"You're turning on the television news?" Kat moaned incredulously. "I don't know why you're bothering. There's nothing but all anthrax, all the time on there." Actually, there's also the weather report. When one is taking twelve eleven-year-olds camping on Saturday, the weather is of more immediate impact than anthrax. Luckily, if the forecast is correct, it will be partly cloudy and close to sixty degrees. Great weather for outdoor activities.

Still, Kat has a point. The news is all anthrax, all the time. People are calling the police to report receiving suspicious, unsolicited mail from a car leasing company they don't use that is located in Florida. It turns out that their out-of-state son rents a car from the place. Not only did this incident take police time, it also took journalists' time. We've got the police from two towns over spending four hours investigating a trail of white powder, only to discover that they had just run the training route for their high school's cross-country team. That bit of silliness made the papers as well.

When I was young, my father loved to pose philosophical riddles. I was never sure whether his intent was to make deep thinkers of his children or whether he simply liked those types of discussions. I do enough reading in science to know that I am supposed to favor the more elegant (the simpler) explanation so my current theory is that he loved the discussions. (He's out-of-town right now so, unfortunately, he's unlikely to enlighten me in my guestbook.)

One of the riddles that I remember most vividly involved the concepts of infinity and of suffering and came up several times. "Which is greater," he asked. "The deep suffering of one or the deep suffering of many?" If I chose the deep suffering of many, he would point out that often the deep suffering of one was far more affecting. He would point to Anne Frank, for example, whose suffering speaks to those who read her diary far more eloquently than the stark figure of six million Jews dead at Nazi hands does. If I chose the deep suffering of one, he would question whether common sense didn't tell me that the suffering of several, any one of which was suffering as much as that one, had to be more.

From my middle-aged perspective, I know that deep suffering, if it is not infinite, at least approaches the infinite. From my mathematically-educated perspective, I know that infinity is infinity is infinity. By definition, one infinity cannot be larger than another infinity. They are equal in themselves regardless whether they are equal in impact.

So, despite my instincts to the contrary, I suppose I should understand when Tom Brokaw lets his suffering by the discovery of anthrax directed at him seem to dwarf the suffering of all those who lost friends and relatives in the World Trade Center disaster. I suppose I should understand when the deep fear Joe Blow has over talcum powder oozes out in ridiculous ways and is treated as though it is as big or bigger than the more everyday suffering of themother whose child was murdered.

Yet the depth of suffering has never been the primary criteria of the extent of the coverage of a news story and it should not be now. Reporting the facts on the anthrax situation is fair game. Stirring the pot with page after page of sensationalist writing in something other than the tabloids is not. And until the media gets this distinction, I'll be watching the news primarily for the weather, thank you.

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