Just today, Slate ran an article about Michael Crichton’s fifteen-year-old prediction of mass-media extinction. The resulting story was interesting, but the reader-response question at the end caught my eye: What do you want in a news service? I was slightly surprised to realize that this question had been percolating for a while in the back of my head, and thanks to some recent reading material I even had a response mostly ready. This is what I sent in:
Excellent article on Crichton’s “mediasaurus” predictions. I hadn’t heard about the essay before (probably because, being only 10 at the time of its publication, I wasn’t really listening), but in retrospect his commentary about mainstream news media seems surprisingly bang-on.
I’ve lately been reading the excellent book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen, which examines the myriad problems plaguing high-school history textbooks. One of the recurring issues is the style in which they’re written; passive voice abounds, and almost all events happen more or less in a vacuum, which reduces history to a tedious list of dates and events. There was almost no effort in any of the textbooks Loewen studied to examine cause and effect, or present historical theories as to why things occurred. Often – especially in matters of foreign policy – this was due to the fact that doing so would paint the United States government in an unflattering light.
This struck a chord with me, not just from my own fuzzy high school memories, but because I’ve often noticed that about news stories, too. I remember being told in school that, when writing in a journalistic context, you should always answer the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. Modern news stories almost never answer that last to any satisfactory degree. You see pundits on TV proclaiming their opinions about one thing or another, but they almost never give much support for their arguments – and they never put things in any kind of historical context. Shortly after the September 11th attacks, Bush made an attempt to answer the “why” question with his now-famous “They hate our freedoms” speech, which even at age 18 I could tell was patent BS. Yet every major news outlet picked it up and trumpeted it as a national slogan. Bin Laden’s actual publicly declared reasons for attacking – resentment for the economic embargo against Hussein’s Iraq, our growing military presence in the Middle East, and most of all our economic and cultural might, as symbolized by the World Trade Center – received only minimal coverage, if any. None of the stories I saw out of mainstream media gave any indication as to the political pressures, racial/religious issues, and foreign-policy problems that provoked the attack in the first place. I remember being completely confused and annoyed that I couldn’t find a reasonable answer to the “why” question from any of the sources I was supposed to be trusting for information.
I would hazard a guess that many of the problems with mainstream news media stem from the same issues that high-school history textbooks have – they’re trying to sell a narrative, and when they come across information that doesn’t conform to that narrative, it gets more or less left by the wayside. As a result, there’s no coherent sense from any of the major news outlets as to why (for instance) North Korea might have given nuclear weapons/information to Syria, what might’ve happened in the past to encourage their hostile attitude, or even what the heck is going on with the disarmament talks. Simplicity sells – the mainstream population wants simple answers that reassure them that everything’s all right. (Or at least that’s what they’ve been consistently buying from the news for the past few decades.) The problem is, when bad things continue to happen, it leaves the populace either confused as to what’s gone wrong, or clinging to jingoist slogans such as “the towelheads hate our freedoms” to explain things to themselves. (I wish I could tell you that I made that last one up, or even that I’d only seen it used as an argument once or twice. I really do.)
What I’d like to see is non-simplified news reporting – articles that don’t just speak in the present tense, but also examine past events and their potential contributions to the current situation, and most of all give us some idea of what the people involved are thinking. Nothing occurs in a vacuum; when a person (especially a person representing a nation) takes an action, there are inevitably reasons. I, for one, would like to know why – and if, in the process of investigating, the reporters make public information that’s been largely ignored by the mainstream press, so much the better.
Of course, if all that is a bit long and involved, I’ll admit that I’d settle for Brian’s answer:
Rupert Murdoch set on fire. On national television.
