Top news stories of 2006

The following is an article that I read on New Year's Eve from CTV.ca. The article struck me as profound. I don't know exactly why, but I really like it.

"It's just one of those unshakeable human characteristics, the compulsion to look back. Right or wrong, we may think it gives us a sense of where we're going. That we're given the chance to control the future but only when we codify our past.
No doubt there are two intellectual pathways at work -- the philosophical and the psychological. Sometimes the on- and off-ramps intersect.

To work in news or to have a daily news routine; be it television, radio, newspaper, Internet or any combination of media sources, is to have an overriding need to compartmentalize. There is simply too much to sift through and our lives are complicated.

When it's good news, we want desperately to relive it and this is where television shines with its emphasis on the image. Replaying the moment elevates our mood. Maybe it's a historic handshake, a pithy quote from an expert or a kindness shown to an animal, a child or the elderly. Let's not discount the elation brought by victory for a Canadian medical team on the world stage. Or what about something as monumental, albeit rare, as the end of a war? Heady stuff that. Progress for humankind, we tell ourselves.

Bad news is different. Modern technology allows us to see almost everything that happens, as it happens. Fear and anxiety sets in because we can't possibly understand all the reasons why. So we mark the event with a mental date stamp and when it's an all-out catastrophe we pray that it never happens again. But we're not stupid; we know that inevitably it will. There will be hurricanes and plane crashes, and humans will perpetrate evil on other humans.

And that's a year, 365 days of something we rarely comprehend it its entirety. Good and bad. Triumph and tragedy. Some events we wait to pass judgment on. What we know for sure is that while we're living our lives, other people are living theirs -- sometimes in the storm of a media crush.

This year, in the countdown to 2007, CTV News is offering up an unscientific selection of the top ten news stories of 2006.

For the record, here they are.

1. Stephen Harper Elected Prime Minister
2. War in Afghanistan
3. Lebanese-Canadians Evacuated From Middle East War Zone
4. British Columbia Ferry Disaster
5. Dawson College Shooting
6. Alleged Toronto Terror Suspect Arrests
7. Laval, Quebec Overpass Collapse
8. Canada's Winter Olympic Medal Count
9. West Coast Storms
10. Stephane Dion Elected Liberal Leader

It's instructive to remember that daily news has been called the first rough draft of history. That axiom also applies to Top Ten lists. Sometimes objectivity gets trampled by emotion when stories hit on a purely personal level. Arguments are expected and encouraged.

I was not on the CTV panel that contributed to the formation of the list. My ideas went into producing the nightly broadcast, CTV News with Lloyd Robertson, when these stories received their treatments the first time around.
Some thoughts: I fail to see the point in discussing the inclusion of politicians who may turn out to be blips on the national landscape five years or five months from now. First, let them do great things ... or allow them to fail. Then consider them. The mere fact that they were elected doesn't impress me. I was elected class president in 1974. Believe me I wasn't that good. I go with the experts who tell me to pay attention to municipal politics, the rest is only window dressing.
War, it appears, is with us no matter horrifying we may find it and how much it hurts to see our brave men and women in its grip. I wholeheartedly agree with its place on the list.

It's easy to pass off sports as nothing more than, well, sports, and certainly not news. The fact is, sometimes I feel that way, and yet one of the greatest nights of my life was with my brother, watching the Canadian team beat the Russians from the blue seats at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1972.
As someone who helped produce the news, night after night this year, three stories on that list stand out: the B.C. ferry sinking; the overpass collapse; and the Dawson School shooting. The theme should be apparent. I'm like most people. I follow rules (most of the time) and I put my trust (naively, perhaps) in officialdom. I almost never question my right to travel freely and with an expectation of safety in our great Canadian society. I'm willing to bet that most of the victims of those three stories -- many of them emotionally shattered now, for who knows how long -- felt the same way.

So there you have it. Our top ten list of news stories that meant the most to Canadians in 2006. Some choices I agree with, some I don't. Where are Frank and Nancy Ianiero, for example? What story would you remove to include them? Welcome to the world of a news producer. Your chair is waiting ... and so are more than one million people every night who think they know better. And who knows. They may be right."