Good News-Bad News
- At October 26, 2004
- By Bob Howe
- In Blog Posts
26
About Me
First my bona fides, such as they are: I have a degree in journalism from Brooklyn College. I worked briefly as a reporter for a weekly newspaper here in Brooklyn, and was a columnist for that paper for several years. I also wrote a series of columns for a Eugene weekly, and I’ve written some nonfiction pieces for magazines here and there. I spent more than ten years working on the other side of the fence, in public relations, for two different colleges and a handful of other non-profits and businesses. I’ve written reams of institutional copy at those jobs, and “placed” stories in a handful of big newspapers and television news shows.
What I want to make clear is that I don’t pretend to expertise as a journalist on a daily newspaper. What expertise I have is as an observer and consumer of journalism, shaped by more than a decade of following the news to anticipate news editors’ story needs, and trends in journalism, especially as it concerned higher education.
News Habits
I read the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Salon, the BBC Online and the Washington Post daily (though, as I’ll, explain in a moment, not every word of every issue); I read New York Newsday (the Queens edition), and the New York Post once or twice a week. Once or twice a month I’ll read the Miami Herald (especially Carl Hiaasen’s column), the Los Angeles Times, the Portland Oregonian and the Arizona Republic. More infrequently I’ll pick up the Village Voice and one of a handful of weekly New York papers. I subscribe to a daily news feed, a roundup of news about the media business, from Mediabistro.Com, and I read nonfiction voraciously. I occasionally watch network news, 60 Minutes and Nightline; I watch Charlie Rose and Frontline more frequently.
About reading selectively: almost no one, except institutionalized persons upon whose hands time hangs heavy, reads every word of every story in the newspaper, unless it is a very small newspaper. I frequently don’t read all the way to the end of stories, even on topics that interest me. The classic news story is written in the “inverted pyramid” style, with the most important information in the lead paragraph, and each subsequent paragraph carries details in descending order of importance, as calculated by the newspaper, its editors and reporters. Analysis and feature pieces don’t adhere to this formula as often or as tightly as news stories. Columns and magazine articles are organized differently, and if I don’t finish one of those it’s because the writer has bored me. Life is too short to dance with ugly men, as Lori Wright once told me.
The Case for Murders, Fires and Accidents
Those people are in the minority. TV news especially lives and dies by ratings, and believe me, if a significant number of people were tuning out because of “bad” news, stations would transform their programming overnight. I think television news is a horror, but not because it focuses on bad news. Television news offers much less information than sensation, and interesting looking stories take precedence over substantive ones. TV news programs are almost exclusively patterned after ABC’s “Eyewitness News” format: multiple anchors who interact with one another between reading introductions to film clips and remote feeds. Every second that the anchors use in joshing the weatherman about the weekend forecast is a second less of real news. The so-called “news hole,” the space available for news (as opposed to advertising, promotions, banter, etc…), is tiny in television news as compared to print journalism: you can get more news from one page of the New York Times than 30 minutes of evening news. What television news excels at, of course, is the telling picture. Sometimes it’s worth 1,000 words (the expression on the face of an exhausted marine outside Baghdad); sometimes not (Donald Rumsfeld feeding glib non-answers to a Fox News anchor).
The more I think about this issue, the more I have to say that I don’t believe you can break down the news into “good” and “bad” stories. Journalism, at bottom, is storytelling: “I was there and this is what I saw,” or “Joe Smith was there, and this is what he said about it.” And storytelling is about drama. A trapped family in a tenement fire; a shootout between police and armed robbers; a river that overflows its banks and sends people fleeing for the high ground: those are all dramatic situations. It’s what sells newspapers and TV stations. It’s not a surprise, nor is it wrong, that people respond most immediately and viscerally to these dramatic, human-scale stories.
The murders, fires and accidents that are the staples of news reporting are the descendants of the stories humans were telling around communal fires 100,000 years ago: Then Joe looked up and the fucking cave bear was RIGHT THERE… Those kinds of stories have a built-in niche in the human psyche because they have been adaptive for us as a species. The emotional weight of dramatic stories insures that the lessons they teach will be remembered. It’s only in recent human history, since the invention of the printing press, maybe—an eyeblink in evolutionary time—that disaster stories are maladaptive. There are few lessons Americans can learn from, for example, a story about a fatal bus accident in Islamabad. Stories like that depress us, but we don’t take away any useful lessons from them. And even the stories we can benefit from have to be framed correctly to engage our emotions. A news story that says 41,000 Americans die in traffic accidents every year is a dry abstraction, but if Primetime Live does a story about a pretty, blue-eyed, blonde toddler who’s orphaned by a car accident, out come the hankies, and people will be retelling that story by the watercooler the next day.
The other thing that catches the psyche, besides danger and conflict, is the unusual. As the maxim goes: “dog bites man” isn’t a story, but “man bites dog” certainly is. Of course the grand slam of news stories is one about celebrity, conflict, death and sex—the weirder the better. Why does celebrity matter? Who cares if a guy you never heard of murders his wife in some far-off place? But a celebrity is someone you know—at least it feels like you do—so when O.J. Simpson stabs his ex-wife to death it’s a drama as close as if it happened to the family next door.
That it’s only natural to be attracted to dramatic stories doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to stretch a bit and read outside the comfort zone. Stories about welfare reform, healthcare, and fiscal policy aren’t as exciting as murders, fires, and accidents, but since we live in a world that’s vastly more complicated than the one in which our storytelling preferences evolved, we sometimes need to force ourselves to wade through them to be better informed citizens.
But reading newspapers alone isn’t enough: there is neither the space nor the interest in unpacking complicated issues for daily (or even weekly) news outlets. Even the heavy analysis pieces are streamlined and, unfortunately, dumbed down. If you only read the New York Times Science section, for example, it might take you a very long time to realize that evolutionary theory is the underpinning of modern biology, and that in serious scientific circles there is NO consideration of the merits of creationism, even under its stealth title of “intelligent design.” Likewise reading a good newspaper, even several good newspapers, religiously will not make you well informed about history, climatology, physics, foreign languages, political science, literature or engineering. For the all-important context you are on your own.
Moist with Amniotic Fluid
“…If you dive in fresh as a newborn babe?” hits the nail right on the head. Without context, without a sense of how the world works, you can’t tell. Some context comes from using a variety of news sources; some comes from knowing the slant of a particular newspaper or TV station; and some comes reading widely outside of journalism.
Acquiring the background to parse the meaning of the news is time-consuming and ongoing. The more complicated the world gets, the more effort it takes to understand it. There is no natural law that says everything should be comprehensible just because we want it to be so, and we will never acquire all the relevant facts solely by reading newspapers. I know enough about the history of World War II, for example, to judge as moonshine the ravings of Holocaust revisionists, no matter how plausible they may seem. (A newspaper might call revisionist David Irving “controversial” or more strongly “discredited,” but that would give you no sense of Irving as an unreconstructed anti-semite and Hitler apologist.) But I know less about string theory than a dog knows about baseball: I have no idea, very often, whether a particular notion is arrant nonsense or cutting-edge physics. I just don’t have enough context, nor will I probably have enough time in my life to acquire such context.
Politics and national policy, fortunately, is a little easier to grasp than advanced physics. If you watch and read a variety of news sources, and not just Fox News and a few cable outlets, you will know that things are not going well in Iraq. There is just no hiding it, no matter how much positive spin you want to put on the story. In some cases you can go to the source material and read it directly to decide for yourself whether it is being unreasonably spun by the media, or by one party or another. If, after a yearlong search of the country, the C.I.A. issues a report that says there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after 1991, and that report reflects badly on both the C.I.A. and the current administration, it seems likely to be true. Especially since that information is corroborated by events on the ground during the war, and by the concurrence of other reports by the U.S. government, the United Nations, and Great Britain. So if the president tells Americans “Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States and to world peace,” you have some facts at your disposal upon which to make a decision about the president’s truthfulness.
Ecclesiastes Agonistes
Well, no one news source is absolutely reliable. As Damon Runyon said, however, “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet.” Some sources, on average, are vastly more reliable than others. How do you know which ones are which? I knew you would ask that. Again, we go back to context: you start by weighing a news outlet’s record against things you’ve already got the facts about. If the New York Post reports that John Lennon, Elvis Presley and Karen Carpenter are giving a concert in Central Park, you can reasonably assume that the Post is, in this case, unreliable. Add enough of those observations up and you have a way to judge a publication’s overall reliability.
Likewise, if the BBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, Newsweek, Time Magazine and The Tablet are all reporting that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, but Sean Hannity and the barking heads at Fox News say Saddam Hussein had nuclear-tipped ICBMs aimed at Washington, you can pretty much guess Which Of These News Outlets is Not Like The Other.
Of course most of the issues are more subjective, and require more sophisticated parsing. Which means, unfortunately, more context, damnit.
Attribution, Attribution, Attribution
Well, there’s some justification for that. Newspaper reporters aren’t the experts, they merely tell us what the experts have to say, and it too-often does lead to a spurious equity of opinion that doesn’t exist in the real world.
As I pointed out in another comment, It’s the media’s corporate posture of neutrality that cedes the turf to the most outrageous liar. The Bush campaign issues a press release saying that John Kerry is actually a vampire who has to drink the blood of Christian babies to stay alive, and that Kerry furthermore takes orders from Stalin and Hitler, who are not actually dead. The Kerry campaign issues a denial. The New York Times prints both the Bush charge and Kerry’s denial, and in doing so has achieved “balance,” without regard to physical reality outside the confines of Karl “Dr. Strangelove” Rove’s skull.
On the other hand, this election has seen the (belated, anemic) rise of the fact-checkers, and if you get your news from a diversity of sources, you can tell that the tide of truth is flowing against the Bush campaign. News organizations are actually discussing the problem of achieving editorial balance without projecting a spurious equivalence between the frequent and outright falsehoods of the Bush administration on the one hand, and the relatively few and minor ones of the Kerry campaign.
You Can Lead A Horse to Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think
Reliable news coverage, not perfect news coverage, is out there. Yes it competes with very biased, simplistic news coverage, but news consumers’ cluttered radar isn’t the whole story. There are a lot of people who’d rather watch Bill O’Reilly be belligerently certain about things, than read a nuanced policy piece in the Washington Post.
A 2001 Gallup poll found that A majority (57 percent) of Americans choose “creationism” over “evolution” when asked which term best describes human origins. I think that’s a pretty fair indication of the influence of anti-intellectualism and evangelism in American life. The facts on evolution are, if anything, easier to come by than the those on national policy: there are hundreds of popular books on evolution, and evolutionary theory is a staple of PBS science programming for the last three decades.
At some point we have to concede that the fault doesn’t lie wholly with the media: that there are a LOT of Americans out there who’d rather believe comforting lies than difficult truths; people who are intellectually lazy and comfortable in their biases. If they are being manipulated by the administration, by big media, or by secret masonic cabals, it’s because to some extent they want to be manipulated.