Conjugating the News

Last week in this space, I wrote a short tutorial blog of how mainstream media – or MSM, in the current media shorthand – works, and how vital it was that the public understand those workings. That piece brought a response from a San Diego reader who found the heart of the issue in a single sentence.

“It’s strange to me,” said the reader, Stuart Jewell, “that almost all columnists and reporters assume the talent of being able to define what ‘the people’ want to know and how urgently they want to know it.”

It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism is no mystery; it is as black-and-white as mathematics. Journalism uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs. If my “Introduction to News Writing” students at Grossmont College can’t define what news is by the end of the semester, and its relative levels of urgency, then they flunk the class.

This “talent” appears strange to the general public, who Stuart Jewell represents so well, because they never studied “News” in school. Not their fault; it isn’t taught. But it should be, right alongside English, civics and computer literacy. In this age, of all ages, the study of “News” should not be confined to journalism studies; it should be a core curriculum class in every American high school.

Actually, my students never flunk my class because they don’t know what news is. They may flunk because they can’t spell, can’t punctuate, and slide around grammar as if it were a greased flagpole. But they don’t flunk the news part, because of a wonderfully elegant wrinkle: they know what the news is before they ever get to my class.

I didn’t understand that until about five years ago. I had been teaching, for some years, a survey course titled “Mass Media and Society.” Doing that work, it became clear to me that the definition of “news,” and the values and categories of news, were not created by the media. They were created by early humans, tens of thousands of years before the media existed. Taken together, they constituted a “reaction package,” that humans from the earliest days to the present, carry around with them all the time. The media simply took that reaction package, starting about 3,500 years ago, and turned it into a business.

It made me curious. I wanted to test it. Back in my “Introduction to News Writing” classes, on the first day of the semester, I said, “Before I teach you a single thing in this class, you already know what the news is.” I gave them a page of notes, several lines of details, arranged randomly, about an event that had “happened” that day.

“Imagine you are reporters for the morning paper. I want you to look at this information, then write the first sentence of the story – what this information is about – and bring it with you to our next class. I will ask you to read your sentence, and we will see if you know what the news is.”

Their rate of success was about 90 percent, and after five years – 10 semesters – of testing, it remains steady at about that level. They were carrying the reaction package around all along. It must mean that most – practically all – of the American population knows what the news is. It must mean that Stuart Jewell knows what the news is. So what is it, about what columnists and reporters do, that seems strange to him?

It brings us back to the beginning: education. A free press is vital to the survival of a democracy, so vital that it predates the Constitution. Very interesting to realize that the Constitution did not create press freedom. The First Amendment states, in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.” The key word is “abridging,” which means to reduce in scope, or diminish. That means the framers understood, in the infant democracy after the Revolution, that freedom of the press already existed.

The First Amendment guarantees the press almost absolute power to do its job. Now we have evidence of citizens to whom this work, of columnists and reporters, seems “strange.” I remember that strangeness very well, leafing through an algebra book that had just been issued to me and thinking, “I’ll never learn this stuff.” But I did, and I was allowed to move on toward graduation.

What is strange to me is that if algebra is required for high school graduation in the United States of America, then news – this conscious-unconscious reaction package that we all carry – sure as hell should be, too. It is vital to a basic understanding, and a basic acceptance, of how this enormously powerful, beyond abridging, press, the mainstream media, does its job.

There is something else the public needs to understand. The media originally turned the human “reaction package” into a business to keep people informed. But that same reaction package makes people vulnerable to manipulation. Over time, the media, and groups (entertainment, marketing, political) who are expert in using media, learned and developed extremely sophisticated ways to use the package to manipulate public reactions. That is a second, and also enormously powerful, function of the media, and a powerful second reason for public education in the conjugation of the human responses that started it all.