What It Takes To See The Evergreens
Until recently, the tragic story of conflict diamonds was the kind of story journalists refer to as an "evergreen." An "evergreen" is a story that can be told at anytime – like the plight of the poor in America, for example, or climate change. These stories tend not to get a ton of coverage until there is a "peg" – a development that makes editors and producers suddenly excited about a story that has been around for a long time. The peg that got the media talking about the poor – at least for a little while – was Hurricane Katrina; the peg that got reporters talking about climate change was Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." There would still have been stories about these issues without their respective pegs, but not nearly so many. It takes a peg to get the media buzzing and boost issues like these out of the journalistic ghetto of evergreen status.
Conflict diamonds now have their peg, and that is, undoubtedly, a good thing. People are now more likely to ask questions about where their diamonds are coming from, and diamond sellers are more likely to make sure that their diamonds are not tied to violence. But from a journalistic perspective, there is something troubling about that fact that it took a movie to get the issue the attention it deserves. There are countless individual stories tied to blood diamonds, stories of tragedy and death that could have been told years ago. Part of the problem is that the news simply doesn't pay as much attention to Africa as it should – as we pointed out last October, it usually takes a celebrity, political visit, or movie to get attention to African issues. When asked why he recently visited Darfur, George Clooney said this to Newsweek: "If you're going to be famous and have cameras follow you around, you might as well go where the cameras will do some good."
Clooney is right to bring the cameras with him to Darfur. But should he really need to? Why should journalists let the news agenda be set by movie studios, politicians and celebrities? If journalists look hard enough, they can find the compelling, often-heartbreaking stories that make these kinds of topics evergreens in the first place. And then an issue like conflict diamonds would get the world's attention regardless of whether or not some studio executive gave the green light to a movie.
The counterargument to this, of course, is that when journalists do find these stories -- and there is no peg to tie them to -- no one watches or reads them. There's something to that argument. Journalists do need a certain amount of leverage to break through the rest of the news out there and get their stories some attention, and a peg provides that leverage. But I still think the media could do a better job ferreting out stories that are compelling enough to engage the audience on their own.