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Why Finding Things Out is so Hard Copyright 1997 by Sam Smith. Excerpted from Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual published in hardback and paperback by WW Norton, New York & London, Summer 1997. 1. There are too many messages Here's a little experiment you can try. (Please don't attempt this if you are not in good physical and mental health): Go around your house and turn on every device that emits a sound: radio, TV, CD player, alarm clock, stove timer, whatever. Make sure the volume is such that you can hear each device from some central location, say your front hall or kitchen. Gather your spouse or housemates and/or children at this location and ask them to sing, play an instrument or declaim with some force. If your dog will join in, so much the better. Now, sit down and try to read a book. You have just demonstrated in the privacy of your own home a central problem of modern media: too much data, not enough comprehension. Every day we are bombarded with thousands of symbols, most of which register only subconsciously. In fact, the essence of contemporary media is that we are often not aware of it. What we recognize as the media -- the TV, the newspaper and so forth -- represent just a fraction of the symbols and messages reaching our minds. 2 . There's too little news While the media may be ubiquitous, the news we want and need is hard to find. For example, a study by the Rocky Mountain Media Watch analyzed the news content of some 100 news shows around the country on one evening and found that news about things other than war, disasters and crime amounted to what could be typed on four double-spaced sheets of paper. Some 70% of the programs, for example, featured the latest of 200 California earthquakes that month -- with no injuries and little damage. 3. The camera only looks one way As our eye on the news, the television camera suffers from some inherent flaws, the biggest one being that it can only look one way. If a story is happening in several or many places at once, TV will see only a little piece of it. It is ill-prepared to tell us about social trends, non-visual events, or highly dispersed activities (such as a guerrilla war or multiple election campaigns). Further, it forces news to bend to its technological needs. For example, TV finds the White House easier on its eye than is Congress with its 535 members. Thus it has contributed to the concentration of power in the presidency simply by which way it has pointed the camera. TV shows what's easy for it to see and not what's important for us to view. 4. Too many journalists are too close to their sources In Washington especially, journalists quickly adopt the same outlook on politics and problems as those they are covering. Washington reporters have been described as people who sit around waiting for some official to lie to them. Russell Baker says that when he was a Washington correspondent, he felt like "a megaphone for the convenience of frauds." Instead of being an amplifier for those in power, the journalist should be the surrogate eyes and ears for those who aren't. But the cozy style of the capital has thoroughly tamed much of the press corps. Washington journalists often become members of the court rather than its observers and critics. 5. Too few people decide what's news It may not be long before we find ourselves in the situation of Australia where two-thirds of the newspaper readership is controlled by one man: Rupert Murdoch. Or England where Murdoch controls over one-third of the newspaper readership and the national satellite broadcasting system (the equivalent of our entire cable system). By the 1980s, most of what Americans saw, read, or heard was controlled by fewer than two dozen corporations. By the 1990s just five corporations controlled all or part of the following cable channels: Discovery, Startz!, Encore, Learning Channel, Family Channel, Lifetime, ESPN, A&E, Disney, QVC, Cinemax, Cartoon Network, CNN, TBS, TNT, HBO, Home Shopping Network, Black Entertainment Television, Court TV, Bravo, American Movie Classics, CNBC, The Movie Channel, Comedy Central, USA Networks, MTV, Showtime, VH1. Some 75% of all dailies are now in the hands of chains. In fact, just four of these chains own 21% of all the country's daily papers. This concentration of power has not occurred by accident nor is it the result of economic predestination; it is not an outward sign of inner capitalist grace. Rather, it is in no small part the result of a major dismantling of the nation's anti-trust laws and the powers of the Federal Communications Commission. 6. The media is just another business Journalism consists in buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it at ten cents a pound -- Charles A. Dana With the media increasingly part of huge conglomerates, journalism is now much more the product of corporate employees acting as reporters than it is of reporters who happen to be working for corporations. When I started out in journalism in the 1950s, the typical reporter had only a high school education and was, by class and inclination, far more likely to side with the reader than with the boss. While some were in the pocket of a politician or the mob, the consensus was that the best way to look at a government official was down your nose. In the 70s and 80s the trade (as it had been considered) was transformed into a "profession." Aspiring journalists were expected to go to grad schools, reporters started being cited in cultural and society coverage (thus granting themselves equal status with newsmakers and other elites). Newspaper Guild locals found their members considering themselves too good for unions, and publishers began spending excessive time discussing ethics and principles, a sure sign of trouble. Such shifts have not gone unnoticed by the public. A 1995 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found only 26% of respondents having a positive or somewhat positive impression of news media. 50% had a negative impression. Twenty years ago, a similar poll produced almost the reverse results. Thus, in just a few decades, the American journalist has been transformed from an idiosyncratic and independent-minded member of a trade to a carefully shaped corporate employee. Some reporters aren't even called reporters -- they are "team members." At the Winston-Salem Journal, consultants have told reporters just how much time they can spend covering different caegories of stories. The articles reporters write and the content of the papers for which they work inevitably reflect these shifts. 7. There's little history in the news Arthur Schlesinger Jr. says that a community without history is like a person without a memory. The media is not particularly interested in, nor knowledgeable about, history and little of it informs news reporting. It really does help to know what happened the last time anyone tried something, but it's a question the media finds singularly uninteresting. 8. Numbers are used as adjectives; facts as fillers Unlike history, facts and numbers are often mentioned in the media. The problem is that they are frequently wrong or given distorted meaning. For example, many Americans are unaware that when the press talks about a budgetary cut, it may not be an actual cut at all, but only a change in relation to an imaginary baseline or projection created by some government agency. Thus a Clinton aide could go on Meet the Press and with a straight face say that "growing" Medicaid at 3% between 1995 and 2002 "is equivalent to a 38% reduction in spending." As Peter Carlson explained in the Washington Post, the 3% was an absolute growth, while the "cut" was relative to projections of expenditures if current annual growth continued. Got it? 9. There are too many people lying to you The ability of people to lie to you through the media has grown enormously. The average large corporation and its advertising agencies, lobbyists, and PR flacks have more manipulative skills at their disposal than the entire Nazi propaganda machine. The same is true of the White House or major political campaigns. Between advertising and politics you're probably hearing more lies, exaggerations and distortions in a single day than you would hear during a full season at a Minnesota fishing camp. Not only does the disinformation, misinformation, spin and hype foul our internal data banks, it makes us far more cynical and suspicious than is healthy. What can we do about it? One thing is to borrow a principle from financial investing: diversify. The more (and more varied) sources of information you have, the less likely you'll be led astray. This is one reason that I subscribe to the liberal Nation and the conservative Insight and read three dailies each morning. 10. And then there's TV Polls tell us that nearly a majority of Americans say they get all their news from television and that three-quarters say they get most of their news from the tube. ( Sam Smith )