Dumbing Ourselves Down

I’m going to start by saying that this new blogging journey that the CW and I are on is an interesting one. Any blogger, or even most national opinion writers, can sit at their computers and spout. To back up your positions with factual information requires a great deal of time and research. Despite the time-suck the CW and I are determined to stay the course. If every blogger in America did the same we’d probably have better discourse in this country. Alas…

Onwards.


For whatever reason, there seems to be strong empirical evidence that Americans have surprisingly little knowledge of current political issues even as they seemingly have incredibly black and white views on political positions. Proving or disproving this beyond the empirical is a difficult, if not impossible proposition, although one can easily find enough evidence to comfortably say that Americans are woefully ignorant of political realities and facts. Examples: Barack Obama is a Muslim, who is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and who the top military commander is in Afghanistan. So we (“we” being me and the CW) chose to do some research on how people today are getting their political information.

To do this, we had to make some suppositions. We started with the way news is reported, and we looked at 1) political and news magazines, 2) local and national newspapers, and 3) cable and local television news.

-Our first supposition was that news magazines (e.g., Time, U.S. News, Christian Science Monitor Weekly, Business Week, Forbes) have the most in-depth coverage of stories based on their area of interest when compared to the newspapers and TV.
-The second supposition is that both national (e.g., USA Today, Wall Street Journal) and local newspapers cover topics that are more widely varying than magazines or TV, especially local newspapers since they also are attempting to cover stories of local interest.
-By nature, if these suppositions are true (which seem reasonable that they are based on empirical evidence and common sense), then TV news reports little more than an overview of a small number of stories. Even 24/7 cable news does not spend the in-depth time on most issues, outside of opinion and tabloid shows.

-According to this synopsis by the Pew Research Center of a survey concluded in February 2009, readership of newspapers in any form has fallen among all age groups. The WWII generation (the “Greatest Generation”) dropped to 53% from 65%, and Baby Boomers dropped from 48% to 38%. Gen X & Gen Y apparently never started reading newspapers in any form, as their numbers over the same time went from 31% & 22% respectively to 26% & 21% respectively.

-During this same time period news gathered from TV sources has remained stable.

-Even for those getting their news online, online cable TV news sites (CNN, Fox, MSNBC) are visited consistently higher than the entire aggregation of local newspaper sites, which also suggests that people’s understanding of local issues, arguably more important in people’s day-to-day lives than national issues, is declining rapidly.

Pew also breaks the country down by how they get their news into Integrators, Net-Newsers, Traditionalists and Disengaged, with Traditionalists being by far the largest segment (46%). This is the only segment that is almost solely reliant on TV for their news. However, the Integrators (23%) also use TV as their main news source. Integrators are defined as those who use traditional sources (TV, magazine, newspaper) and the internet. They tend to be middle-aged Americans who are “well-educated and affluent.” This means that, taken as an aggregate, 69% of all Americans rely on TV for all or most of their news.

This might be ok if TV were a reliable source for accuracy in a “headline news” sort of mode, or if the 24/7 news channels were to take the major stories of the day and give them a journalistic analysis. But that’s not the reality of what national news coverage has become; certainly not with the cable news stations, which have become more and more politicized over time. CNN, which was once thought of as both the bastion of TV journalism and ironically as the mouthpiece of the left is now foundering as not being politicized enough, and therefore 3rd in the cable news ratings.


So if TV news is a brief overview of issues, is overtly politicized instead of being journalistically sound, is rewarded (by ratings) for assuming a political stance, and people are picking and choosing what network to watch based on their political affiliation, then the viewership is being rewarded for continuing to believe what they want to believe. Along the same line, the network or station in question is rewarded for giving their viewership “red meat” along the political lines they hold. To the medium of television news, journalism is all but dead, true dissent is dead, and by nature, the truth is dead. Yet this is what 69% of all Americans choose as their primary news source.

Is it any wonder that we are becoming more polarized and more intractable? If this climate continues, will we ever be able to compromise for the good of the country? Ask yourself, whatever you believe: can you see any point in listening tothe other side? Or do you believe that the other side is so out of touch that there’s no sense in listening to them?

Regardless of the answers, it seems reasonably clear that to have some grasp of the truth you must turn off the TV.