No News: Good News?

Tyler Cowen argues at Bloomberg that the sheer volume of "news" we must sort through to be informed modern citizens is more problematic than supposed "fake news." Readers with access to so much information about the various tragedies in our world are left jaded and cynical. Thanks to the internet, we also learn the many flaws and quirks of leaders and experts, from banal personal details on their Facebook, to their wild teenage Twitter posts, to more serious exposés about them. (Undoubtedly, Andrew Jackson's presidency would have suffered if he'd had a Twitter account).

This feature of our world isn't going away anytime soon. There are loads of reasons to argue the Information Age is, on net, good for humans. Today's volume of quality reporting and available information act as a valuable check on those in power. Accountability is, generally, good. 

But our oversaturated marketplace for news can clearly corrode societal trust, attention, and hope. Cowen's brief piece echoes back to a long tradition which warns about the side effects of being hooked on "news." I think we need to take the warnings of this tradition seriously, even if we decide that at the end of the day we'll suffer the Internet's bad with its good.

Below I've summarized two similar arguments which I think deserve your attention. Neil Postman's masterful Amusing Ourselves to Death belongs, too, in this genre. Postman argues (as David Foster Wallace masterfully does here) that modern news and political opinion has become totally conflated with entertainment. I also can't recommend enough Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram," an attack on irony and cynicism in U.S. media culture.

Rochelle Gurstein (The Repeal of Reticence, 1996)

Gurstein makes a case for intimacy which serves, inversely, as a case against media exposure. She develops this by citing many early critics of intrusive newspapers, which, firstly, distort our sense of what is trivial and what is vital:

Repeatedly, advocates of reticence warned that gossipy journalism warped the community by elevating "unimportant persons to public notice." In an early article, Opinion-Moulding (1869), Godkin made this position clear: squandering attention on the unworthy constituted nothing less than "a fraud on the public," giving an obscure person's "opinions and wishes an amount of respect ... to which they are not entitled." (48)

This concern, perhaps rightly, sets off all of our democratic anti-elitist fire alarms. There's nothing more American than thinking of an "obscure person" as equal to some supposed expert. But there are democratic alternatives to an impenetrable aristocracy that still cherish and protect expertise. There's no way around it: at some point, it's not good to for just anyone to dominate American airwaves and digital/print newsstands. Gurstein continues by noting the way early newspaper critics thought of endless information as addictive:

Warner's vigorous condemnation of "the habit of excessive newspaper-reading" was typical of this position. Because newspapers treated too many topics in a superficial manner, "the mind loses the power of discrimination, the taste is lowered, and the appetite becomes diseased." [Another critic writes]: "The mental powers grow stagnant, the judgement warped, and intellectual freedom [becomes] an impossibility ... The brain degenerates into a pulpy, spongy, mass through which daily percolate the falsehood and immorality of the world's news." [...] To people "addicted" to the "Newspaper Habit," "its greatest fascinations are that it 'kills the time,' satisfies the thirst for scandal, and acts as a preventitive to thinking." (49)

Gurstein summarizes that for these critics,

Journalism and [dime] novels geared to the marketplace were undermining individual morality and the public good in a number of distinct yet related ways: they gave undue prominence to to matters not large enough to legitimately deserve attention, and thereby demeaned and trivialized the quality of public conversation; they wore down people's sense of proportion and the right ordering of things, corroded their powers of concentration, and destroyed their capacity to appreciate more demanding, let alone excellent, material; and finally, these developments made for an increasingly polarized society. (50)

She recognizes that this goes against our instinct to suspect privacy as "a breeding ground for privilege." It's hard not to think of the ways that invasive journalism has unearthed abuses of power and privilege: recent abuse scandals in the Catholic church, police brutality, fill in the blank. Gurstein, while acknowledging that there are ditches on both sides of the road, argues that prying curiosity about others becomes, in the words of an English journal, "an excessively vulgar form of spite." Our fascination with tragedies is also tied to schadenfreude, or as Rochefoucauld puts it, the "secret pleasure in the misfortune of our best friends."

This is related to Cowen's larger point about cynicism. Gurstein, quoting W.S. Lilly (1889), suggests that shock journalism is meant to show readers that 

"pretended virtues are a mere cloak for some great base or sordid end; [they] will demonstrate conclusively that 'old Cato is as great a rogue as you." ... one of the main achievements of the newspaper press during the last quarter century has been to deidealize [sic] public life" ...  Aline Gorren [argues that contemporary journalism] "works subtly to cheapen the ideal, wherever it is found; to make every delicacy seem a prejudice, a superstition; to rob, by colloquializing them pitilessly, even the common events of existence of that dignity that inheres, to the right vision, in everything human." (57)

Thus Cowen's complaint is more than a century old! One can only imagine E.L. Godkin on Snapchat.

Gurstein identifies one more feature of newspaper criticism which is relevant today: arguments about the effect of markets on the media. For proponents of "new journalism," the fact that news sells proves its worth in a truly democratic way. If "The People Want to Know," what arrogant elite can tell them otherwise? Gurstein:

The trouble with this allegedly democratic standard -- which continues to be offered today as a justification not only for the most violent and sexually explicit mass media but also for the most vapid -- is that it is never clear by what authority producers of such material know what the public wants, and furthermore, why popularity should be the determining factor. (79)

To extend this line of argumentation: There are also markets for dogfighting, child pornography, and other morally repugnant activities which corrode our public life. Many market transactions hurt non-consenting third parties (the externalities concept). Additionally, when modern news media plays on our addictions and vices, we are constantly cajoled into buying or clicking on content that we know is bad for us! (Fight me, Gary Becker!)  All that to say: you can resist Gurstein's self-conscious elitism and still reject market-based defenses of modern news.

John Henry Newman (The Idea of A University, 1852)

Newman, in a lecture about the education of the mind, first argues that without a lot of practice and self-reflection we cannot properly categorize information we learn. This is too good not to cite at length:

It is the fault of all of us, till we have duly practised our minds, to be unreal in our sentiments and crude in our judgments, and to be carried off by fancies, instead of being at the trouble of acquiring sound knowledge. In consequence, when we hear opinions put forth on any new subject, we have no principle to guide us in balancing them; we do not know what to make of them; we turn them to and fro, and over, and back again, as if to pronounce upon them, if we could, but with no means of pronouncing. It is the same when we attempt to speak upon them: we make some random venture; or we take up the opinion of someone else, which strikes our fancy; or perhaps, with the vaguest enunciation possible of any opinion at all, we are satisfied with ourselves if we are merely able to throw off some rounded sentences, to make some pointed remarks on some other subject, or to introduce some figure of speech, or flowers of rhetoric, which, instead of being the vehicle, are the  mere substitute of meaning. We wish to take a part in politics, and then nothing is open to us but to follow some person, or some party, and to learn the commonplaces and the watchwords which belong to it. (498)

Sound familiar? If we're honest, a lot of our news consumption is to help us look and sound smart. But a pastiche of facts and opinions gathered from disparate sources will not help us ultimately find truth. Newman continues with a passage similar to the introductory paragraphs of After Virtue:

Reflect, Gentlemen, how many disputes you must have listened to, which were interminable, because neither party understood either his opponent or himself. Consider the fortunes of an argument in a debating society, and the need there so frequently is, not simply of some clear thinker to disentangle the perplexities of thought, but of capacity in the combatants to do justice to the clearest explanations which are set before them,—so much so, that the luminous arbitration only gives rise, perhaps, to more hopeless altercation. "Is a constitutional government better for a population than an absolute rule?" What a number of points have to be clearly apprehended before we are in a position to say one word on such a question! What is meant by "constitution"? by "constitutional government"? by "better"? by "a population"? and by "absolutism"? The ideas represented by these various words ought, I do not say, to be as perfectly defined and located in the minds of the speakers as objects of sight in a landscape, but to be sufficiently, even though incompletely, apprehended, before they have a right to speak. "How is it that democracy can admit of slavery, as in ancient Greece?" "How can Catholicism flourish in a republic?" Now, a person who knows his ignorance will say, "These questions are beyond me;" and he tries to gain a clear notion and a firm hold of them; and, if he speaks, it is as investigating, not as deciding. On the other hand, let him never have tried to throw things together, or to discriminate between them, or to denote their peculiarities, in that case he has no hesitation in undertaking any subject, and perhaps has most to say upon those questions which are most new to him. This is why so many men are one-sided, narrow-minded, prejudiced, crotchety. This is why able men have to change their minds and their line of action in middle age, and to begin life again, because they have followed their party, instead of having secured that faculty of true perception as regards intellectual objects which has accrued to them, without their knowing how, as regards the objects of sight. (499)

This is critical: an addiction to news doesn't necessarily make us wiser (even if we know more facts). It does make us more arrogant about our intelligence.

But this defect will never be corrected,—on the contrary, it will be aggravated,—by those popular institutions [evening lectures/1850s YouTube] to which I referred just now. The displays of eloquence, or the interesting matter contained in their lectures, the variety of useful or entertaining knowledge contained in their libraries, though admirable in themselves, and advantageous to the student at a later stage of his course, never can serve as a substitute for methodical and laborious teaching. A young man of sharp and active intellect, who has had no other training, has little to show for it besides a litter of ideas heaped up into his mind anyhow. He can utter a number of truths or sophisms, as the case may be, and one is as good to him as another. He is up with a number of doctrines and a number of facts, but they are all loose, and straggling, for he has no principles set up in his mind round which to aggregate and locate them. He can say a word or two on half a dozen sciences, but not a dozen words on any one. He says one thing now, and another thing presently; and when he attempts to write down distinctly what he holds upon a point in dispute, or what he understands by its terms, he breaks down, and is surprised at his failure. He sees objections more clearly than truths, and can ask a thousand questions which the wisest of men cannot answer; and withal, he has a very good opinion of himself, and is well satisfied with his attainments, and he declares against others, as opposed to the spread of knowledge altogether, who do not happen to adopt his ways of furthering it, or the opinions in which he considers it to result. 

This is that barren mockery of knowledge which comes of attending on great Lecturers, or of mere acquaintance with reviews, magazines, newspapers, and other literature of the day, which, however able and valuable in itself, is not the instrument of intellectual education. If this is all the training a man has, the chance is that, when a few years have passed over his head, and he has talked to the full, he wearies of talking, and of the subjects on which he talked. He gives up the pursuit of knowledge, and forgets what he knew, whatever it was; and, taking things at their best, his mind is in no very different condition from what it was when he first began to improve it, as he hoped, though perhaps he never thought of more than of amusing himself. I say, "at the best," for perhaps he will suffer from exhaustion and a distaste of the subjects which once pleased him; or perhaps he has suffered some real intellectual mischief; perhaps he has contracted some serious disorder, he has admitted some taint of scepticism, which he will never get rid of. 

And here we see what is meant by the poet's maxim, "A little learning is a dangerous thing." Not that knowledge, little or much, if it be real knowledge, is dangerous; but that many a man considers a mere hazy view of many things to be real knowledge, whereas it does but mislead, just as a short-sighted man sees only so far as to be led by his uncertain sight over the precipice. (501)

I won't attempt to say it better.

So What?

Suppose it is true that modern news and opinion distracts us from what is important, entertains us to distraction, dulls our sense of what is real, stokes both cynicism and spite, and tricks us with information as a substitute for wisdom. (This is to say nothing about the ideological polarization it encourages). 

The proverbial toothpaste, though, ain't going back in the tube, even if we wanted it to.

I think we need to start considering measured and responsible journalism a public good that deserves private and public funding beyond the "media marketplace." I think we must carefully reflect on the way our media diet shapes our tastes, biases, and eschatology. If vicious consumer preferences birthed today's chaotic media kaleidoscope, only virtuous consumers can get us out of it.