Roughly speaking, I think we have three main political problems in this country: 1) that too many people with a megaphone talk crap; 2) that too many citizens believe crap; and 3) the ratio of crap to non-crap in the public dialogue is much too high.
These three political problems can be roughly reformulated as follows: 1) our news media are broken; 2) civic education is broken; 3) political leadership is broken.
I’m not going to bother to support these contentions right now, but instead throw out unsupported assertions as to why each is true. Some of these assertions are commonplace and easily supported. Some are probably true, but require more support than is in the public dialogue right now. And some I’m just throwing out for the hell of it. These three problems are in no way discrete: they are all thoroughly interpenetrated. The lists are not meant to be exhaustive: there is lots more wrong.
Today, we deal with a broken media, the megaphones for the squawk that is our civic dialogue.
1) Too many people with a megaphone talk crap; our news media are broken:
a. Unfit people are given access to the media – The ratio of Pat Robertsons, Tea Baggers, bloviating reporters, movie stars, sports stars and just plain morons who get air time/column inches etc. is way too high. Who cares what these people think about political issues? They know little, and have no standing to offer an intelligent opinion beyond any person on the street.
b. Fit people are denied access to the media – The ratio of academics and genuine subject-matter experts who get air time/column inches etc. is way too low. Moreover, the range of the few who do get exposure is way too narrow. These people have real expertise in a given subject, from air pollution to dissident movements in Islam. Why not tap into opinions which have some basis in study and experience?
c. Reporters are on screen much too much – Does this sound strange to you? Then you are too young to remember that even famous reporters in the early days of television like Edward R. Murrow and Lowell Thomas were almost always disembodied voices from off-screen. Their voices spoke while video ran of the story they were reporting. This meant a number of things: 1) they were valued for their reporting; 2) they didn’t have to be beautiful. Because in our society, perceptions of beauty and youth correspond tightly, this virtually guarantees a pool of reporters who are largely inexperienced. By limiting television reporters to the videogenic, television eliminates a huge number of people who would be good reporters, and includes a high number of good-looking potential morons and naifs.
d. Reporting is now a profession – Again, if this sounds strange to you, you are young. Reporting used to be a craft – verbal carpentry, if you will: finding out who, what, why, when, where and how, getting it double-sourced and writing it in coherent English to a deadline. This work was done mostly by high-school graduates (of course, in those days, most white high school graduates could do this). The work paid little and only people who loved it did it, without much prospect of reward. Now, journalists have to major in journalism in college. College and journalism school are very expensive these days. Although capstone pay is high, starting pay is very low, so only young people who can be supported by their parents for a few more years after college go into the profession. Guess why journalists are no longer “paladins of the people” but somehow all seem to gravitate toward the opinions of the rich and the wanna-be rich? Professionalization also means that young reporters are hoping for a career, which makes them mostly gutless.
e. Reporters are ignorant of the background to their stories – As the recent stompings of Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper on Celebrity Jeopardy indicate, generalists who are supposed to report on a range facts simply don’t know enough of them. Because they spend lots of time speaking with ill-informed people and not enough time with well-informed ones (see items a. and b.), reporters are under a constant barrage of lies, spin and opinion masquerading as fact. Because they do not know enough of the facts themselves, everything in the civic dialogue just appears to be in contention. In many cases, they are too damned ignorant to know crap from fact. It doesn’t help that they are too scared for their jobs to call out crap, and too young to have lived through things being discussed and therefore have a suspicion that they are hearing crap, but in many instances, they just don’t know crap from fact. Because all truth is merely a matter of opinion – we are quickly abandoning any practice of the Anglo-American empirical tradition – they are not going to bothered trying to sort out crap from fact.
f. Journalists run in herds, because they are scared, lazy and ignorant.
g. Journalism is the most arrogant profession, having long since surpassed medicine. Doctors will admit that they were wrong occasionally. Try to get a journalist to do it sometime. The rest of us just don’t understand how hard their jobs are, how much expertise they have, how much preparation they do. Baloney.
h. And of course, journalism has been corporatized. Career journalists know who their masters are.
