At a party Art talks to Sam.
Art: “I almost clicked on a news outlet this morning.”
Sam: “So? I check the news daily. What’s the big deal.”
Art: “But is it news or just people talking about people talking about the news? What people responsible for reporting do is to…hmmn, how should I say it?—they look to irritate nerve endings, to rouse feelings, and to influence thinking.”
Sam: “Huh?”
Art: “Remember the old principles of journalism? The opening of a story should present the “who, what, when, where, and if possible, the why” of the incident. The ensuing part of the story is an elaboration of those details. We get some of that, true, but then we get the seemingly interminable comments that devolve into nothing about the original story. The devolution becomes a story about the story-tellers. Heck, I saw that one cable network even has a Sunday program devoted to how the news was handled by the media. The premise of that show is that the actual news is just a springboard that launches opinion into the pool of viewers and readers.”
Sam: “So, where should I go for news? I want to stay informed. I don’t want to be unaware. Ignorance might be bliss, but it is also dangerous. I’m not going to South Africa to rent a car where carjacking is common. I know that only because I watched the news.”
Art: “I have no advice. I can’t tell you where to click. I can only suggest that when you begin to read, you might consider clicking out if you don’t see those five Ws. Otherwise, you’ll get dragged into the quagmire of opinion, usually unsubstantiated opinion. And it’s not that this is a new problem. It was even one in the nineteenth century.”
Sam: “Go on.”
Art: “Ever hear the line ‘Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it’?”
Sam: “Yeah, so?”
Art: “It was made by Mark Twain’s friend Charles Dudley Warner, a nineteenth-century guy who actually, by the way, once collaborated with Twain to write The Gilded Age. Anyway, Warner, who made that remark about weather, wrote The American Newspaper, which I found online among the Gutenberg Project’s postings. * Warner wrote—here, let me get his exact words; hold on. Here they are: ‘Our newspapers are overwhelmed with material that is of no importance.’ That was in the nineteenth century.
“He also says something that applies to our stressful times in general and to online media and our addiction to our electronic gadgets that connect us to everyone everywhere instantaneously. Let me read a paragraph of his:
‘To return for a moment to the subject of general news. The characteristic of our modern civilization is sensitiveness, or, as the doctors say, nervousness. Perhaps the philanthropist would term it sympathy. No doubt an exciting cause of it is the adaptation of electricity to the transmission of facts and ideas. The telegraph, we say, has put us in sympathy with all the world. And we reckon this enlargement of nerve contact somehow a gain. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening or deadening them to these shocks; but nevertheless, every person who reads is a focus for the excitements, the ills, the troubles, of all the world. In addition to his local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a manner compelled to be a sharer in the universal uneasiness.’
“Insightful, isn’t it? Almost Nostradamus-like though he could not have foreseen the Internet.”
Sam: “I’m beginning to see what you’re saying. Now I’m thinking that if a nineteenth-century guy can point out the psychological consequences of electrified news, we should be able to see similar consequences for our psyches because of our round-the-clock opinionated news coverage. I suppose you could also add that our twenty-first sensitiveness is nineteenth-century sensitiveness on steroids, all our nerve ends irritated far beyond what a primitive telegraph technology could inflame.”
Art: “You should read all of Warner’s little essay on the press. It’s free to read online at Project Gutenberg. When I read it, I asked myself an odd question.”
Sam: “What?”
Art: “How would Aristotle see the modern news media?”
Sam: “Yeah, that is odd. So, how would he?”
Art: “I don’t think he would favor it because of his philosophy of causes. He said we can understand something if we know why it is what it is and how it came to be what it is.”
Sam: “Here we go, one of your deep dives into metaphysics.”
Art: “Not deep, but right on the surface of the Aristotle’s philosophical ocean. Anyway, Aristotle says there are four explanations for everything. He called the explanations ‘causes.’ The first is the stuff of the thing; he would have said the thing’s matter is like building materials. In the case of the news media, I think he would say the matter is composed of an incident as evident in the who, what, when, where, and why. Aristotle would have reporters use those parts to build the form. His second cause is that form, in the case of the news media might be the hard copy paper rendition of the five Ws, the TV news program, or the online news outlet’s website. His third cause was what he called the ‘efficient’ cause, but not in the sense of doing something well, but rather in the sense of the primary or immediate cause, say the editor, reporter or the anchor. The media has a plan to present the incident and presents it in the shape we see. That leads us to his fourth cause, which is the goal. And that’s where Aristotle would probably put down the paper and stop reading.”
Sam: “And why would he do that?”
Art: “Because he would see that the fourth cause in the media twists the first three causes to do the will of the media which is not to present the incident as a thing in itself but rather as an interpreted thing. They take the five Ws to build the form all right, but then in building the form they add their own purpose which is not a simple rendition of news, but an elaboration based on their interpretation. I’m fumbling here for an analogy, but if the news media were building a house, they would add much that has nothing to do with the structure and function of a house. At the very least their house would be the epitome of rococo architecture, you know, that late Baroque style that has so much ornamentation that it appears to be a style for the sake of the style, some elaborate ars gratia artis, with the original matter shaped and reshaped and overelaborated according to the ‘school’ of news, the news ‘artists’ and ‘architects’ who share a point of view and who have become the story instead of the actual story. Yeah, I think I’m onto something here. I think the modern presentation of the news is definitely a rebirth of the rococo.”
Sam: “Your mind never fails to wander around in the strangest ways. Talking to you is like reading a stream-of-consciousness novel by Joyce or listening to Don McClean’s “American Pie” and trying to figure out the meaning of his elliptic lyrics without some intensive background about him and Buddy Holly. But I think I get the point about the modern news.”
Art: “And…”
Sam: “Sorry, I have an appointment.”
*Warner, Charles Dudley. The American Newspaper. Online free at the Project Gutenberg EBook website at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3110/pg3110.html I highly recommend this insightful little pamphlet. Warner addresses just about every concern that you might have about the way news is handled and about its effect on the American psyche. Already a nervous people fraught with concerns over how others view incidents and individuals, your contemporaries are daily subject to more emphasis on story tellers than on stories.
Art: “I almost clicked on a news outlet this morning.”
Sam: “So? I check the news daily. What’s the big deal.”
Art: “But is it news or just people talking about people talking about the news? What people responsible for reporting do is to…hmmn, how should I say it?—they look to irritate nerve endings, to rouse feelings, and to influence thinking.”
Sam: “Huh?”
Art: “Remember the old principles of journalism? The opening of a story should present the “who, what, when, where, and if possible, the why” of the incident. The ensuing part of the story is an elaboration of those details. We get some of that, true, but then we get the seemingly interminable comments that devolve into nothing about the original story. The devolution becomes a story about the story-tellers. Heck, I saw that one cable network even has a Sunday program devoted to how the news was handled by the media. The premise of that show is that the actual news is just a springboard that launches opinion into the pool of viewers and readers.”
Sam: “So, where should I go for news? I want to stay informed. I don’t want to be unaware. Ignorance might be bliss, but it is also dangerous. I’m not going to South Africa to rent a car where carjacking is common. I know that only because I watched the news.”
Art: “I have no advice. I can’t tell you where to click. I can only suggest that when you begin to read, you might consider clicking out if you don’t see those five Ws. Otherwise, you’ll get dragged into the quagmire of opinion, usually unsubstantiated opinion. And it’s not that this is a new problem. It was even one in the nineteenth century.”
Sam: “Go on.”
Art: “Ever hear the line ‘Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it’?”
Sam: “Yeah, so?”
Art: “It was made by Mark Twain’s friend Charles Dudley Warner, a nineteenth-century guy who actually, by the way, once collaborated with Twain to write The Gilded Age. Anyway, Warner, who made that remark about weather, wrote The American Newspaper, which I found online among the Gutenberg Project’s postings. * Warner wrote—here, let me get his exact words; hold on. Here they are: ‘Our newspapers are overwhelmed with material that is of no importance.’ That was in the nineteenth century.
“He also says something that applies to our stressful times in general and to online media and our addiction to our electronic gadgets that connect us to everyone everywhere instantaneously. Let me read a paragraph of his:
‘To return for a moment to the subject of general news. The characteristic of our modern civilization is sensitiveness, or, as the doctors say, nervousness. Perhaps the philanthropist would term it sympathy. No doubt an exciting cause of it is the adaptation of electricity to the transmission of facts and ideas. The telegraph, we say, has put us in sympathy with all the world. And we reckon this enlargement of nerve contact somehow a gain. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening or deadening them to these shocks; but nevertheless, every person who reads is a focus for the excitements, the ills, the troubles, of all the world. In addition to his local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a manner compelled to be a sharer in the universal uneasiness.’
“Insightful, isn’t it? Almost Nostradamus-like though he could not have foreseen the Internet.”
Sam: “I’m beginning to see what you’re saying. Now I’m thinking that if a nineteenth-century guy can point out the psychological consequences of electrified news, we should be able to see similar consequences for our psyches because of our round-the-clock opinionated news coverage. I suppose you could also add that our twenty-first sensitiveness is nineteenth-century sensitiveness on steroids, all our nerve ends irritated far beyond what a primitive telegraph technology could inflame.”
Art: “You should read all of Warner’s little essay on the press. It’s free to read online at Project Gutenberg. When I read it, I asked myself an odd question.”
Sam: “What?”
Art: “How would Aristotle see the modern news media?”
Sam: “Yeah, that is odd. So, how would he?”
Art: “I don’t think he would favor it because of his philosophy of causes. He said we can understand something if we know why it is what it is and how it came to be what it is.”
Sam: “Here we go, one of your deep dives into metaphysics.”
Art: “Not deep, but right on the surface of the Aristotle’s philosophical ocean. Anyway, Aristotle says there are four explanations for everything. He called the explanations ‘causes.’ The first is the stuff of the thing; he would have said the thing’s matter is like building materials. In the case of the news media, I think he would say the matter is composed of an incident as evident in the who, what, when, where, and why. Aristotle would have reporters use those parts to build the form. His second cause is that form, in the case of the news media might be the hard copy paper rendition of the five Ws, the TV news program, or the online news outlet’s website. His third cause was what he called the ‘efficient’ cause, but not in the sense of doing something well, but rather in the sense of the primary or immediate cause, say the editor, reporter or the anchor. The media has a plan to present the incident and presents it in the shape we see. That leads us to his fourth cause, which is the goal. And that’s where Aristotle would probably put down the paper and stop reading.”
Sam: “And why would he do that?”
Art: “Because he would see that the fourth cause in the media twists the first three causes to do the will of the media which is not to present the incident as a thing in itself but rather as an interpreted thing. They take the five Ws to build the form all right, but then in building the form they add their own purpose which is not a simple rendition of news, but an elaboration based on their interpretation. I’m fumbling here for an analogy, but if the news media were building a house, they would add much that has nothing to do with the structure and function of a house. At the very least their house would be the epitome of rococo architecture, you know, that late Baroque style that has so much ornamentation that it appears to be a style for the sake of the style, some elaborate ars gratia artis, with the original matter shaped and reshaped and overelaborated according to the ‘school’ of news, the news ‘artists’ and ‘architects’ who share a point of view and who have become the story instead of the actual story. Yeah, I think I’m onto something here. I think the modern presentation of the news is definitely a rebirth of the rococo.”
Sam: “Your mind never fails to wander around in the strangest ways. Talking to you is like reading a stream-of-consciousness novel by Joyce or listening to Don McClean’s “American Pie” and trying to figure out the meaning of his elliptic lyrics without some intensive background about him and Buddy Holly. But I think I get the point about the modern news.”
Art: “And…”
Sam: “Sorry, I have an appointment.”
*Warner, Charles Dudley. The American Newspaper. Online free at the Project Gutenberg EBook website at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3110/pg3110.html I highly recommend this insightful little pamphlet. Warner addresses just about every concern that you might have about the way news is handled and about its effect on the American psyche. Already a nervous people fraught with concerns over how others view incidents and individuals, your contemporaries are daily subject to more emphasis on story tellers than on stories.
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