Billy the Martian

Minnesotans have this odd inferiority complex. It shows up in the local news media, primarily in the TV news. It seems they believe that all news stories, no matter what they’re about or where they are located, must be forcibly related to the Twin Cities somehow.

This observation isn’t original with me, but I’ve been spreading it for years. Almost daily some friend will relate a minor story they saw that got translated to a local story. Yesterday, the story that a British company, source of half the flu vaccine in the world, would stop producing resulted in this comment from a local talking head: “Available flu vaccines may be cut in half for the United States including Minnesota.”

It’s Minneapolis TV. Everyone is in range of that broadcast knows what freaking state we’re in.

My favorite example of this was a story that the Mayo Clinic had discovered a new technique for detecting colon cancer that wasn’t as invasive as a colonoscopy. Now, get this. The Mayo Clinic is in Minnesota. This is already a local story. But this didn’t satisfy the local TV news. They sent a camera crew to a nearby suburb, and managed to find someone who admitted, astonishingly, that they’d prefer a blood sample taken over having a telescope shoved up their rear end. Now, understand, this person had gotten a regular colonoscopy the year before — they hadn’t gotten the chance to try the new method. The camera crew had just been sent out to find some random person who thought the new method sounded good. Just for the local perspective.

All this, for what was a local story to begin with!

I don’t pretend to understand it. I think of it as some kind of inferiority complex. Some folks who live here seem to feel that Minnesota is behind one of the coastal states, and that we don’t do enough to promote ourselves. Or maybe our local news people think that we don’t care about a story unless they can show us how it’s relevant to our tiny, parochial minds.

Beats me. I won’t watch them anymore, and after the Rathergate scandal, I won’t watch the national folks, either.