Well, Isn't That Sweet

 "What happened when two strangers went on vacation together." Well, pretty much exactly what one would expect: they hit it off, started dating, married and had children together. I'll admit that when I clicked over to CNN after encountering the headline on Google News I was hoping for something more interesting, but didn't have high expectations. And yes, I realize that I likely shouldn't have had any expectation of anything different when there was a potential feel-good love story, however simple, on offer. Although, I understand that this is mainly because it was in the Travel section. Had it been in the Crime section, it would have been a completely different, if still utterly predictable, story.

So my question is this: Was the story of Rodrigo Leal's and Irma Cáceres' meet-cute one of the better alternatives that CNN had for a positive news story, or simply one of the easier ones? And what I mean by "better" here is not was it a "better" news story, because as far as I'm concerned, the story is of absolutely zero news value. But does it best meet whatever goal CNN has for these sorts of stories? Without knowing that goal, I have no real means of addressing the question, which is why I'm curious about it, but I suppose that all I'm left with is conjecture. It's more or less understood that many people find the news depressing. I suspect that it's sort of calibrated that way from the outset. There's not much in the story of a man who throws his infant son at police officers in an attempt to escape pursuit that's going to lead anyone to feel better about the state of the world. And there's no reason for this to even make the front page of Google's U.S. coverage other than the point-and-stare aspect of it. "Random guy with criminal record endangers child in failed attempt to escape police." That's what qualifies as national news? This happened in Florida (go figure). Of what possible relevance is it to me, here in Washington. I'm pretty much as far away from this as one can be without leaving the contiguous 48 states. This is little more than criminal-justice gossip column material. Likewise stories on District Judge Roger T. Benitez's decision that the California Assault Weapons Control Act violates the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution tend to be more about the partisan reactions to the decision than the legal reasoning behind it. And for media outlets that appeal to generally left-leaning audiences, as CNN does, one can guess how that's turning out.

So the supposed antidote to the relentless negativity of the news is for random love stories to be elevated to the front page. And if the goal is to make the point that not all of the news is bad, that's reasonable. But with all of North America to work with, the best that could done was a story of two people meeting that wouldn't even make for an engaging romantic comedy? (One shudders to think of all of the contrived complications that screenwriters would feel compelled to add.) Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for the Leal-Cáceres family and all, but this seems like something that happens more or less every day.

In the end, there's nothing wrong with stories of people finding love, even if I'm dubious that they rise to the level of international news. They strike me as fairly clear examples of news as narrative, where the narrative is that beautiful things still happen in the world, but even that doesn't really strike me as news so much as it does a momentary reprieve from media outlets seeking clicks and attention by portraying the world as going to Hell in a handbasket. It becomes fluff designed to cushion the perhaps unnecessarily sharp edges that tend to come with information about the world.