After such a tumultuous week, it would be natural to presume that the downing of the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine and the Israeli invasion of Gaza will have major implications across the globe for a long time to come.

Unfortunately, that’s probably not accurate.
In this world of fast-moving news cycles and flavor-of-the-week politics this, too, shall pass.

The bloody separatist movement in eastern Ukraine dominated the news several weeks ago, and then it was gone, and now it’s back again in a very big way. But it’s not hard to imagine that it will be gone again soon.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict periodically flares up in an ugly way, then it dies down, and then the media moves on.
These two stories deserve in-depth coverage and analysis but today’s form of journalism, particularly on TV and radio, doesn’t have the time or the space to engage in such things.
Last week, the big story was the border crisis created by migrant Central American kids. Before that it was Lois Lerner’s lost IRS emails. Before that it was the ISIS jihadists taking control of a large swath of Iraq.

Rewind a little further and we had the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap with the Taliban. Prior to that it was the VA health care scandal. Going backward, next it was the kidnapped Nigerian school girls. A couple of times it was Benghazi. And, of course, if you go all the way back to mid-May (yes, all of this in just two months) the big news was pro-Russian forces wreaking havoc in Ukraine.
If you want to reach back to March, the hot story was the presumed crash of a Malaysian airliner with all aboard apparently dead.

Liberal and conservative commentators express concern about this scattershot approach to the news and how politicians manipulate the situation.
“Such is the attention-deficit disorder that has come to affect our politics,” wrote Dana Milbank of The Washington Post last week. “Those Nigerian schoolgirls are still missing. The situation in Iraq is every bit as grim as it was when Washington was paying attention, and perhaps more so. Ukraine is still volatile and veterans still aren’t getting the level of service they deserve. But now we care only about whether Obama’s failure to visit the border was his ‘Katrina moment’…”

The column by Milbank, a liberal pundit who appears regularly on MSNBC, was juxtaposed with a column by John Stossel, a conservative/libertarian who hosts a Fox Business Network show, on an intriguing Macomb Daily editorial page last Tuesday.
Stossel noted that the media tends to miss the slowly developing news stories because reporters are moving so fast, hopping from one tragic story to the next across the country and across the globe. CNN’s Anderson Cooper has become the poster boy for this kind of drifter journalism.
However, the slow stories are the most important stories, Stossel explained. The world today is a place where people are healthier, better fed, better educated, less impoverished. Deaths and disease are down sharply.

“Science that lengthens lives, innovation that enhances them, increased tolerance and fewer deaths in wars are great news. But, day by day, reporters barely cover that. Where would we point our cameras?” Stossel wrote. “The news is biased not just because reporters are politically biased but because most good news happens gradually.”
Of course, social media has played a major role, pushing the news cycle into fast-forward mode. On Twitter – and especially for those who use the Tweetdeck format — a story that is 6 minutes old is old. Within hours of the news that the Malaysian plane was shot out of the sky, social media and talk-radio were filled with claims that it was President Obama’s fault. No facts, just opinions.

In the face of this past week’s two dramatic events, will any action be taken, will the right questions be asked?
As the Israeli Defense Forces pummel large sections of the Gaza Strip, what will it take to get Hamas to come to the table for short-term (and long-term) peace negotiations? How much of a complicating factor is Egypt’s apparent inability to play the honest broker?
Regarding Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, should we return to the post-9/11 move toward putting missile interceptors on jetliners? Is the U.S. making sufficient strides toward keeping surface-to-air missiles out of the hands of radical terror groups?
When will the leaders in the Netherlands, which suffered the majority of deaths in the shoot down, speak out forcefully and can they convince Europe to impose sanctions on Russia? And do we need new international no-fly-zone rules and the creation of internationally accepted standards for handling a crash site?

With Washington adrift and a do-nothing Congress creating a vacuum, too often pertinent questions are not asked and the inside-the-Beltway media hoard settles for pack journalism.
For months, the Hamas forces in Gaza were shooting rockets into Israel before the tanks rolled in. The separatist rebels in Ukraine entrenched near the Russian border had already used sophisticated surface-to-air missiles to shoot down four Ukrainian military planes, including two last week.
Yet, the media took little notice. They were busy covering the story of the week.

More thoughtful journalism ahead of time may have changed the entire political discussion. But when you’re dealing with time, there is no rewind.

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