Telling of some stories relies on readers' reason

I have talked in this space in the past about ubiquitous news stories whose origins cannot be divined or explained but which must be followed because people have become so aware of them that their curiosity is piqued - the disappearance of some attractive coed somewhere, an East Coast murder mystery, a petty court battle among friends over a lost iPod, the litany of Tiger Woods' dalliances, any of scores of unspectacular stories that caught the right person's interest somewhere and then, in the vernacular of our day, went viral, ultimately infecting even those of us who may not see much news value in the issue at hand.

Most of these cases, whether trivial or tragic, are harmless. They give valid cause for shaking one's head, if not also his finger, at the sometimes inscrutable judgments of the news media and the pack mentality to which we occasionally fall prey.

But then every once in a while, along comes a so-called Rev. Terry Jones, and the peculiar story no longer seems a harmless curiosity. Now, suddenly, the issue focuses a lot more on trust and the faith responsible media must have in the overriding reasonableness of their audiences when approaching some stories.

Jones, the leader of a 50-member church in Gainesville, Fla., has gained international attention by announcing plans to publicly burn copies of the Quran on Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. Reason cannot readily explain the news appeal of Jones' action. It is no small irony that a congregation of 50 people - and I wonder, does that number include the Christmas- and Easter-only crowd? - in a mid-sized Florida college town can turn the heads of the world when a demonstration, say, of 50,000 abortion rights opponents in the nation's capital gets barely a mention on the nightly news.

But turn heads it has, giving Jones a forum not for the soul-saving words of his religion's core message but for the bitter destructiveness of his own quixotic ignorance. It has turned the heads of heads of state and even drawn an appeal from the leader of U.S. troops in Afghanistan that Jones reconsider. The official spin now - and a welcome approach it is - is that the real message about America here is not the picture of Jones' intolerance but the story of the thousands who have spoken out condemning it.

Indeed, it strikes me that the real test of the First Amendment is not in what it allows people to do and say, but in what it expects of the people who hear or see things they don't like. There is no limit to the ignorance that some human beings are capable of following - think Westboro Baptist Church and its protests of military funerals on the tortured reasoning that the soldiers died fighting for a country that permits homosexuality - and that sometimes requires an equally limitless reserve from the rest of us.

And so we may all join in the telling of Terry Jones' misguided story, but we do so with the faith that most people seeing and hearing it will know it is misguided. Jones may get his 15 minutes on the world stage, but in the end, reason will out, most people will recognize what an insignificant intellectual pipsqueak he is and we'll turn our heads back to stories about health care, taxes, people in need and other issues of substance.

Yes, I guess an occasional story about a starlet's sex life or athlete's drug habits will sneak in there, but ultimately, thank goodness, we know you'll concentrate on life's meaningful challenges more than its curious nonsense.

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