rest of it.

And what academic research tells us is that slow news days create scandals. That’s what Brendan Nyhan and other media researchers have found; indeed, Nyhan believes that the lack of scandal during Barack Obama’s first two years in the White House was caused, at least in part, by a series of very eventful news cycles. The mechanism, obviously, is that if there’s no major news, then minor news fills the hole, and if there’s no minor news, then we’ll hear plenty about stuff that if you squint just the right way might sort of pass for news….

It’s no surprise that mid-summer, when lots of newsmakers are on vacation (and when little is happening even in the sports world), is when stories such as the “ground zero mosque” or Shirley Sherrod’s supposed racism took off. Not just those; any kind of meaningless hype, whether it’s a supposed gaffe or some meaningless polling random variation, is going to get far more attention than it deserves.

Bernstein offers some suggestions for what political reporters could do with their surfeit of time besides explore stupid scandals.  Let me proffer a suggestion of my own:  cover the rest of the world.

Seriously.  World politics doesn’t stop for the summer, and as I’m sure I heard someone smart once say, the world is not a boring place. Sure, it used to stop in Europe, but I’m betting a lot will happen on that continent as well.  Why shouldn’t political reporters use the summer to earn their foreign correspondent bona fides? 

Now, I’m sure newspaper and television editors reading these scribblings will immediately protest that even though they think the world is interesting, their audience won’t. Hogwash.  If there is anything the media excels at, it should be how to tart up stories that might otherwise pass under the radar.  Here are a few suggestions:

1)  The "where are they now?" gambit.  Remember how, in 2011, the world seemed liked it was kinda ending?  Earthquakes, revolutions, that kind of thing?  Wouldn’t it be wacky to send reporters to these places to see how things are going now?  Think Fukushima, or Tunisia, or even states that didn’t have full frontal revolutions, like Oman.  Do some follow-up journalism. 

2)   The "Olympic Hangover" stories.  The one big sporting event this summer will be the London Olympics.  How about sending some reporters to previous Olympic host countries and see what happened to those facilities?  I bet the Athens and Beijing reports would be interesting.

3)  Foreign superheroes.  This summer has seen a bumper crop of Hollywood blockbusters about men in tights and women in catsuits with extraordinary powers. While superheroes had their origins in American comic books, wouldn’t it be cool to see if and how this genre has been adopted elsewhere in the globe?  Is there are Russian Superman?  A Chinese Iron Man?  An Indian Wonder Woman?  Go find out! 

Readers are welcomed to come up with their own foreign policy hooks in the comments below.