This article originally appeared in City Miner magazine. We’re reprinting it because it says important things about how journalists mislead themselves and us, encouraging powerlessness rather than enlightenment about the world, or rather worlds, we live in.
Rasa Gustaitis is the author of Turning On (Macmillan, 1969) and Wholly Round (Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1972), about changes in perspectives and lifestyles.
City Miner is $3.50 a year from City Miner, P.O. Box 176, Berkeley, CA 94701 — worth the price. A good Bay Area magazine that speaks to all of us, it feels kin to THE SUN.
— Ed.
An elderly lady in Oakland was once wonderfully rescued by the Oakland police from radio waves that had plagued her and caused her relatives to start thinking she was crazy.
Seems that the two officers who responded to this lady’s desperate call were men of unusual wisdom. Instead of bundling her off to a ward for the mentally disabled, they actually listened carefully to what she said. “Do these waves come from the moulding?” one of the officers inquired. “Yes,” she said, relieved that he understood. “They do, sometimes.” “Then we’re in luck,” said the policeman, “Because we’ve had that kind before.” Did she have any Kaiser aluminum foil in the house? She did. Would she listen carefully? Of course. He took a sheet of newspaper, folded it into a hat of the sort printers sometimes wear in composing rooms. “Make one like this out of Kaiser aluminum,” he instructed. “Whenever you’re alone in the house, wear it. I think you will have no further trouble.”
And indeed, she did not. What the officer had done was to confirm that woman’s reality. He let her know she wasn’t alone out there, that somebody could connect with what was happening to her. And in so doing, he had given her power to carry on.
Of course this officer probably didn’t believe in radio waves. But like a good reporter, he had listened and asked relevant questions. Cynics will say he knew the woman as a loonie and simply played a psychic trick on her. But I prefer to think — having no proof either way — that he reserved judgement. I think he knew that an aluminum hat had helped someone in a similar predicament and that he simply passed on that information.
A journalist is, inescapably, in the position of that cop. By dealing in information he is in the business of confirming or denying realities and, thereby, disbursing power. As long as journalism hesitates to acknowledge this fact, it will be an instrument of other power wielders.
Journalism has the duty, I think, to help the public understand bewildering processes of change and to cope with them. But the prevailing variety of journalism does just the opposite. It inundates with disconnected facts that generate confusion and, consequently, anxiety.
There is no agreement on what news is. We reach for the paper, turn on the TV, the way our grandparents used to step outside to sniff the air for rain — seeking information that would be relevant to choices we must make. But what we get are disconnected reports that are not only useless but dangerous. Such reports can destroy.
In his book The People of the Deer, Farley Mowat told how disconnected information helped to destroy the Ihalmiut people in the subarctic barrens. These far northern people, who for centuries had lived by hunting caribou with bows and arrows, were visited by traders who offered them guns in exchange for fox pelts. So the Ihalmiut took to hunting foxes as well as caribou and, by and by, they lost their skill with the ancient weapons. They came to count on the arrival of the traders with more ammunition. They came to expect them each spring, much the way the caribou return to their proper season.
What the Ihalmiut did not know was that the context of the traders’ coming was different from the cyclical pattern that ruled their own lives. They were not given the critically important piece of the trade story: that the traders were connected to the dollar price of pelts. So one year, when the traders did not find it worth their while to come, the Ihalmiut were left without ammunition and they starved.
Reporting must be alert to contextual changes that alter the significance of apparent facts, else it becomes misleading information, endangering the people who receive it, robbing them of their right to choose and leading them to feel powerless and, consequently, fearful.
By and large, journalists shrink from confronting the fact that they wield power to shape events and lives except in those special instances when they turn the social compost by digging into dark doings of officialdom, or when they become intermediaries in conflicts, as Walter Cronkite did in the Mideast.
Most journalists avoid the issue by subscribing to the comfortable myth that their only role is to find the facts and tell them. Herbert Bruckner defined this attitude in his book The Journalist. “Reporting can of course help or hurt a cause,” he wrote. “But under the American journalistic tradition, reporting is not concerned with whether it helps or hinders anything. It consists simply of getting and telling the facts, be they pleasant, nasty, or in between.”
“. . . if a point of view is unavoidable, what is the fair perspective? In choosing one, do we not authenticate that one and exclude the others?”
Yet evidence abounds that this position is both smug and unrealistic. It dodges the point that by choosing what to report the reporter also chooses what to help and hinder. Unconsciousness won’t do as a defense.
Back in 1958, for instance, when Herbert Matthews went into the Cuban mountains and then wrote stories for the New York Times telling that the rebel movement was alive, he struck an involuntary blow for the Cuban revolution. He was an excellent newsman and he wrote the facts as he found them. But later, a Cuban told a visitor those stories had been worth at least three battles to Fidel Castro.
Castro’s revolution needed the recognition of the world. This could be obtained by coverage in a world-respected newspaper. To get it, Castro engineered the kidnapping of a group of Americans from Guantanamo and offered to release them if the Times sent a correspondent to interview his troops. The Times obliged, sending Matthews. By confirming the existence of the revolution he added to its power.
Scientists have, by and large, accepted that the act of noticing something changes the thing that is noticed. Elemental particle physics has compelled that recognition. For way back, Werner Heisenberg discovered that an electron is either a wave or a particle, depending on whether you were looking at its speed or its location, and that there was no way to look at both speed and location at once.
Now, as ever more elemental particles are discovered, and as their existence becomes ever more elusive, some physicists have begun to suggest that these new particles may actually be created by the search for them.
In the social sciences, also, it’s been many years since the classic experiment in a factory, designed to show whether better lighting would improve workers’ production. Two groups were studied. Only one was given better lighting but both showed improved productivity, The experimenters concluded that the study had affected the second group simply by focusing attention on it.
In medicine, studies have shown that a placebo can work as well as a powerful drug if the person who takes it believes that it will. Yet in journalism, the hoary notion of an objective reality still lingers and reporters are still being instructed to go out and “tell it like it is.”
I was trying to usher this illusion offstage and into history during a session with some students at the University of California, Berkeley, when a professor jumped to its defense. Was I saying that I would cover a strike from the viewpoint of one side, he inquired. Was I denying that it was possible to be impartial?
I said, just before, that each story is different from every perspective and in every telling. So I asked him to consider a different question. Would he describe the window we were both facing? It was an aluminum frame window covered with a dusty venetian blind through which light was seeping. “It’s dirty,” he said, and laughed. “It’s a rectangle laced with lines of light,” I responded.
The next day I asked some other students to describe a similar window. For them it was: the opening toward outdoors; the separation between inside and outside; a translucent pane; the frame for a landscape.
Clearly there was a multitude of possible windows. Which description was appropriate?
“Tell it like it is,” the editor says and we take to our typewriters. But if a point of view is unavoidable, what is the fair perspective? In choosing one, do we not authenticate that one and exclude the others? Refusal to deal with that question is, again, a refusal to deal with journalism’s power. The press mirrors, yes, but it cannot mirror reality, only reality as perceived by the reporter.
If there is no way to separate story and story teller, there is no way to avoid facing the fact that the press never simply covers news. It defines and authenticates certain ways of seeing. It does this by the way it focuses, the way it names, by its choice of authenticating authorities and of story parameters.
Last winter, a year after the big swine flu scare, we had a Russian flu scare. As soon as it was first identified, at a Cheyenne, Wyoming, high school, Walter Cronkite’s crew was on the scene. The Washington Post off-lead proclaimed: “Russian Flu Arrives.” Shortly thereafter, a boy in San Francisco ran a fever, was sent from his school to a hospital, diagnosed as having Russian flu and sent to bed.
Now during this same time a lot of people were down with another bug that sapped their energy, brought headaches, respiratory trouble, and seemed to last at least two weeks, sometimes three. The Russian flu, according to a physician quoted in the Washington Post, was a simple two-to-five day affair. But people all over the country were dragging themselves to work with that other flu, the name of which they did not know. Their illness had not been authenticated by media recognition. So they were not sure whether they were really ill.
Naming is a big part of the authentication process, for words are never neutral. They resonate with implication. Battles are fought over what things should be called. It is possible to trace the course of social change through changes in the language of journalism.
During the civil rights era, when school integration was beginning, its opponents talked of “forced busing” while advocates, if they couldn’t avoid the mention of busses with a phrase like “assignment for racial balance,” spoke of “mandatory busing.”
As the backlash against integration expanded into Northern cities, “forced busing” crept into political rhetoric. Some newspapers sanctioned its use as a proper descriptive by omitting the cautionary quotation marks.
During the brief and blazing story of the Symbionese Liberation Army, “SLA soldier” appeared only within quotes at first. But before it was all over, both San Francisco dailies had dropped the quotes, thereby conveying the message that a real army with real soldiers had begun a revolutionary civil war here.
During the Vietnam war, The National Council of Teachers of English gave a Doublespeak Award to a former air attache at the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh who complained to reporters: “You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing. It’s not bombing; it’s air support.” Now in the fight over whether baby seals should be killed for their fur, proponents use the word harvest while opponents say “slaughter.” Strip miners, meanwhile, work to replace “topsoil” with “over burden.”
We used to have low-income people. Now we have the poor. We used to have Occidentals. But as the world grew less Western-dominated, we got Asians instead.
People who rise to the top of hierarchies share many characteristics and points of view. Relying on them, the press becomes a purveyor of the status quo view.
Language shapes how we see. It reflects social attitudes. In the case of the Bakke decision, a particular point of view rode to respectability on a phrase, because the press accepted it as descriptive.
Allen Bakke sued the University of California charging that his application to medical school was rejected at least in part because he is white. The Supreme Court compelled the university to revise its policy of reserving some spaces for minority students.
Supporters of this policy call it “affirmative action.” Supporters of Bakke call it “reverse discrimination.” The press, by and large, used the latter. It fed its ever-present need for newness, and it fit with the growing public hostility toward civil rights efforts.
“Discrimination” had commonly been understood to mean mass exclusion on the basis of color, age, sex or national origin. No such exclusion was involved in the Bakke case. Nor had it even been proven that he was rejected because he was white. (He was also older than average medical school applicants.) “Reverse” discrimination, moreover, implied that whatever way race weighed in the issue against the applicant, it was equivalent to the discrimination practiced against blacks by whites. This it surely was not.
In the extensive reporting on the Bakke issue, however, these facts were not examined. Nor were others, such as different forms of favoritism in admissions. A recent Harvard University study has shown that medical students — of all races — tend to come from well-to-do families and that affirmative action programs had not changed that. The Washington Post ran a story on discrimination in favor of the influential, but it was one of the few major papers to go beyond the yes-or-no discussion within the “reverse discrimination” format.
In this way, the press provided safe conduct for a point of view that, until the Bakke case, had been not quite respectable, at least among liberals. It legitimized the popular feeling that there had been enough noise about black rights.
On many matters authentication requires attribution to authorities. Doctors must be linked to any utterings on matters of health, psychiatrists consulted on issues of the psyche. On stories about joblessness, employment officials are deemed suitable — and more credible than, for instance, jobless people at large. On poverty, social welfare agency officials are routinely interviewed, much more often than people who are poor. To do otherwise would require work, discomfort, transcendence of communication problems, and thinking.
Yet doctors often know more about disease than about health. Psychiatrists have a limited range of knowledge on matters of mind and spirit. Welfare officials often exist in bureaucratic realities remote from the lives of people they are supposed to serve.
Reporters pride themselves on going to the source on stories. But often, they assume that whoever is on top of an organization is the best source. They do not consider that the view from the top tends to be abstract. It’s not the same view as one gets by walking on the ground.
Robert Gordon Shepherd and Erich Goode reported in the Nov. 24 New Scientist how they tried to understand the process whereby certain of their scientific peers are certified as “experts” by the press. Focusing on research and coverage on the subject of marijuana, they found that “reporters and editors seem uninterested in quoting or citing scientists who are at the cutting edge of research being done on a subject. . . . They want to talk to conspicuous, prominent people, people with credentials the public can understand.”
The press’ favorite marijuana experts had, for the most part, done no writing at all on cannabis. They were, however, heads of prestigious institutes or organizations.
People who rise to the top of hierarchies share many characteristics and points of view. Relying on them, the press becomes a purveyor of the status quo view.
A form of insurance against this hazard is provided in the practice of searching out two sides on controversial issues. But this locks into an either/or view of the situation and, combining with the journalistic predilection for the the weird or dramatic, often skews the meaning.
As it seeks the most prestigious figures as its experts, so the press seeks the most obvious or loudest contenders on controversies. It highlights extremes and generally assumes that the truth lies somewhere between them.
That leaves the press as arbiter of popular opinion rather than as seeker of what is. In the recent controversy over whether the Redwood National Park should be expanded, the issue was discussed as one of jobs versus trees. The timber industry and the Sierra Club had been the most vocal contestants in the matter and lumbermen see jobs while conservationists see trees. Had the press resisted that narrow focus, had it come in with a wider angle lens, it would have been apparent that, in the long run, trees and jobs were interdependent rather than mutually exclusive.
What is dramatic or novel may not reflect what is significant. Last fall, the Wall Street Journal ran a story that set out to show that solar technology in architecture was proving disappointing. It focused on two high rise buildings, one in Boston, one in New York where a hope had turned into a bungle. Only way down in the piece was there a hint that the two structures, and their location, were unsuited for solar technology. Its best promise lies in low-rise buildings of much more conventional design, in sunny climates like California’s or Arizona’s. Had the reporter talked to the California state architect, who is building three multi-million-dollar solar office structures, he would probably not have come away with a story that found solar architecture disappointing.
Because it is impossible to “tell it like it is,” because the way the press focuses affects what is, it is unavoidably an instrument of power.
A TV executive once glibly told me that “news is what happens.” More to the point is a definition by Edmund Carpenter, the anthropologist: “News is what is reported. What is not reported is not news. . . . What is not reported is outside of public responsibility and public control.”
After America and its press discovered race problems, in the late 1950s discrimination became a matter of public responsibility and control. Likewise with hunger in the 1960s. Neither quite exist anymore, as that unnamed flu we all had did not quite exist.
As long as journalism refuses to come to terms with its power, as long as it continues to wear antiquated blinders and hold to notions that should have gone out way before computerized type replaced linotype machines, it will be a power tool for others and fail to rise to the idea. Joseph Pulitzer painted in 1904: “A journalist is the lookout on the bridge of the ship of state. He notes the passing sail, the little things of interest that dot the horizon in fine weather. He reports the drifting castaway whom the ship can save. He peers through fog and storm to give warning of dangers ahead. . . . He is there to watch over the safety and welfare of the people who trust him.” Our lookout shouts of flotsam and jetsam, leaving us with the uneasy feeling that the real story is not being told.
And the effort to watch over our safety and welfare turns out to be so old-fashioned, very often, as to be quaint.
One cold Sunday afternoon, some of San Francisco’s best newsmen stood on the steps of a downtown church, waiting for a Soviet sympathizer to slug a Nazi. With them they had two TV camera crews and a still photographer.
The Nazi — there was only that one — had planted himself, in full regalia, at curbside, with a sign lettered: “Gas all Commies.” Inside the church, a small band of aging progressives hand gathered in its annual ritual, to hope aloud for world peace and be entertained by a couple of Soviet performers.
There was no story on either the meeting or the Nazi, the man from the San Francisco Chronicle explained. “As news value these guys (the local Nazis) are worth zilch,” he said. “There are only about three of them and they’re all morons. Except that they have this ability to provoke incidents.”
Never mind whether the heavy presence of news media was, in fact, an invitation to assault the Nazi. Why was this man’s offensiveness worth such expensive reporting time?
Nobody punched the Nazi and the reporters went away, grumbling at the waste of an afternoon but compensated by a vague sense that they had carried out the journalist’s noble duty.
But the threat to public safety and welfare is seldom as obvious now as a Nazi with a sign. It is more likely to be something odorless, soundless, invisible, possessed of a slow violence. It demands much more by way of watchful alertness.
A.J. Liebling laid much blame for the failures of journalism on the growing concentration of ownership and the fact that “the function of the press in society is to inform, but its role is to make money.”
Certainly what he said is even more true now, and it means a growing uniformity in news judgement. So does the fact that reporters continue to be predominantly white, male, urban people of middle or upper-class backgrounds, with a sprinkling of famous and rich people’s heirs and editors’ children. Such minority people as were hired since the push for integration in newsrooms have stayed on lower levels. If they have risen, they have done so by acquiescing to the prevailing ways of thought.
This uniformity creates a mental landscape against which events are defined. Last February, CBS’ “Sixty Minutes” did a story on the struggle for change in Rhodesia. Like so many other stories about Rhodesia, it focused around the country’s 263,000 whites, not its 6.7 million blacks. There was no interview with anyone from the Patriotic Front, which is engaged in guerrilla war against the whites and their moderate black supporters. It was a story from the perspective of the folks who are white.
There is also the fact that editors live in small worlds, hooked to telephones, press releases and dinner conversations. They seldom venture out to discover how the world has changed. Reporters, without opportunities to educate themselves through stories that force them beyond the surface events, don’t learn the new questions they should be asking.
We are living in a time of quantum changes. The American dream isn’t working the way it used to anymore. The economy, grown cumbersome in scale and complexity, seems to be winding down toward an entropy state. Increase in GNP no longer means an increase in jobs. Long-standing principles, like the trickle-down theory, have ceased to serve society. As the economy moves toward ever greater capital and resource intensity, more and more people are being discarded as useless.
Upward mobility has largely ceased and we are dividing into two societies. The one on top remains stable and shares in social benefits. The one below, the undersociety, expands, pushing against a top that has no openings, sucking down those who struggle to stay on the surface. We do not read about this in the news.
The American dream isn’t working the way it used to . . . As the economy moves toward ever greater capital and resource intensity, more and more people are being discarded.
Stories on agriculture do not make it clear that farming is of two distinct kinds in this country now: agribusiness enterprise farming and subsistence farming. Stories on cities do not come to terms with the fact that they are refuse bins for unneeded people and that some of them are now being transformed into playgrounds for the privileged.
Our miracle technologies are losing their potency. That is true with antibiotics and also with pesticides. Farmers have begun to look for new pest control methods because the chemicals to which they have grown accustomed must be used in ever greater quantities, at ever greater cost, to achieve the needed effect.
Entropy is the process of decay that makes new growth possible. Signs of fresh developments are there for those who can see them. Often, the best of our press cannot. A two-part series on pesticides in the New York Times last December posed the issue as one of agricultural boon versus agricultural worker risk. It did not touch on the growing array of problems that have brought a rising interest in integrated pest management, a method that does not rely as much on chemicals.
According to the Times, “the cost of doing without pesticides would be enormous.” Its documentation? “The National Agricultural Chemicals Association estimates that, without pesticides, the $35 billion worth of products generated by farmers each year would be cut from 30 to 60 per cent.” The Times tells its readers that the Association speaks for the pesticides industry. But it does not offer any of the very different estimates available from sources with different interests.
If the honorable New York Times can be so far behind on an issue well within the range of our journalistic tradition, it is no wonder that the press misses more profound changes, which require greater mental reach. What are the implications of the fact that Latinos are our new big urban minority? That one out of four people can now expect to contract cancer? What new world-views and perspectives are taking root in a time of such changes?
Doris Lessing, in Memoirs of a Survivor, describes what to me is exactly the feel of today’s world: things are happening, everyone vaguely knows they are momentous, but nobody will acknowledge them. Stuck in its old modes, confused in its role, quoting confused authorities, our journalism spreads fear rather than light.
What is it, what is it? we ask. Failing to hear an answer, we become frightened by the echo of our own question.
A recent Harris Survey showed that the media seriously underestimate their readers’ interest in hard news and that they grossly overrate the interest in sports news. The survey (was) conducted among a national cross-section of 1,533 adults, 85 high-level editors and news directors, and 76 major reporters and writers. It found that on state, national, foreign and science news, the public was much more interested than the press assumed. Interest in business and financial news, and in commentary and columns also tends to be higher than newsmen believed. On sports, while 76 per cent of the editors think the public is “very interested,” in fact only 35 per cent of those surveyed said they were.
I get much of my real news now from special publications — Science, Scientific American, Medical Dimensions, Forbes, Acres, U.S.A., CoEvolution Quarterly, New Age Journal, Working Papers. Here, from varied perspectives, come fresh observations, to be pieced together into meaning.
The one feature of the nightly news I truly appreciate is the weather report. It does come with its proper context. It shows where we are in the biosphere that sustains us. Those wonderful satellite photos reveal the roundness of the planet and our smallness in it. They link us here in San Francisco with New York, Chicago, Texas and Gunnison, Colorado. The weather report always comes with meaningful context. And therefore, for a moment, it makes me feel safe and clear.
