Where's the meat?

Someone asked me after reading this space , where is the meat in your writing on media? I thought and thought and thought more. Where is the meat in media? It made me wonder. So I browsed through the Television channels , kept surfing through radio channels , browsed through couple of magazines and tried hard , harder. There are scoops , sting operations and soundbytes. But even in all this I guess the meat is lacking.

If we look at it medium by medium may be we might be able to spot some bits of interesting pieces but they are so few and far in between that the effort would be tremendous and results only dismal I wonder what should I do? May be go further under the skin of things and look beyond the obvious.

I also happen to be reading Einstein at this stage and that's where I see a stark comparison. The old timers book called "Ideas and Opinion" is excerpts of his speeches and writing put together and its a wonderful piece of writing. That's meat for sure. So its not the medium but the content as has been said again and again and again.

Compared to the writing, would a docu-drama on Einstein sound as interesting? I guess not. I think as mass media and the masses consuming them explodes it is somewhere losing out on what some great media analysts like Ephron call engagement.

This is how I see it. Media presence is becoming ubiquitous. In turn it is becoming a part of our setting. So breakfast is served with radio, lunch with internet at office and dinner with television is so much given that we don't even pay attention to it. We don't consciously observe /curb it. And somehow when something is routine we also loose interest in it. So its just another show , one after another, just another piece of music and just another piece of writing.

But do we really need to look at the extra-ordinary when the ordinary that seems ordinary is not really so. At an extremely high pace things seem static and I guess so is the case with the mediated world but slow down and you might see it all.

As for my friend well his journalistic self can keep looking for meat and stories but I guess there is one everywhere. You just need to see it.