The Summer of the Shark

Distant memory from the time before, but the summer before 9/11 was dubbed The Summer of the Shark because there were a few highly publicized shark attacks, probably not even more than usual but who knows, that dominated The Narrative, edging out whatever trivial things dominated The Narrative right before that.

After 9/11 there was some public soul-searching from prominent journalists about how they should be focused on Serious Things and then they did and oh boy did they make everything fucking worse.

Go back to focusing on the sharks, was the lesson. (These types of comments aren't about Real Journalists, but the prominent pseudo-celebrity infotainment ones: the silly columnists, the cable news hosts, the theater critic political journalists, etc.).