It’s a bit of a paradox that as we enter the summer months, the news gets both weirder and less interesting.

Thus, the news is filled with reports of crazed, face-eating lunatics, serial-killer Canadian porn stars and … Donald Trump.

It’s sort of a national version of what happens every summer in Fargo-Moorhead. I used to advise people that if they were going to be arrested for so much as jaywalking, don’t do it on a Friday in July in Fargo; it would be front-page news by default. Nothing else is going on.

That’s even true in a presidential election year. The Trump stories are evidence of that. Why anybody would give a windbag like Donald Trump the time of day is beyond me. Part of it, quite frankly, is that Trump is headquartered in New York, the same place as most of the national news outlets. You may have noticed that anything that happens in New York is national news. Stories that wouldn’t even get a mention in the local paper if they happened in the interior of say, Wyoming, get splashed all over the news if they happen in New York. That’s a function of both the parochialism of those who live in the Big Apple and of the ease of coverage. Especially given the national media’s eye on the bottom line, it’s a lot cheaper and easier to cover something that’s happening a few blocks away than it is to actually send a reporter out to the hinterlands of America.

But Donald Trump? Really? That’s the best you can do?

The play that the face-eating and serial-killing get are more easily explainable. They’re just weird stories and editors love weird stories, for two reasons: They’re interesting and they attract viewers, especially on the Internet.

Those kinds of stories have a long, not necessarily honorable tradition in journalism. In fact, that tradition goes farther back than what we think of as journalism itself. The depravities of Vlad the Impaler, the 15th Century Transylvanian ruler who was the inspiration for Dracula, were popular grist for what passed for literature in those days (Dracula wasn’t created until the late 19th Century). Not long after the printing press was created, you could buy pamphlets telling all about Vlad, complete with some pretty gnarly woodcuts of Vlad eating dinner surrounded by people impaled on large stakes (hence his nickname).

These days, the saying is, “if it bleeds, it leads.” If an editor has a choice between running a lead story on the debate over federal fiscal policy or the story about the face-eating lunatic, the lunatic is going to win out every time. And not just that, every single angle of the story is going to be covered. That’s why we’re suddenly seeing a spate of pieces about the dangers of ingesting bath salts, which the face-eating lunatic may or may not have done.

The trend toward blood and gore in the news is more noticeable in the summer, since there’s so much less going on to report, but it’s really true year-round. When I used to visit my mother in Minneapolis, it always amazed me to watch the local news; it wasn’t unusual for the first half-dozen stories on a newscast to be about violent crimes. If a Martian landed on earth and his first contact with our population was watching local news, he’d think Minneapolis was a free-fire zone.

The problem is that the concentration on blood and gore, understandable as it is from a purely dollars-and-cents standpoint, has some fairly adverse effects on the public. People are more afraid than ever of violent crime, but national statistics show that it’s actually declined in recent years. You’d never know it by watching the news, though.

That puts me in a rather odd position, both professionally and personally. My first love as a reporter has always been crime reporting. The darker angels of our nature always have fascinated me personally and covering that as a journalist gave me a chance to deal in matters I love to ponder. And I saw value in even the worst crimes I covered, if only to grab my readers by the scruff of the neck and saying to them, “Look, this happens here; don’t ignore it.”

There was never a huge danger of overplaying a murder story, for example, in Fargo-Moorhead because murders are rare enough that they ought to be front-page news. In fact, I’ll never forget a phone call we got the first time I covered a murder in Fargo; a guy from New Jersey called the paper to find out about the community because, he said, he wanted to move to a place where a murder still made the front page.

But I always had a secret, nagging fear that my work would give readers a false sense of what was really going on in the community. As far as I could tell, that never happened. But if the murder rate in Fargo ever hits double digits, it very well could. And believe me, the media market is competitive enough here that larger questions, like the false impression over reporting of crime can give, aren’t going to be considered much.

Still, that’s off in the future, at least in the Red River Valley. For now, we’ll have contented ourselves with face-eating lunatics and Donald Trump. And if a lunatic ever attacks The Donald, boy, will that get play.

Fortunately, Donald is safe in one respect; if the lunatic has a taste for brains, Donald has none to give him.