Last week, three major local news stories gave telling glimpses into much of what's wrong with local news, especially television news.

First came The Big Windstorm, a reference not to the rather typical blustery November front that moved through Seattle one night with a few hours of high winds, but to the 48 hours of breathless bluster that preceded it on local TV. Newscasts were literally going to remote reporters looking for wisps of wind 24 hours before the storm hit. It worked; on the Monday prior to the storm, the imminent doom of the metropolis was the focus of virtually every casual conversation in the city. Droves left work early--to avoid a windstorm set to arrive after midnight.

The power of TV to get the word out--and, in this case, to induce unneeded worry, if not panic--was never demonstrated more clearly. The eagerness of local newscasts to have a breaking story that will compel people to watch is the force that drives decisions to hype things like bad weather stories. Such eagerness literally occupied a city for a day. In this case, the results were rather innocuous; one has to wonder, however, about the potential for abuse when the need to hype something conflicts with the responsibility that was once a part of having a license to broadcast over the public's airwaves.

The following Friday, a horrific tragedy--a shooting and subsequent bus accident at the Aurora bridge that resulted in three deaths and 28 injuries-- demonstrated once again television's power of hype. This time, there was no denying that a legitimate and major story was at the core. Moreover, unlike boring stuff like elections and political-corporate graft, this one had real immediacy for viewers; most of us have ridden buses, know the Fremont neighborhood, have imagined these sorts of nightmare scenarios.

Nonetheless, the accident unfolded in about 30 seconds, and was over. Not too much more can be said--unless you're TV news, in which case live broadcasts from the scene, involving helicopters, fancy computer graphics, and a half dozen reporters from each station badgering eyewitnesses to repeat the obvious ("It was, like, really scary.") go on for four or five hours virtually without interruption. This, quite simply, was violence porn-- titillation, over and over, for the sake of the emotional engagement of the audience. It didn't contribute to the resolution of the "breaking" news. It certainly didn't add to the viewers' knowledge of the world--quite the opposite, in fact, as the story bumped every other possible local news story (including the plethora of protests that day greeting holiday shoppers in downtown Seattle).

These two stories were problematic simply because of stations' actions in wanting to draw and keep viewers. The coverage of Seattle School Superintendent John Stanford's death, however--like the coverage for the last several months of his illness--was more complex, and poses deeper problems.

Stanford, quite simply, has been elevated from a problematic local public official--one disliked by many of his employees but adored by the city's corporate, political, and media establishment. Now he's a martyr and a saint, and no objective look at his legacy is possible. It was all good--because we must not speak ill of the dead, especially when they died for the kids. Well, Stanford's death at age 60 is truly a sad event, as well as a pointed reminder that sometimes no amount of good will and/or steely resolve can beat microbiology, which cares not about your resume. But Stanford's tenure was one of a relentlessly self-promoting, authoritarian asshole. Not examining that tenure for some lessons other than the most banal and cliched imaginable ("He made us feel good about ourselves and about the kids"--honest to God!) is a tremendous disservice to the future of Seattle's schools. Moreover, it's an unfair portrait of his life, which had nothing to do with education, Seattle, or "the kids" until his last three years.

What role did the media play in Stanford's death? The unalloyed cheerleading that accompanied announcement of his illness and his decision to stay on as head of Seattle schools throughout his treatment early this year covered up a critical issue. Stanford's hubris cost the school district a year of effective leadership; more importantly, it may have contributed to a tendency to not take his illness seriously enough, or to overwork. Conversely, the sense of being in control that came with staying in the job, and the media-orchestrated outpouring of civic sympathy that urged him to heal, may have kept him alive longer. For Stanford personally, the public hype might have been a morale booster or a pain in the butt; it might have slowed or accelerated his illness, or made no difference at all. We'll never know. The question, however, deserves to be asked; the media's belief that John Stanford was immortal, tragically, just might have rubbed off. (How long will it be before they start naming shit after him? Probably by the time you read this...)

Unfortunately, Stanford's deification means that we won't be hearing about the most important criteria in selecting a new head for Seattle's schools: that person needs to be as different as possible from Gen. John Stanford. And we certainly won't be hearing from the media about the media themselves: what role its relentless, unthinking hype plays in how we view our city and the world. Increasingly, mass media isn't simply reporting tragedies; it's creating them.