“What if political scientists covered the news?” asks Christopher Beam in a new article in Slate:
A powerful thunderstorm forced President Obama to cancel his Memorial Day speech near Chicago on Monday—an arbitrary event that had no affect on the trajectory of American politics.
Obama now faces some of the most difficult challenges of his young presidency: the ongoing oil spill, the Gaza flotilla disaster, and revelations about possibly inappropriate conversations between the White House and candidates for federal office. But while these narratives may affect fleeting public perceptions, Americans will ultimately judge Obama on the crude economic fundamentals of jobs numbers and GDP.
Most of us realize that the events of last week’s news cycle will likely have no real effect on the election in 2012. Indeed, if we were pressed to be truthful, most of us would have to admit that what is sold as news—whether in newspapers, on cable news programs, etc.—is rarely newsworthy. For those news-junkies who disagree, I suggest asking this two-part question about any news article: What makes this story important and what distinguishes it from mere gossip and/or trivia?
One aspect of any answer would have to include an explanation of how how the story either fits into a broader narrative or has an inherent permanence. But how often does that apply to our daily news? How much of what happens every day truly is all that important? How many of us have ever stopped to ask why we even have daily news, much less the impact it is having on our culture?
C. John Sommerville is one brave soul who has dared to ask such questions. In the October 1991 issue of First Things, Sommerville explained “Why the News Makes Us Dumb“:
What happens when you sell information on a daily basis? You have to make each day’s report seem important, and you do this primarily by reducing the importance of its context. What you are selling is change, and if readers were aware of the bigger story, that would tend to diminish today’s contribution. The industry has to convince its consumers of the significance of today’s News, and it has to make them want to come hack tomorrow for more News—more change. The implication will then be that today’s report can now be forgotten. So News involves a radical devaluation of the past, and short-circuits any kind of debate.
In the book based on the article, Sommerville points out:
The product of the news business is change, not wisdom. Wisdom has to do with seeing things in their largest context, whereas news is structured in a way that destroys the larger context. You have to do certain things to information if you want to sell it on a daily basis. You have to make each day’s report seem important. And you do that by reducing the importance of its context.
This focus on change has a deleterious effect on all forms of conservatism—whether cultural, political, or religious. Once we believed an essential part of our mission as conservatives was, as William Buckley claimed, to “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop.’” Change was something to be undertaken slowly and with reflection. After all, the important institutions—family, religion, government—shouldn’t change on a whim. But the focus on dailiness has led conservatives to adopt attitudes that were once the province of hyper-progressivism. We don’t just ask what government has done for us lately, we ask what it has done for us today. We don’t just ask for change when it is needed, we ask for it daily. We are addicted to the process of change.
What is most disconcerting is that we have come to believe that this addiction is normal and that those who aren’t hooked into a daily news feed are ill-informed. Take, for example, an article Steve Outing wrote a few years ago for the Poynter Institute in which he describes an “experiment in mainstream-media deprivation.”
Outing documents how Steve Rubel, a blogger and public relations executive, conducted a news experiment in which he gave up his regular media habits and learned what was going on in the world solely by checking weblogs. Rubel claims that he “definitely lacked the depth of knowledge of current events” gained in a normal week. “I felt a little naked,” he says, “having received the basics of the week’s news from blogs, but not getting the real meat.”
What was this “real meat” Rubel missed out on? Outing gave him a quiz,
While knowing why President Bush hired a criminal lawyer last week, and the official reasons cited for George Tenet’s resignation from the CIA, Rubel missed actor Daniel Radcliffe’s statement that he thinks his Harry Potter character will die at the end of the J.K. Rowling book series. He didn’t catch ex-Beatle Paul McCartney’s admission that he tried heroin and was a cocaine user. And he missed more obscure stories, such as one of Seattle’s famed monorail trains catching fire.
Six years have passed since that article was published. How many people would now consider these items newsworthy? Who truly believes that Rubel was ill-informed for not being aware of such trivia? But it isn’t just gossip-type “news” that is unimportant. Most of what occurs on a daily basis is inconsequential. At the end of his article Sommerville concluded:
Still dubious about all this? Consider the proposition: If it is no longer worth your while to go back and read the News of, oh, September 22, 1976, then it was never worthwhile doing so. And why should today be any different?
As a Christian, I’m expected to take an eternal perspective, viewing events not just in their historical but in their eschatological context. But I can’t do that while focusing on the churning events in the last 24 hours. Events that are truly important are rarely those captured on the front page of a daily paper. As Malcolm Muggeridge, who was himself a journalist, admitted, “I’ve often thought that if I’d been a journalist in the Holy Land at the time of our Lordís ministry, I should have spent my time looking into what was happening in Herod’s court. I’d be wanting to sign Salome for her exclusive memoirs, and finding out what Pilate was up to, and—I would have missed completely the most important event there ever was.”
June 7th, 2010 | 9:35 am
The real reason for the news: to make us dumb? And all this time I thought it served to enrich corporations by the selling of product.
June 7th, 2010 | 10:40 am
[...] the News Makes Us Dumb Filed under: Booklist,Currents — Thomas @ 10:39 am From First Things: What happens when you sell information on a daily basis? You have to make each day’s report seem [...]
June 7th, 2010 | 10:46 am
There are maybe three or four news stories a year. In a particularly busy year, six to ten. All else is filler.
Now multiply the filler by a 24-hour news-cycle, a dozen major news outlets, and the unblinking internet eye. Information overload is the most serious obstacle to knowledge today (much less wisdom).
It is liberating to realize this. We were not made to be consumers of stimuli at this speed and this volume. Turn it off. Turn it all off.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/people-of-the-screen
http://galleyslaves.blogspot.com/2010/03/now-vs-last-year.html
http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=329
June 7th, 2010 | 11:00 am
“If it is no longer worth your while to go back and read the News of, oh, September 22, 1976, then it was never worthwhile doing so.”
Why would I assume that it is not worth my while to go back? The proposition appears to be silly. Today’s news is fundamentally different because it is news. Yesterday’s news is a historical document. The problem we have with news is that there is so much that we do not know which news will matter (though we can guess with a high degree of confidence that anything to do with Hollywood and other pop culture will be a waste of time and that science reporting will be misleading and the actual story will be garbled).
Still, it can be useful to remain informed of the events of the day in order to have a good sense of what we can expect as possible results of those events. Whether you think that the IDF was properly defending Israel when it boarded that ship in international waters or think that they were making life even worse for victims of their oppression while breaking international law, it helps to know what happened and what events are likely to arise from it. We cannot always use our knowledge to keep bad things from happening, but without that knowledge, there is little chance we can do anything.
June 7th, 2010 | 11:15 am
By focusing on the impact this phenomenon has on our theology, you’re really onto something, Joe. For evangelicals in particular, the focus on the present and on relevance too often kills our desire to attend to church history, since it seems so bland compared to the latest political drama. So we are as a group more concerned about things like health care reform than we are about doctrinal issues like, say, sanctification vs. deification.
June 7th, 2010 | 11:23 am
[...] Why the News Makes Us Dumb » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog [...]
June 7th, 2010 | 12:21 pm
As much as I respect Muggeridge, I point out that the world of circa 33 AD, including all of the 12 apostles most of the time, without ANY daily newspapers, TV/radio broadcasts, blogs, podcasts, or RSS feeds to addict them to “change,” did in fact miss the “most important event there ever was.”
The post, and especially some of the comments strike me as reflexive. “News” makes us dumb because it’s, you know, inherently dumb – no context, no wisdom, shallow, sensationalistic, impressionistic. Just check out, oh, say Jim Hoft’s Gateway Pundit for example.
It all reminds me of a an editor of a past evangelical magazine who canceled a freelance story I had started under his predecessor, about Christians who are actors in Hollywood. Christians in Hollywood, he said, were like Christians working for the tobacco industry; meaning, they both are doing something inherently immoral and should find another line of work.
So what’s the conclusion of this line of analysis — that media is inherently, by nature, contrary to the wisdom and truth? Tell Christians to get out of the news business? Cancel their subscriptions?
June 7th, 2010 | 12:57 pm
I turned off the news a long time ago, and I have never regretted it. I still see “major” stories play out on the Internet, through blogs, facebook posts by friends, etc. But the endless cycle of talking heads is a distant memory for me.
The book you refer to, and others of a similar nature (i.e., Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman) first made me aware of the problem. Since then, I’ve turned it off and have never looked back.
June 7th, 2010 | 1:00 pm
Sommerville’s more academic book, The News Revolution in England, points out (p135) that while “periodical news found a natural affinity for politics, it discovered the opposite with religion.”
June 7th, 2010 | 1:51 pm
Re: “One aspect of any answer would have to include an explanation of how the story either fits into a broader narrative or has an inherent permanence.” Fitting events into a broader narrative is what historians do. The perspective of time helps us sort the significant from the inconsequential.
Even so, there’s merit to be aware of current events. Among other things, awareness contributes to my decision making about participation in public life.
June 7th, 2010 | 2:21 pm
A year ago, I gave up reading news websites and even blogs devoted exclusively to politics (e.g., Andrews Sullivan, NRO Corner, etc.). I felt led to give up this daily habit so that I would not get so caught up in the daily minutiae (and would hopefully have more time for prayer & spiritual reading each day). I’d already given up TV (entirely) and radio news (NPR) before that. I figured that anything really important that I needed to know about I would learn from my husband or friends. I decided to only read blogs devoted to spiritual ideals (Christian), like FT, and that provides me plenty of information on current events. (In fact, I now believe that I need to curtail even this, for I end up spending a lot of time just on these limited sites. For example, I’ve recently stopped reading the comments, because I can blow an amazing amount of time just on that. And yet, here I am providing a comment…)
At first it was very hard to not read the daily news feed, but now I am used to it. And if I am somehow exposed to the typical daily offerings (e.g., if CNN is turned on in a waiting room), I’m usually struck by how chatty and banal the reporting is; it’s cringe-inducing and I can no longer imagine watching that every day.
The surprising thing is that I don’t feel at all deprived now, nor particularly ill-informed. The other day I laughed when I took an online Pew Research quiz on news events and scored better than 90% of respondents – after a year of not reading/watching/listening to news.
I was inspired to try this by two things: (1) knowing about contemplative communities in which one nun was assigned the duty of, once a week, reading a news magazine and then telling the other community members the most important items so they could pray for those situations, and (2) reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he describes typical news exposures before radio & TV.
I also will say that I work part-time telecommuting from home. I do think it would be harder to abstain from news if I were in a daily work environment where I was directly interacting with co-workers. But it could still be done, if I didn’t mind not having an opinion to offer on every passing event (and admittedly, also not mind being considered to be rather weird).
June 7th, 2010 | 4:49 pm
The news makes us dumb? That is a fine topic to bandy around a seminar class. But does it not sound a bit too close to Obama’s complaint that information is just a distraction? That it makes us numb–not dumb–to the good intentions of our Dear Leaders? We should just put our feet up and trust.
Better to take our chances with the news–from a competing array of producers– than without it. And if that were not true, why would FT bother to host news-driven blogs?
June 7th, 2010 | 5:40 pm
I believe – er, have faith – that there are more of us turned off to the “news” as per Chuck and sojourner than is commonly assumed. [Could that help explain the demise in MSM ratings, per chance?]
As to the point of this thread, years ago I edited a weekly newspaper and for some time endeavored to put historical context into the “news” items I wrote. Alas, the publisher counted beans and the extra white space needed for “perspective” limited ad revenue. And so out that feature went. I don’t think the subscribers ever noticed, but the college of journalism of a nearby university nominated one of the earlier articles for prize consideration – not that anything ever came of that.
Today I listen to talk radio less than 30 minutes daily on week days, and follow Spengler, Belmont Club and Thomas Sowell on-line at about the same rate. Other than celebrity gossip stuff I’m usually the first in my family to know of “important happenings”. I can live with that handicap.
I think as we are being salt to the world we need to maintain our savoriness by understanding what is happening. Christians need to know the correct answer to freelunch’s comment re: the IDL blockade issue. It is NOT a violation of international law for a sovereign nation to operate a blockade in self defense. In this case, at the time two nations were operating the [legal] blockade. But most people limited to the MSM do not know this.
June 7th, 2010 | 7:23 pm
Some of the blogs are worse than the broadcast media. You wanna see dumb, check out the “Gateway Pundit”. And I am a conservative!
June 9th, 2010 | 4:34 am
Of course, there are no Conservatives anymore, only Revolutionaries who would like to halt the course of the revolt at the present moment, instead of allowing it to proceed to its logical conclusion, or in extreme cases, might even be willing to back up a step or two.
It’s actually more interesting to read a paper from 1976 than a current issue, because it reminds one of what life was like at that period; all the minutia which makes today’s paper inane makes yesterday’s paper like an archaeological dig. We’re surrounded by changes to which we have grown used, and often cannot remember the quality of our lives in previous decades.
If one goes back to even earlier papers, say, 40′s or 50′s, (especially local papers) one is impressed by the detail of information about events concerning the lives of other people; an article covering a wedding, for example, would state where it took place, who was officiating, what the wedding pattern was, what the bride’s dress looked like, etc. This is information for people who are really interested in other people’s lives. This is not the kind of news that makes us dumb, it really involves us in the things that are taking place in our communities, local and extended. Contemporary news divorces us from this involvement, making us dumb, by its relentless focus on the sensational; quotidian existence is not sensational, therefore we are removed from interest in what is going on around us, and become dissatisfied with our lives because they do not resemble the glitzy series of entertaining trivialities paraded before our glassy eyes and stunned sensibilities each evening, which makes us really dumb.
Also, the reason the political events of the national and world-wide stage covered by the news are not more meaningful is that people have been educated to believe the Economy is the only thing that matters; if people could really be stirred to outrage by the series of petty betrayals, subterfuge and deception represented by most political events, then news coverage of these things would be highly significant, but as it is, people are made to be satisfied with their “bread and circuses”, and sink beyond the reach of any penetrating concern into a slough of semi-contented lethargy. The “News” is intended to perpetuate this condition.
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