What is news? Let's just think about that for a minute.
Every semester, students come into my classroom believing they're going to learn some professional secrets about the media.
They always seem pleased when, on the first day, I ask them: "Who is responsible for deciding what is, and isn't, news?"
The mumbles rise tentatively. "Why . . . the media." The silent ones hear the mumbles, and embrace them, and all the faces acquire a kind of glow, as if they're about to hear an answer to a question they've wondered about all their lives. They think I'm going to tell them how the media does it. And I am. It's not easy, because they've known the answer all along, and an answer in plain sight can be the hardest kind to see, and to understand.
"That's right," I say. "It is the media's job to decide, out of all the things that happen in all the towns and cities and countries in the world, every day, twenty-four hours a day, what is and isn't news. So. How do they decide?"
One answer: "There are big stories, and there are little stories. Anybody can see that."
Anybody can see that. So quickly they get the hint, that they've had the answer all along.
"But what makes one story big, and another story little, and a third story medium-sized?"
"The editors have rules."
"What kind of rules?"
"Rules that tell which stories are big, and which aren't."
"Where do they get these rules?"
"Learn them in journalism school."
"Where did the journalism school get the rules?"
"Somebody made them up. Gutenberg, maybe."
Invariably, it comes around, in classrooms, in cocktail chat, and in letters to the editor, that the rules of news are somehow the arbitrary creation of the media. The subject usually comes up in the context of the rules being irresponsible, and requiring change to bring an arrogant media into line. People accuse the media of slanting the rules toward bad, juicy news, because "sensational stories sell."
In my files is a long letter to the editor from a woman who simply listed all the things she was "tired of," 23 items in all, from crooked politicians to crazy people scaling White House fences, and of course including O.J. Simpson, hate mongers, and biased newspapers.
"I'm tired of so many things, and I don't think I'm alone," she concluded.
Her letter inspired other letters, typified by the following, from a man: "People such as (the woman) are in the vast majority, always have been, always will be . . . she is right, she is not alone. Most people are tired of the same things. Just remember, the things she's tired of are flashed constantly in our faces by lazy TV and print reporters, editors and producers because sensational stories sell. And don't forget: It will never be newsworthy that the vast majority of people get up again each morning and make the day go well."
It will never be newsworthy! He's right, he's looking straight at it, but he doesn't realize it. Just like the student in the classroom.
The letter writer is like a person who is looking for his eyeglasses, and can't find them, because they're pushed back on his head. What he must be suggesting is that a vast, untapped market, weary of the everyday news, is waiting for some enterprising, out-of-work newsman (plenty of those around) to start up a paper: The Good News Times. As a newsman myself, I am trying to imagine the page-one headline:
Vast Majority Rises
Does Little Things; Makes Day Go Well
If our letter writer is right, The Good News Times should ride the back of the vast majority to riches surpassing Murdoch. If he is wrong, and the paper folds (once the novelty wears off) and the local bad-news rag keeps selling 400,000 copies a day, he's going to have to go back to these lazy reporters and editors and ask himself: "What do these guys know, that I don't?"
Simply put, they know where the media values come from. It is true that journalists, both print and broadcast, bring to their task many specialized tools – the inverted pyramid, interviewing skills, the ability to write a grabby first paragraph, called a lede – for which the general public has little use.
But when the issue is the definition of news, the media and the public are joined at the hip by that set of values and definitions called the media code. Always have been, always will be. Remember, the code was there before the media. All the media did, starting with Gutenberg, was turn the code into a business. Imagine the media as a sieve, through which the tide of human experience is poured, all of it, every day. The mesh of the sieve is woven from the media code, which won't let news through. Most of human experience – hard to say exactly how much, but let's say the "vast majority" – will pour right on through. Daily – or many times daily now, with the advent of the Internet and the "24-hour deadline" – the sieve will be emptied onto editors' desks, the raw material of, in newspaper publisher Philip Graham's memorable phrase, the first rough draft of history.
A student holds up a hand.
"But if the news is captured by the media code, why do people have such different opinions of what they think the news is?"
Because no two people are alike. Every human being has the ability to create an instant "values profile" for any media image which is also an exact "reaction profile" of who the human being is. Take three random people, show them the same image, or story, and listen to their responses, how individual they are. People responding to media images is like pulling the handle on a slot machine. Imagine a row of windows in your head, like windows across a slot machine, one window for each value and definition in the media code, 14 in all. Every time you look at a news story, you pull the handle on the slot. In the windows, numbers whir, and then stop, each of them somewhere between zero and 10. The number sequence is your reaction profile to that story and an exact reflection of who you are.
The media's role is to democratize the results, assigning values to the story that represent the majority. Yes, emphatically, many people will disagree with the majority, and disagreement is the essence of the democratic process. Imagine, if you can, a nation whose people could read the paper in complete, voluntary agreement every day. Contrast that image with a free nation whose media is the "news Congress" of the people. And it is a Congress free of electioneering, lobbyists and special interests.
Many even within the profession don't understand the elegant, critical simplicity of that role. An admiral was killed in a plane crash, and the paper ran a front-page color photo of the admiral's widow and young son in their eruption of grief. Reaction to the photo was swift and subsequently the subject of a column by the paper's ombudsman. Readers called the photo "disgusting." "An invasion of privacy." "Exploitation at its worst."
The ombudsman referred to the lengthy editorial debate before the decision was made to run the picture, a decision that made nobody inside the paper comfortable. The ombudsman wrote: "At issue here are basic questions about how the newspaper covers stories and the choices it makes."
And then she stopped! Bumped right into the heart of the matter and didn't see it. Turned the discussion in another direction, when the completed paragraph might have – should have – read:
"At issue here are basic questions about how the newspaper covers stories and the choices it makes. It can be a very tough business, but the newspaper is the public's proxy, obligated to respond to the people's media values and democratize them."
Which is of course what happened. In media code, the photo scores 10s for conflict, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest and sensationalism, with proximity (in a Navy town) and human interest reinforcing the others. Once the photo was taken, the paper had no more choice to run it than Barack Obama did to take office when elected. It was simple, democratic mathematics, no matter how distasteful the result to some. (The admiral's widow, incidentally, asked for a copy of the photo to save for her son.)
Those who are discouraged by their media, and by the mathematics that produce media decisions, might want to read the opening paragraphs of "The Moral Sense" (Free Press, 1993), a study of human judgment by the eminent social scientist James Q. Wilson:
"Since daily newspapers were first published, they have been filled with accounts of murder and mayhem, of political terror and human atrocities . . . If people have a common moral sense, there is scarcely any evidence of it in the matters to which journalists – and their readers – pay the greatest attention . . . .But before drawing so bleak a conclusion from his daily newspaper, the reader should ask himself why bloodletting and savagery are news. There are two answers. The first is that they are unusual. If daily life were simply a war of all against all, what would be newsworthy would be the occasional outbreak of compassion and decency, self-restraint and fair dealing . . . Amazed that such things occurred, we would explain them as either rare expressions of a personality quirk or disguised examples of clever self-dealing.
"The second reason that misery is news is because it is shocking. We recoil in horror at pictures of starving children, death camp victims, and greedy looters. Though in the heat of battle or the embrace of ideology many of us will be indifferent to suffering or inured to bloodshed, in our calm and disinterested moments we discover in ourselves an intuitive and powerful aversion to inhumanity."
It is an intuitive and powerful aversion that shows up every day in our national news Congress; the good news that the vast majority craves is always there, glowing between the lines.
Every semester, students come into my classroom believing they're going to learn some professional secrets about the media.
They always seem pleased when, on the first day, I ask them: "Who is responsible for deciding what is, and isn't, news?"
The mumbles rise tentatively. "Why . . . the media." The silent ones hear the mumbles, and embrace them, and all the faces acquire a kind of glow, as if they're about to hear an answer to a question they've wondered about all their lives. They think I'm going to tell them how the media does it. And I am. It's not easy, because they've known the answer all along, and an answer in plain sight can be the hardest kind to see, and to understand.
"That's right," I say. "It is the media's job to decide, out of all the things that happen in all the towns and cities and countries in the world, every day, twenty-four hours a day, what is and isn't news. So. How do they decide?"
One answer: "There are big stories, and there are little stories. Anybody can see that."
Anybody can see that. So quickly they get the hint, that they've had the answer all along.
"But what makes one story big, and another story little, and a third story medium-sized?"
"The editors have rules."
"What kind of rules?"
"Rules that tell which stories are big, and which aren't."
"Where do they get these rules?"
"Learn them in journalism school."
"Where did the journalism school get the rules?"
"Somebody made them up. Gutenberg, maybe."
Invariably, it comes around, in classrooms, in cocktail chat, and in letters to the editor, that the rules of news are somehow the arbitrary creation of the media. The subject usually comes up in the context of the rules being irresponsible, and requiring change to bring an arrogant media into line. People accuse the media of slanting the rules toward bad, juicy news, because "sensational stories sell."
In my files is a long letter to the editor from a woman who simply listed all the things she was "tired of," 23 items in all, from crooked politicians to crazy people scaling White House fences, and of course including O.J. Simpson, hate mongers, and biased newspapers.
"I'm tired of so many things, and I don't think I'm alone," she concluded.
Her letter inspired other letters, typified by the following, from a man: "People such as (the woman) are in the vast majority, always have been, always will be . . . she is right, she is not alone. Most people are tired of the same things. Just remember, the things she's tired of are flashed constantly in our faces by lazy TV and print reporters, editors and producers because sensational stories sell. And don't forget: It will never be newsworthy that the vast majority of people get up again each morning and make the day go well."
It will never be newsworthy! He's right, he's looking straight at it, but he doesn't realize it. Just like the student in the classroom.
The letter writer is like a person who is looking for his eyeglasses, and can't find them, because they're pushed back on his head. What he must be suggesting is that a vast, untapped market, weary of the everyday news, is waiting for some enterprising, out-of-work newsman (plenty of those around) to start up a paper: The Good News Times. As a newsman myself, I am trying to imagine the page-one headline:
Vast Majority Rises
Does Little Things; Makes Day Go Well
If our letter writer is right, The Good News Times should ride the back of the vast majority to riches surpassing Murdoch. If he is wrong, and the paper folds (once the novelty wears off) and the local bad-news rag keeps selling 400,000 copies a day, he's going to have to go back to these lazy reporters and editors and ask himself: "What do these guys know, that I don't?"
Simply put, they know where the media values come from. It is true that journalists, both print and broadcast, bring to their task many specialized tools – the inverted pyramid, interviewing skills, the ability to write a grabby first paragraph, called a lede – for which the general public has little use.
But when the issue is the definition of news, the media and the public are joined at the hip by that set of values and definitions called the media code. Always have been, always will be. Remember, the code was there before the media. All the media did, starting with Gutenberg, was turn the code into a business. Imagine the media as a sieve, through which the tide of human experience is poured, all of it, every day. The mesh of the sieve is woven from the media code, which won't let news through. Most of human experience – hard to say exactly how much, but let's say the "vast majority" – will pour right on through. Daily – or many times daily now, with the advent of the Internet and the "24-hour deadline" – the sieve will be emptied onto editors' desks, the raw material of, in newspaper publisher Philip Graham's memorable phrase, the first rough draft of history.
A student holds up a hand.
"But if the news is captured by the media code, why do people have such different opinions of what they think the news is?"
Because no two people are alike. Every human being has the ability to create an instant "values profile" for any media image which is also an exact "reaction profile" of who the human being is. Take three random people, show them the same image, or story, and listen to their responses, how individual they are. People responding to media images is like pulling the handle on a slot machine. Imagine a row of windows in your head, like windows across a slot machine, one window for each value and definition in the media code, 14 in all. Every time you look at a news story, you pull the handle on the slot. In the windows, numbers whir, and then stop, each of them somewhere between zero and 10. The number sequence is your reaction profile to that story and an exact reflection of who you are.
The media's role is to democratize the results, assigning values to the story that represent the majority. Yes, emphatically, many people will disagree with the majority, and disagreement is the essence of the democratic process. Imagine, if you can, a nation whose people could read the paper in complete, voluntary agreement every day. Contrast that image with a free nation whose media is the "news Congress" of the people. And it is a Congress free of electioneering, lobbyists and special interests.
Many even within the profession don't understand the elegant, critical simplicity of that role. An admiral was killed in a plane crash, and the paper ran a front-page color photo of the admiral's widow and young son in their eruption of grief. Reaction to the photo was swift and subsequently the subject of a column by the paper's ombudsman. Readers called the photo "disgusting." "An invasion of privacy." "Exploitation at its worst."
The ombudsman referred to the lengthy editorial debate before the decision was made to run the picture, a decision that made nobody inside the paper comfortable. The ombudsman wrote: "At issue here are basic questions about how the newspaper covers stories and the choices it makes."
And then she stopped! Bumped right into the heart of the matter and didn't see it. Turned the discussion in another direction, when the completed paragraph might have – should have – read:
"At issue here are basic questions about how the newspaper covers stories and the choices it makes. It can be a very tough business, but the newspaper is the public's proxy, obligated to respond to the people's media values and democratize them."
Which is of course what happened. In media code, the photo scores 10s for conflict, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest and sensationalism, with proximity (in a Navy town) and human interest reinforcing the others. Once the photo was taken, the paper had no more choice to run it than Barack Obama did to take office when elected. It was simple, democratic mathematics, no matter how distasteful the result to some. (The admiral's widow, incidentally, asked for a copy of the photo to save for her son.)
Those who are discouraged by their media, and by the mathematics that produce media decisions, might want to read the opening paragraphs of "The Moral Sense" (Free Press, 1993), a study of human judgment by the eminent social scientist James Q. Wilson:
"Since daily newspapers were first published, they have been filled with accounts of murder and mayhem, of political terror and human atrocities . . . If people have a common moral sense, there is scarcely any evidence of it in the matters to which journalists – and their readers – pay the greatest attention . . . .But before drawing so bleak a conclusion from his daily newspaper, the reader should ask himself why bloodletting and savagery are news. There are two answers. The first is that they are unusual. If daily life were simply a war of all against all, what would be newsworthy would be the occasional outbreak of compassion and decency, self-restraint and fair dealing . . . Amazed that such things occurred, we would explain them as either rare expressions of a personality quirk or disguised examples of clever self-dealing.
"The second reason that misery is news is because it is shocking. We recoil in horror at pictures of starving children, death camp victims, and greedy looters. Though in the heat of battle or the embrace of ideology many of us will be indifferent to suffering or inured to bloodshed, in our calm and disinterested moments we discover in ourselves an intuitive and powerful aversion to inhumanity."
It is an intuitive and powerful aversion that shows up every day in our national news Congress; the good news that the vast majority craves is always there, glowing between the lines.
Glad I ran across your blog. If okay, I think I may use as a discussion starter in one of my Mass Comm classes next semester.
ReplyDeletePuffer
Coker College