Chapter 4: The Public Realities
When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will start to change.In the beginning, was reality.
No rationale, no hindsight, no neurosis. Just primitive human beings, with their bare hands, in a raw environment, and the reality of surviving, or not.
The first realities of human survival were food and water. Where was the food? Where was the water?
So food and water were not the first human realities at all. The first, original, human reality, was information. Where was the food? Where was the water?
If you made a movie about media history, and played it backward, it would speed back from a scene of this World Wide Web screen, through television, radio, the telegraph, the first newspapers, the Gutenberg press (which really did change everything), the scribal culture, the oral culture, papyrus scrolls, hieroglyphs, wood block prints, wall paintings, and then into vast spaces of time in which marks and symbols flashed by and disappeared, arrowing through guttural millennia toward the cusp where humans, separating upward and upright onto two feet, began their quest for survival with the original need for human
information.
From their first days on the planet, humans have needed information to survive. They have always worked very hard to develop information, at first mostly as a result of experience, including accidents, but later on as a result of experimentation. All of human knowledge is the result of information being developed, in one way or another other.
From birth, infants instinctively acquire information about their situation and surroundings. Parents and other adults provide much information to them, including their first information about how to make language.
Both primitive and civilized societies understand that its members can’t succeed without information, which is passed down to them beginning as children. In civilized societies, children begin school at four or five to acquire information. The basic information necessary to function successfully in those societies takes a minimum of 12 years to acquire. In the United States, parents are required by law to see that their children receive this information and understand it before they can “graduate.” After that, much more information is available to students who want it. All positions in a society, from homemaker to genetic scientist, require both general and specific information.
People in the United States get information from many sources, including, after all these thousands of years, experience. People are always learning something as a result of experience. But the single largest provider of information to people is the media. The media provides information to people through the seven media businesses: books, magazines, movies, newspapers, radio, recordings, and television. The information may be technical, or it may be entertaining, or it may simply be informational. Every day, people need all kinds of information, both general (the date, the time, the news, the weather) and specific (transport schedules, product pricing and availability, technical specifications, stock prices). They also want all kinds of information, including stories, plays, games, music, competitions, commentary and humor.
The second public reality is Demographics.
Demographics is the science of dividing people into distributions, or groups. No two people are exactly alike. But they are alike in many ways, and so they become members of demographic groups. The two basic demographic groups are men and women. Men and women are alike in many ways, but they are also so monumentally different that it is a wonder that they occupy the same general physical form.
A person’s demographic group plays a huge role in the media-public relationship. We don’t need to go any further than the men-women division to understand this. The media develops many products specifically for men, and many products specifically for women. Manufacturers and advertisers pay billions of dollars to support these media products, with products of their own that are very carefully conceived and created to appeal to men, or to women.
People are also divided into groups by race, nationality, religion, age, culture, economics, height, weight, color of eyes, and a hundred other factors that create within each of us a unique human being within our demographic group. A person’s reaction to a media event is unique to him or her, as unique as a fingerprint.
The media develops products to appeal to the preferences of demographic groups. Television programming, for example, is strongly influenced by viewers within an age group. Probably the most desirable group to television and its advertisers is the 18-24 age group. Programming or other media content aimed at a specific group or audience is called narrowcasting. Specialty magazines and cable television channels (the History Channel, the Food Network, MTV, the Weather Channel) are examples of narrowcasting.
The Third public reality is Curiosity.
Human beings are naturally curious. It is part of their need for information. They obtain information by being curious. Their curiosity makes people particularly interested in anything new. When people hear there is a “new show” on television, they are curious to see it. They are also attracted by anything unusual, or novel.
The media is very aware of this natural human curiosity. Working within its own realities, the media is constantly looking for ways to appeal to curiosity. Sometimes the appeal is culturally positive, because curiosity is positive in that it brings new and better understanding to humans of the world they live in.
But the appeal can also be opportunisitic. In the last 30 years, competition has become a huge, and difficult reality for the media. It is often the competition reality that entices the media to appeal to that sort of curiosity that causes humans to slow down and gawk at accidents on the freeway. This is the kind of curiosity that has for decades supported the tabloid media, and now is steadily, grimly, infiltrating the mainstream product. So many people are very curious about celebrities, their life styles and their weaknesses, and the media attracts these people, and the advertisers who want to reach them, with classic tabloid products like “Access Hollywood” and “The National Enquirer,” but also everyday celebrity “reality” shows, starring Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith.
©Michael Grant 2006
This just in: a Domenech universe?
When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will start to change.
Children – that is, any person age 25 or younger – live in a world so different from the adult world that it could almost be described as a parallel universe.
This is nothing new. It was as true of my generation, in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s, as it is today, except in the matter of degree. I am now 62. When I was 25 and younger, it was popular to say, “Never trust anybody over 30.” Yet we had to live with, and live like, the old fogies. It set up the sort of angst that began to show up in movies like “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”
American post-war mainstream culture, and the companies that marketed to it, was still adult-oriented, and in goods and services, movies and entertainment, the kids wore and watched and listened to the same things as their parents because that’s all there was. It was very much a youth culture that convened at the movies and in the hamburger joint parking lots, but the movie was ‘Three Coins in the Fountain,’ and Perry Como, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher and Patti Page sang practically all of the music coming out of the car radios.
That all started to change after 1954, with the arrival in the youth awareness of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and with the spread of television. But compared to 2005, the 1950s in America might as well have occurred on another planet. Last week, in the comic strip “Zits,” Jeremy’s mom has asked him to take out the trash. Jeremy, not moving from the couch, says, “Ages 14-25, $94 billion in discretionary spending.” His mom counters by offering to freeze his allowance. In the last panel, Jeremy, dumping the trash in the can, says, “The retail industry respects me more than my parents do.”
That’s not generally true, but it is true in most cases that the retail industry pays at least as much (and frequently more) attention to children than their parents do. The kids are spending the $94 billion on things they want and have been manufactured, created, or organized for them. If parents researched their kids one-tenth as much as the retail industry does, millions of parent-child relationships would change. In 1954, parents didn’t have to pay attention to what was out there; it was all the same. In 2005, parents can’t keep up with what’s out there, even the ones who try. When my kids were teenagers, I watched MTV regularly, because it was the best way to find out what was going on in my kids’ world. I also tried to watch “The Simpsons.” But I failed. Bart didn’t interest me as entertainment. Neither did MTV, though it was fun to mute the sound and play old Patti Page LPs while Madonna and Aerosmith tore up the screen.
Kids today have terrific power. They have the retail industry wrapped around their little finger, and the media furiously develops product that shows children in control of their, if not the, world. In their world, the 2006 kids find it popular to say to anyone outside that world, that is, anyone over 30, “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”
It must be that power that persuaded The Washington Post to hire the 24-year-old Ben Domenech to be its “conservative blogger.” Talk about a furiously developed product to attract a younger readership. Domenech only lasted three days, because it turned out he was a casual plagiarist, which in journalism is the lowest of the low. He couldn’t deny the line-by-line comparisons, but he did make it a point, that left-wing bloggers, whom he called “leftists with their sharpened knives” had provided all the evidence.
His resignation note reads for all the world like a paraphrase of Richard Nixon’s resignation speech from Aug. 8, 1974. He has lost his support base, but he accepts no responsibility for “the firestorm” that had been created. Karen, my wife, says such behavior is simply sick, in the clinical psychology sense. Refusal to accept responsibility, she says, is a character disorder.
But Domenech’s behavior could also be argued as prototypical of the children who inhabit this parallel universe, growing ever more serene in their power and disturbingly confident that the world must shape itself to them.
The Domenech story is another example of chatter coming from that world. Troubling. It reminds me of “Lord of the Flies.” The little beasts, murderous in their power lust, become little boys again the instant an adult appears. In this story, 2006 may be the instant for adults to appear.
©Michael Grant 2006
This just in: Picture power
When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will change.
Osama bin Laden caused airliners to be flown into the Trade Center towers for a number of reasons. High in importance among these reasons – certainly it was the most carefully planned for – was pictures.
The airliners were scheduled to hit the towers around 9 in the morning, to leave all those hours of daylight for cameras to send pictures.
The same thinking was in Timothy McVeigh’s mind as he planned the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. His bomb went off at 9:02 a.m., leaving all those hours of daylight for cameras to send pictures.
The pictures maximized the public impact. They manipulated the public’s reaction. Terrorists are media experts, and any terrorism planning always begins with journalism tools that are based on the ancient human reaction package.
President Bush makes clear the influence of pictures. This week he said the media contributed to the sour mood about Iraq because it sent pictures of insurgent bombs blowing up instead of pictures of the good things happening in Iraq.
Of course, “good thing” is relative, regarding pictures from Iraq. In March, 2003, a good thing picture from Iraq was bomb flashes in the Baghdad darkness, and a very, very, good thing picture was the one of a U.S. tank pulling over the statue of Saddam Hussein.
It’s funny. This week in his press conference, crusty old Helen Thomas asked Mr. Bush why he “really wanted to go to war with Iraq,” when all his published reasons for that war turned out not to exist. It was just flat wrong, he said, to assume he wanted war.
One reason to want an Iraq war was pictures. No president would go to war just for pictures – he had plenty of public reasons for that decision, even if they turned out not to exist – but the pictures are going to be there anyway, and they are powerful shapers of public impact.
Pictures would not have been much of a reason to want a war with the Osama terrorists. It would not have been the same with pictures from the U.S. pursuit of terrorists in Afghanistan, the Al Qaeda base, of rocket attacks on obscure tunnel entrances in rocky Afghan mountains, or of diplomatic efforts to enlist international allegiance in the war on terrorism. None of those pictures would stand up to pictures of twin towers collapsing.
The Iraq pictures were powerful. “Shock and awe,” they called it. Mr. Bush understands the power of pictures to manipulate public reaction. You will remember the pictures of him in military gear landing on an aircraft carrier, at the front-seat controls, to declare on the flight deck: “Mission accomplished.”
Now the Iraq pictures don’t bear that out, and Mr. Bush wishes for “good things” pictures. What he knows, and the rest of us know, is that the best good thing pictures from Iraq right now would be no pictures at all.
©Michael Grant 2006
Chapter Three: The Katrina Time Window
When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will change.
The week of Katrina, in September, 2005, gave us a rare opportunity to look back through time at exactly what the news is.
Scenes and stories from New Orleans provided the spooky opportunity to travel back hundreds of thousands of years, to the time of the formation of the human reaction package created by unprotected people living on the ground, with survival their only purpose.
“New Orleans After Katrina” provided us a living, instant view of the beating heart of the news that was born in “The Dawn of Media.” Conflict, Disaster, Prominence, Proximity, Human Interest, Consequence, Novelty, Sensationalism. The ancient, original human values of news were on display on our television screens in all their mute, primitive reality.
New Orleans, even more than 9/11, showed how helpless, how motionless, humans are, against the news values in their original strength. Conflict totally erases Progress, and Prominence cowers before Disaster. More than anything, humanity in New Orleans needed a leader. Always, humans unsure of their survival have needed someone who believes in survival and will move toward where he thinks it is, so at least the people will have someone and something to follow, and be reassured by the simple act of moving.
And as always, there were humans preying on humans. We were watching a news story unique in its originality. Watching it wasn’t easy, and it showed what survival is really like, no food, no water, no protection, no leadership, no direction, with violence all around, It is a unique opportunity for anyone curious about how to read media, to witness media where it originated, with humanity locked in its eternal battle to survive.
©Michael Grant 2006
Chapter 2: The Reaction Package
When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will change.
Those humans in The Dawn of Media created, simply by the experience of existing, the reaction package that is present in every human being on the face of the planet today.
The package includes conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, and sensationalism.
Conflict was, and is, basic. We are born with an inner conflict that starts to bug us as early as three or four years old. In Dawn of Media, conflict is everywhere. Finding food. Finding water. Trying to drink water that made them sick. Tension between groups. Fear versus courage. Dominance versus passivity. Earthquakes and eruptions. A deer not moving. Predator animals. Darkness. The sky, and what came from it. Unknowns, wherever they presented themselves. A firestorm. Death.
Progress was where they discovered it. Discovering a brother in the earth, to whom appeals could be made. Discovering the taste of blood, and then of animal flesh. Defenses against predators. Weapons for hunting and defense.
Disasters were sudden, and terrifying. Tribes decimated by fire. A leader lost.
Consequence was all around them, though they probably couldn’t articulate, even in their thinking, the connection between cause and effect. They did, however, leaning over the body of a dead leader, know about fear of things to come. Part of that fear was an awareness that the leader had made those connections for them. The leader saw danger in the impact of this fire, and as they wondered what to do, he took action to move his people out of the fire’s way.
Prominence was important. The leader was different from the others. He seemed to know things, and he had an air of dominance. He was always kept in sight, and given preferential treatment by the group. A leader dying, or being killed, was the worst thing that could happen.
Proximity meant belonging to a group and sharing its codes. What happened in their group was important to them; what happened within other groups was not. It also meant being near or far from an event, like a fire, ignoring the far ones and compelled to action by the near ones.
Timeliness meant finding shelter before darkness, preparing for the night, and knowing what activities day permitted, and night didn’t. Timeliness meant watching the sun, which could tell a leader when the cold time was coming.
Human interest was a feeling, a moving that could be felt in the chest, not understood but nevertheless there. Children could trigger the feeling, and the death of a leader.
The groups lived in a world that was as novel to them as today’s world is novel to a baby. They had no way to replace curiosity with knowledge, except through experience, and experiences, when connections didn’t yet exist between cause and effect, were very slow in becoming complete. They passed their lives in fascination of thunder, and a completely separate fascination with lightning.
Sex is sex. Then, as now, humans were attracted to it in the most fundamental way.
Sensational things were all around them. Of course, they were easily awed, in such a novel world. Events routinely stopped them in their tracks. Then there were the earthquakes, fires, and mountain cats howling in the night.
Chapter 1: The Dawn of Media
When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will change.
They lived in groups of 40 to 50 on a dry coastal plain crevassing down from mountains and then low foothills across open space to the sea.
They knew about the sea. Water reaching to the rim of the world. But they couldn’t live down there by it. They couldn’t drink the water. They tried, because the water was there and they knew they needed it. All that water, but it did not satisfy their thirst and it made them sick.
So they lived inland, along streams that came down from the mountains and gave them good water that they could drink. Most of the people gave it no thought but occasionally one of them, usually the leader, would look up from drinking this sweet water and look off toward the sea and wonder about the two waters that were the same but so different.
Each group followed a leader who emerged naturally as the one in the group who had the respect of the others in part because of strength and size – usually but not always the largest – and because of his quality of dominance, but mostly because he seemed to know things. He seemed to want to know things, in ways the other people didn’t. He knew where food and water and dangers were and he knew the land and the sky. People in the group felt an urge to keep him in sight.
People in the groups all looked alike and behaved alike and yet they knew they belonged to their group. They recognized each other and would only mate with each other and natural bonding between parents and offspring enforced the sense of belonging. In any group there were young children, young adults and adults, the total number varying from 40 to 60 depending on illness, accidents and predators. No one starved. Food was shared even with the weakest who could not gather it themselves. Their food was berries and grasses and bark and insects found in the ground. The best was saved for the leader because the people knew how important he was to them. There were deer and small animals everywhere foraging with the people and the people saw them as a nuisance. They were competitors for the food.
When two groups came close together there was tension. Mostly it was food or water that brought them into the same place. Groups facing each other across a favorite watering place sought to establish priority by screaming, gesturing, foot-stamping and charging. There were rocks all around their feet but it never occurred to them to pick up a rock and throw it. Usually it was the leader’s dominance that settled the issue and determined which group would drink first.
Then something happened. The ground shook and rolled and heaved. Cracks opened in the earth, trees fell, hillsides and mountain faces collapsed. People were terrified and many were killed or hurt. When the land was still again a leader looked at his shadow on the ground and wondered. He had no doubt the shadow had life. It moved as he moved. It was his brother in the earth. And his brother was much stronger than he and held him to the earth. He tried to leap free but his earth brother always pulled him back. Was it this power with which an angry earth brother shook the earth? The leader thought it must be important that the people respect their earth brothers to keep their anger away and he showed his people how to stamp out images of the earth brothers into the earth, and not normal size but huge, to acknowledge the earth brothers’ power.
Another leader in a group near a mountain face as the earth shook saw rocks fall and hit a deer. The deer fell and was still. Above all else leaders were cautious and to see a deer lie still even as he approached was new and frightening. It took courage to kneel and reach out a hand and with just the tips of his fingers touch the animal and still it did not move. He felt a need to look at the rocks and wonder how they did what they did to the deer. But at the same time he became aware of a scent that moved him in a new and powerful way and brought him back to the deer. He took his hand away and there was red on his fingertips and from it the scent. He lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed. Deep inside him an instinct awoke and instantly was very strong. He licked at the red and inside his throat a growl gathered and grew into a roar of discovery. He looked at the deer where he had touched it, found the wound the rock had made, lifted the deer toward him and with equal care and helplessness sank his teeth deliberately into the flesh. Then he gently pulled and the flesh came away and a new circuit in humankind was closed.
It was not many generations before all the groups knew what the leader had discovered that day and after a thousand years the overall population of the people on the coastal plain had quadrupled because of the new and abundant food supply and at the watering places the rock had become a weapon in the group confrontations. It was a new and violent life among the people but by then no one remembered the old ways.
It also made groups different in a new way. Groups emerged that were better at finding the deer and other animals and in bringing them down. They lived nearer the mountains because that was where the animals were. They discovered that a small, sharp rock could kill as easily as a larger blunt one and had the advantage of distance. But there was danger because in the mountains were the animals that had always hunted the people and whose shrieks in the night terrified the adults huddled around their young. The mountain groups tied sharp rocks to the tips of slender long branches and with these could discourage the big mountain cats. From there it took only an accident of impulse to discover the effect of throwing one of these devices at an animal and hitting it.
Leaders were very careful about the sky and watched it constantly for signs. They watched it both when they could see the sky and when they couldn’t see it. The time of seeing the sky had been very hot even though the time had been growing shorter before the time of the sky they couldn’t see. They sky they couldn’t see was coming nearer when a leader and the adult males in a mountain group crept through thick undergrowth nearer an animal – a bulky javelina – busy feeding on manzanita at the foot of a slope. A hunter threw a spear and missed and the javelina rumbled away. The sharp point of the spear struck a rock face and a spark fell away into brush. The hunter, retrieving his spear, saw a wisp of smoke and looked back at his leader.
The leader was watching the sky and judging the time before vision would disappear. He did not want his people in the open during the time of the cats and he called them back and down the slopes toward the rest of the group encamped on a series of rock ledges and sheltering crevasses. The hunter gave another glance at the cylinder of smoke and trotted back toward the others. They had just enough time to carry back the kill, go to the stream and drink and settle into the rocks with their mates and young ones before vision disappeared.
Ten miles toward the sea, down on the plain, another leader watched and listened. Even though the blinding circle of fire in the sky had been consumed by the rim of the world behind him, as he watched the mountains disappear into blackness he recorded a strangeness in the air. In blackness the air was still hot and did not move at all. His skin felt taut and it tingled as he knew it did when the blackness brought no cool feel of water into the air. In the blackness though he could not see the mountains he saw a red glow and he knew what it was. The people knew about fire at times when the sky sent down angry blinding rockets – the earth always seemed to be angry about something – that exploded in land-rattling booms against the earth. The leader had seen fire many times after the booms but then water would fall from the sky into which the fire would disappear.
But this time there was no water in the sky. The leader settled back and rested and listened for the wind he knew could come in air that was hot and still and dry. People watching him knew he was alert and they knew something could happen without knowing what. They looked back and forth among themselves for reassurance and tried to sleep.
The leader was dozing when the wind woke him up. He stood up and judged it. Not strong but he knew it would be. The glow in the invisible mountains was much larger but what fascinated him was the sky. In the blackness there was a heavier blackness. A cloud. A massive cloud but not the kind that brought water from the sky. Not in this air. He sniffed the wind but couldn’t smell the smell of the cloud that he knew came off fire. Very strange and new. The hair on his neck stood up. He watched the glow and the cloud and with all of his senses straining waited for vision to come. In his face the force of the wind grew until he had to lean against it. He thought about awakening the group but looked and saw that most of them already were.
On the mountain ledge the mountain group’s leader had had no time to wait. He saw not black but red sky and did all he could do. He ran. Ran with the others through a red tumult of wind-blown burning missiles shot at them by a 150-foot wall of fire directly at their backs. The young and swift stayed ahead of the wall. Others were failing and the leader took them beneath a rock outcropping where they hugged the rock and each other as the wall of fire closed over and around them.
On the plain, his first vision told the leader there everything he needed to know. He motioned to his group to get up and follow him. The glow was now a wide red wall of fire that appeared to the leader to be moving toward him with the speed of the wind. He took his people toward the sea but also in a direction that both paralleled the wall of fire and took them toward the river. The leader did not see any fire beyond the river. In the distance he saw the movement of other groups moving out of the way of the wall. Groups arrived at the same position on the river where it was possible to walk most of the way without swimming and this time among the groups there was only cooperation and the instinct to survive.
Most did, as the fire surged through and sped toward the only obstacle that could stop it: the sea. It was days before the ground was cool again but the plains leader didn’t even bother going back. The group moved south of the river and eventually settled into a new encampment on a mesa at the top of a long canyon.
In the mountains, 17 of that group survived and did go back and found the others where they had died under the outcropping. The survivors, 10 males and seven females, didn’t understand the heaviness that came upon their hearts but they understood fear and they were very afraid. In turn they knelt by the leader’s body and rested hands on him as if to draw strength and guidance.
One of them lifted his eyes toward the sea, where the light was disappearing and pulling the darkness over them. But getting through the darkness, he knew, the light would come again. In his throat rose a low, compelling cry of defiance, and of pure interest.
© Michael Grant 2006
Try this: In reading “The Dawn of Media,” look for events you would expect to be reported in the next day’s newspaper, if newspapers had existed at that time.
Introduction
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 in 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 Elements 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 around the reaction package 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.
