| Author's Podcast
1 February, 2006 - American News is Comedy 2 February, 2006 - A Uniformly Uninformed Citizenry 7 February, 2006 - ... Nor Any Drop to Drink 8 February, 2006 - Reader Comments 10 February, 2006 - Lead by Example: OUR STORY 15 February, 2006 - Kidnap & Ransom: Perspective 23 February, 2006 - Kidnap & Ransom: Conclusion |
2 February, 2006: My first job after college and completing the requirements of my Watson Fellowship in Egypt, was at a public mental health institution in Connecticut. I worked on the locked, male Admissions ward. As part of the Intake screening process, we would pose three questions to our potential new "guests." What is your name? What year is it? Who is the President of the United States? The assumption was that any sane person could easily respond to these three questions. Having lived in various parts of the United States, I can attest to the fact that there are places you can go in this country where you'll find people who might not be able to pass such a vetting today. And we consider them sane enough to vote and drive automobiles.
Anyone having watched an episode of television's "Tonight Show with Jay Leno," and having seen his "Jay Walking" segment, knows that any variation on this three-question theme can produce even more alarming results.
Because we all live within the news echo-chamber, we also know that if you asked a majority of Americans a few months back if Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, it would not be a question you'd want to use in order to vet the sanity of the American people. Other examples abound.
I think of this idea of judging people's fitness to make decisions for themselves based on the accurate information they have not only because this project is about journalism and facts but also because of a quote that is often bandied about. If you asked most people who said, "An informed citizenry is the bulwark of democracy ... " the answer, "Thomas Jefferson, of course!" would be immediately offered. According to the Jefferson Library at the Monticello Web site, that's a spurious claim. You can't find that quote anywhere in Jefferson's speeches, letters or other public writings. Hmmn.
What you can find in Mr. Jefferson's writings that does relate to an informed citizenry is in his letter to Dr. Price of 8 January, 1789:
" ... whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights"I'm going to mentally wander a bit more around my main topic, if you'll indulge me for another few moments, please.
In my profession - and especially among those of us who have been called upon to produce daily or weekly columns in order to pay the bills - there are certain institutional clichÈs that I like to call the "fallback articles." I'm sure you've seen them. At the close or beginning of a year one can produce a piece that either recaps the events of the year or makes predictions for coming year. During July or August, one can do a piece on the "slow news/dog days." Neither editors nor readers will complain much, even though these articles are clichés of the trade and exhibition of your lack of imagination.
Another one of the fallbacks of the last twenty-five years is the "information overload" article. I'd wager that every month for the last twenty years, at least, some hack, somewhere on the planet has produced a piece about the rush of information we are made to process, per force, because of the bombardment of faxes, billboards, e-mail, instant messaging, yatta-yatta-yatta. This fallback has a beard as long as the others now. Still editors and readers tolerate it.
Worse yet, doesn't this fallback beg the question, "IF we are so bombarded with information, why do we so bad at getting the story straight?"
Let us wander back to vetting our sanity, the spurious attribution to Thomas Jefferson and my main point.
Even though it was not Jefferson, someone, somewhere came up with a damned good sound bite and a tenet taken to heart by Americans both concerned with the political future and the nature of a free press. Journalists far and wide have taken this notion as part of their mission statement - at least the good ones. But every time I hear this quote, I want to ask, "Informed by whom?"
The fallback column on information-overload works for us because we all believe we are getting a surfeit of information. Upon reflection, some of us further believe that a lot of it is bad information. So the source of the informing is very, very important indeed in my view.
Let me make one other point, which we'll come back to: a lot of the information that we accept as true, and will pass on to others as true, is dependent upon our own self-interests. In other words, the notion of "objective journalism" is a myth. Anyone who claims otherwise is expert at deluding themselves or is knowingly lying. The word media is, in that way, directly related to the word mediate in its second meaning, to convey between.
In other words, the function of any medium - a newspaper, a television broadcast, a Web log - is to convey some bit(s) of the information between reality and you.
It's a well-echoed fact, too, that we Americans are probably among the most ill informed population in the industrialized world. We have to look no further than the sagas of Stephen Glass, Jason Blair, Judith Miller and Bob Woodward to see the beginnings of the evidentiary dossier. But these eminences are not the only culprits.
After all, because we take our information based on our own self-interests, it is easy to understand that many of us bend to the opinions of our bosses. No one wants to get on the wrong side of the person who holds the reins of their own economic security, be that person a reporter at the New York Times or a guy working at a saw mill. If the boss is adamant in insisting that illegal immigrants are the reason local people can't find jobs, lots of the workers are going to grunt "Uh-huh," and some are going to repeat the assertion to their friends and some are going to believe that's the end of the matter.
If co-workers around the water cooler insist that Saddam Hussein masterminded the 9/11 attacks and it's time we took some payback to the Iraqi people, ditto. The information we get from co-workers - in many cases the people we spend more of our year with than our own families - about race, class and what is desirable impacts our view of truth, too. "I heard on Lou Dobbs last night that ... " is just thrown in to validate the factoid ... or the out-and-out lie.
Mr. Jefferson's time was dominated by pamphleteers and town meetings, gatherings of the local gentry to discuss the issues of the day while the plebes were sitting over a grog, if they could get one, and leaving all decisions, political and fiduciary, to men like Jefferson himself. That we genuflect to the world of "the Framers," has always been a mystery to me, so separated is their concept of "democracy" and our own. We should choke on quoting Jefferson or Adams about democracy - if we gave the reality of their world, and their likely actual worldview, any thought.
At the Democracy and Digital Media conference at MIT, in May, 1998, Michael Shudson put it this way:
"Imagine yourself a voter in the world of colonial Virginia where George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson learned their politics. As a matter of law, you must be a white male owning at least a modest amount of property. Your journey to vote may take several hours since there is probably only one polling place in the county. As you approach the courthouse, you see the sheriff, supervising the election. Beside him stand two candidates for office, both of them members of prominent local families. You watch the most prominent members of the community, the leading landowner and clergyman, approach the sheriff and announce their votes in loud, clear voices. When your turn comes, you do the same. Then you step over to the candidate for whom you have voted, and he treats you to a glass of rum punch. Your vote has been an act of assent, restating and reaffirming the social hierarchy of a community where no one but a local notable would think of standing for office, where voting is conducted entirely in public view, and where voters are ritually rewarded by the gentlemen they favor."So much for an informed citizenry.
That is not to say, by any means, that I'm an admirer of our own uniformly uninformed citizenry. I simply mean not to idealize a form of democracy that has never existed or, if it did, only for a brief moment. My larger concern is that of from whom we get our information. That is the issue this Blog post is meant to bring to your attention and place in your consideration.
I could certainly rail on about Big Corporate Media conglomerates, Fox News's habit of making things up and broadcasting them on television, etc. but you've already read or heard all of that from someone else in the news echo-chamber that we all inhabit.
This post is not about offering you conclusions, you see, only food for thought.
Thanks for dropping by.
Go to Previous Post - AMERICAN NEWS IS COMEDY | Go to the Next Post - ... Nor Any Drop to Drink | Go to the Fourth post - Reader Comments | Go to the Fifth post - Lead by Example: OUR STORY | Go to the Sixth post - Kidnap & Ransom: Perspective | Go to Final post - Kidnap & Ransom: Conclusion |
© 2006, Rod Amis.
E-mail your comments to rod@g21.net.
