Directions to a new blog

Today I inaugurated a new blog at http://www.michaelgrant.com/newsblog/. The blog below, “Conjugating the News,” is the introductory blog at the new site and is offered here as your reference to this new work. This blog will continue in its general essay form, and the new blog has a specific focus, explained below. I hope to see you there, as well as here. MG


Conjugating the News

Most Americans have a strange, but innocent, belief about how the news media decides what is and isn’t news.

Growing criticism of the media at the beginning of the new century has encouraged many of them to give voice to that belief, and the voice is instructive. One critic, in a recent letter to the editor n San Diego, CA, 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 first-year journalism students 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 social sciences class in every American high school. In the Introduction to its 2001 book, “The Element of Journalism,” the Committee of Concerned Journalists states: “In the new century, one of the most profound questions for democratic society is whether an independent press survives. The answer will depend on whether journalists have the clarity and conviction to articulate what an independent press means, and whether, as citizens, the rest of us care.” The answer from citizens, according to Stuart Jewell, is that citizens have no idea what to care about. They have never been taught what their role is.

That is the purpose of this course of instruction. Welcome to one journalist’s attempt to articulate what an independent press means. It is time for the public to learn its responsibility in the media-public relationship, as a step in accepting that responsibility. If a course in civics equips students with the information and means to participate in a democratic society, “Conjugating the News” will provide students the knowledge and background to become discerning consumers of information, in which they are immersed every single day. Their subject of study will be the same subject that media professionals have been studying for years.

Actually, my first-year journalism 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, the survey “Mass Media and Society” course. 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 next 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, as if they were notes in a reporter’s notebook, 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, more than 200 years later, 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, that the media turned into a business – sure as hell should be, too. Public knowledge of where news comes from is vital to a basic understanding, and a basic acceptance, of how this enormously powerful, beyond abridging, press, the mainstream media, does its job. That acceptance is at the heart of the “profound question” posed by the Committee of Concerned Journalists for democratic society in the 21st century.

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 a second media function, totally separate and distinct from information and news, has evolved. The 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 second, enormously powerful, function of the media, is a powerful second reason for public education in the conjugation of the human responses that started it all.