| Listening to the news recently, I heard a story about how not getting enough sleep is a cause of heart trouble – something about the old ticker not being able to rejuvenate itself. Then a few days later I read that not getting enough sleep was also a cause of weight gain, though I can’t recall the specific reason.
Well, this caused me some distress. Already a minimalist sleeper, the first item had me lying awake at night, worrying about my health. Unable to sleep, I’d go downstairs and, sooner or later, end up munching on a snack to calm my nerves. Result? You guessed it: weight gain. So, these two news stories contributed to the precise problems they were presumably intended to prevent.
I say "presumably" because I no longer have any idea what at least half the stories that appear in the news – radio, TV or papers – are doing there. What are they telling us? What are we meant to do about them? Take the ubiquitous "scientists now say" type of story. On any given day, one news outlet or another will relay a story that "scientists now say" that alcohol is good for you, tall people live longer, Italians have the best sex, rats communicate via brain waves, etc. Yet it’s never clear how, why or if any of this stuff actually matters – or even if it’s true. I believe that any news story, scientific or otherwise, needs to pass three basic tests.
First, provenance. What is the source of the story and how did it come to enter the public domain? Are there really scientists out there who excitedly run straight from their lab to call reporters about their latest discovery? Or do those same reporters simply hang about universities and other research institutes on the off chance of stumbling across some startling new find?
Second, reliability. Preface any story with the word "science" or "scientist" and people will, at the very least, pay it some attention. But just who are these "scientists"? Occasionally, the news source will elaborate, perhaps citing MIT or the University of Toronto, but more often we’re left with a picture of anonymous men and women, dressed in white coats, thick-rimmed glasses and sensible shoes, delivering "the truth" in Moses-from-the-Mount fashion. It would be nice to know details such as why specific research was being conducted, who was funding it and what agenda, if any, is being advanced by the results.
Third, relevance. Even if the discovery story passes the reliability test, all too often the question remains: well, so what? My favourite story goes back a couple of years, when a certain "national" newspaper announced that "scientists now believed" that the Sun would burn out in X million years (I forget the exact figure). The next day, the same paper ran a correction, saying the figure should have been X billion. Well, that’s a relief, I thought. Really, who cares? Does it really make a difference whether it’s millions or billions? And just how were we supposed to react to the news, anyway? Store away some extra firewood? Knit more sweaters? All too often, so-called scientific stories are interesting, but strictly irrelevant to anything approaching everyday life.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming the scientists – they’re merely one example. Much the same could be said of the way the media reports the claims of political scientists, historians, economists or anyone else with a smattering of "authority." No, the problem lies with the media itself. Over the past 50 years, the combined television and Internet revolutions have increasingly placed content ahead of analysis. Getting the story "out there" has become far more important than explaining its meaning or significance.
Actually, I suspect that this was the case for much of the 20th century. Take a look at Neal Gabler’s Life: The Movie, or Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. But it does seem to be getting worse, if only because the volume of information available is so much greater than ever before, with so little of it passing through any kind of critical scrutiny.
Two concrete examples of this are extremely common. First, the increased use of the word "coverage," as in "our coverage begins with a report from Singapore," etc. What this usually amounts to is a reporter reading from an official press release and perhaps interviewing some randomly selected "person on the street" for comment. This might well be "coverage," but hardly amounts to genuine insight or analysis.
Second, the new habit of news anchors turning to field reporters and saying, "Give me a sense of" this, that or the other. Given its sudden widespread appearance, I assume this tactic originated among news editors and/or producers, who felt that the reporters’ subjective musings did indeed "give a sense" of what war, famine, earthquakes, floods, etc. might be like. If so, I can only further assume that this is because they no longer have faith in their audiences’ ability to imagine for themselves what it is like to be shot, hungry, homeless, and so on.
Ordinarily this is harmless, but with the United States poised to go to war with Iraq, a sharp-minded media is more crucial than ever. For example, the official cause of the impending war is (a) Iraq’s "illegal" possession of weapons of mass destruction and (b) Saddam Hussein’s threat to world stability. Yet assuming that Iraq does indeed possess such weapons and that Saddam is truly mad, then surely a U.S.-led assault is exactly the sort of action that would likely provoke a full-scale nuclear response, the very outcome the U.S. hopes to prevent. This, I would suggest, is a paradox worth pursuing. But so far, most journalists have been content to report preparations for war as if it were inevitable.
So once again, we’re being bombarded with much information, but precious little analysis. Which means, of course, that Canada will eventually be fighting a war with Iraq without fully knowing why. And after 9/11, that’s a real reason for losing sleep. |
