Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Media Are Us

It used to be fashionable to ask Miss America contestants if they thought the media was to blame mounting violence in society. The young woman's reply was always no, she didn't think so, and she came up with some alternative indictment of parents, or schools, or even a crisis in faith.

I was thinking about this the other day as I watched the Murdoch debacle and the demise of the News of the World, and I realized that if I were to turn back the clock and suddenly become nubile while still keeping my experience of years of living, I would beg to differ. Yes, Mr. Parks (that's how far back I go), I would say, the media have a good-sized share of the blame, but so do we all who lapped up squidgy-gate and the rather vulgar conversations between Prince Charles and Camilla.  Wherever did we think they got this stuff? We didn't ask because we wanted to know and, after all, they were the wealthy and privileged and it's their duty in life to entertain us. It only counts when the media do it to "ordinary people" like us.

But I'm going to go further and also say that the media have a good sized chunk of the responsibility for the roiling anger consuming this country. The media does not come out (usually) to promote political agendas on the front page. Such opinions are supposedly by-lined and put on the editorial pages, where people can pick and choose which op ed pieces confirm their own prejudices.

But there are  subtle ways that the news on the front page can appear to be objective while still presenting a politically slanted view. Let me explain. When I taught college English, I used to tell my students the story of a car accident that supposedly occurred at the bottom of the campus. One car broadsided another. At first I told them that one of the drivers was in his late 80s, just returning from a visit to the doctor's office. The other car was driven by a man in his twenties. Speed was not considered a fctor.

Who might they think was to blame? The wisest ones, onto my ploy, said they didn't know enough. I caught a good number of them assuming that the senior driver was "probably" to blame because everyone "knows" that serniors have declining driving skills.

All right, I'd say, here's some more: the 20 year old driver had a suspended license, there were three other men in the car with him, one of them was partially undresssed, and there were beer cans on the back floor.
My students looked a bit ashamed but then went on to do the same thing. Now, it looked like the younger folk were to blame.

The devil was in the details provided and withheld.  And it happens to us all the time if we rely on the media for our information instead of looking more deeply ourselves.

On Tuesday, July 12, The Denver Post ran a front page story with the headline "Draft Ramps Up Kid Rules: The Child-care Lincensing Plan's Focus on Quality Meets Quikc Skepticism."  The lead paragraph stressed that the proposed (note: only proposed) rules would "impose (notice that word) sweeping changes on Colorado Licensed child-care centers." The second paragraph quoted "some" child care operators as saying the proposed changes were a "vast overreach." The next paragraph named the operator of three centers who didn't say anything about the overreach business but commented that health and safety needed to be balanced with quality and that there be some flexibility.

By then, all those opposed to government intervention in anything were probably thumping their chair arms and yelling about damned government sticking its nose into everything.  This would probably produce a very nice rant if the reader was a tea-bagger, meaning that he or she was probably not going to read the rest of the story on 7A buried inside.  Now, on  that equivalent of a back page, we learned that the proposals are a draft to be negotiated by the parties involved and that many of the suggested policies were recommended by childcare operators themselves because Colorado is one of bottom states when it comes to regulating early child-care providers.

Looks different doesn't it? The devil was in the order of the details in this account and since the "balance" didn't come until the end, one must conclude that the writer intended to stir things up. In other words, we were snookered and it was a non-story. However, the next day, the Post ran an editorial no less saying that the draft policies went too far as if the story had been credible and only the media reporting had "saved" the day.

Having actually served on some of these committees to propose anything, I know how they work. You throw everything in but the kitchen sink so it can all be negotiated and people can work together as a team to discard anything really unreasonable. That is how democracy and consensus work. In this case, though, the media picked out the controversy, played it up irresponsibly to sell papers, and by doing so fanned the flames of division.  Who needs enemies when you have media fighting for readership?

But let's be honest. We get the media we deserve. If we aren't willing to educate ourselves to look skeptically at what is presented to us as fact and if we aren't willing to embrace even a rudimentary form of intellectual engagement with the world--and we're seeing mounting evidence that many of us are not--then we are going to continue being presented with gossip masquerading as truth. Shame on us for settling for this.

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