Meditations on a late-night star's blockbuster story

Sometimes, you can understand what makes the news news only if you take a very Zenlike approach to it.

Case in point: David Letterman's sex life.

I have to tell you this is not a subject I've ever devoted much thought to in the past, and it's not one I'm inclined to start thinking about, frankly. In reflecting on the scandal in which he finds himself embroiled, Letterman himself said it has identified him as "a man who has sex" - and, of course, he has also added an important postscript to note that he is a man who has sex with women he shouldn't have sex with.

But even with that postscript, I have frequently found myself asking over the past week, "Why is this news beyond the entertainment notes?"

Or, put more bluntly, "Who cares?"

Well, I think the answer to the latter question leads to that of the former.

The fact is most of us don't really care about David Letterman's sex life. It may pique our curiosity on some level, but it doesn't matter to us in any meaningful way. But when it becomes the subject of intrigue and blackmail, it certainly gets our attention, and if we frame it in the context of the kind of inappropriate workplace behavior that might lead to a huge civil suit, a television icon's firing or at least a running plotline on "The Office," we have to admit we find it engaging.

So engaging that it merits lead status on radio and television newscasts and lengthy analysis pieces in even locally focused newspapers?

Apparently so. There can be no denying that this "scandal" - and I'm reluctant to apply that term to the dalliances of someone in the entertainment business, an industry where, let's face it, dalliances are not exactly man-bites-dog, except maybe in the most literal sense - has captured people's attention. If nothing else, it sent Letterman's own ratings skyrocketing.

The serious journalist in me longs to gnash his teeth at this thought. How is it, I want to cry, that we have a worsening war in Afghanistan, a crisis in health care, a crisis in the state budget, a crisis in the national economy and yet people are shouldering each other out of the way in order to read about David Letterman's peccadilloes?

Shouldn't I be righteously indignant about this?

There is, to be sure, something positive to be said for our news judgment in the way we've played the Letterman story. For, if we followed a philosophy that strictly reserved the front page for the stories that would attract the most readers, Letterman would indeed have crowded his way into a much larger role than a mere occasional "teaser."

But his story also qualifies as one that we often identify in news meetings as so likely to attract interest that it doesn't need to be on the front page. "People will find it no matter where it runs," we say.

Yet, I repeatedly return to the question, why will they look for it? And I don't have a good answer for that one.

Perhaps a sociologist can collect a few hundred thousand dollars from a federal grant to study it, but I suspect that even after years of careful research and analysis, the answer may still lead back to some guy with a scraggly beard sitting cross-legged on a Himalayan mountaintop.

Why is David Letterman's sex life news? I don't know.

It just is.

When I look at it in that context, I feel somehow more at peace with my profession.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.