People want the news as badly as food or sex. Or worse, like nicotine and alcohol. Multiple-edition newspapers and stations that give themselves the pseudo-Teutonic compound “newsradio” set up the addicted with their fix. Network television administers maintenance doses throughout the day, while CNN and kid sibling Headline News service hard-core infomaniacs. The News Hour presses on with Lehrer and without Macneil. A relative handful of programs is broadcast regardless of whether anyone is planning to watch. That some do tune in begs the question of exactly who is turning on what, or what, whom. Print media include Newsday, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. Their names assert an embrace of everything worth knowing.
An orientation toward the news, originally that which is novel, or unprecedented, seeps from journalism into life at large. The Christmas card is now frequently a de facto newsletter about the year in the life of far-flung individuals and families. Letters and telephone calls consist largely of the exchange of recent information, and he Internet is replete with disembodied “newsgroups.” Stasis is seldom discussed. We pay lip service to the saying “No news is good news,” but our perpetual-motion culture stigmatizes a lack of noticeable change no less than silence, contemplation, or excessive literacy.
One of the major publications in its field is, without a hint of irony, ArtNews, though. A hard-shell esthete would find the title redundant, or overreaching. What Pound said of literature applies to other media—they are news that stays news.
Popular culture reflects the same preoccupation. For forty-some years Chuck Berry has whooped, “Tell Tchaikovsky the news.” Rod Steiger’s lines in the ill-fated film The January Man include telling a subordinate police officer, “If I give you a rubber duck to work with, that is the news.”
Art itself is no stranger to this function. The cave paintings of Lascaux say, among other things, “we managed to hunt down some bison around here.” Homer’s hendecasyllables helped to pass on what Odysseus had been up to, with a few embellishments. Smoke-signals, drums and folk-singing have served the same purpose prior to the advent of mass media. Which have their advantages. Information overload is, to mix metaphors, primarily a growing pain of rapid technological change. Sorting high volumes of informational wheat from higher volumes of chaff is a new skill but one that is quickly disseminating. In the meantime, our discomfort is outweighed by our ability to communicate with scattered loved ones and find out, in the narrowcast network of personal life, about the births, deaths, and events in between.
Outside of our own lives the news is largely predictable. Had he lived long enough, Wittgenstein might have called a mass society’s news a linguistic game that exists to perpetuate and validate itself. To wit, the news of the day is presented as fresh because yesterday's news has gone bad; like manna it is plentiful but cannot stored laid up. Tomorrow’s news will fill the void left by today’s.
The conventions of news-bringing are consequently reified, made tautological. The news is delivered to us this way because it is delivered to us this way. No three-year-old in his or her “why” phase would take that for an answer, but “news judgment” in journalism is based on this circular logic. The result is a startling uniformity in headlines and top stories.
Some might call the news a discourse, with boundaries and rules reflecting power relationships, but these rules stem at least as much from habit and sloth as they do from power. Editors and reporters hew to these familiar boundaries like zoo animals, their cages opened, who remain inside. Outside lies the unknown, where lurk hunger, predation, reduced circulation, lower Nielsens and Arbitrons.
Most stories are stretched and cut on the Procrustean bed of the inverted pyramid lead, and they are made to fit into recognizable categories. Manmade and natural disasters, no matter how distant, enjoy pride of place. They lend themselves to coverage in a nearly Aristotelian unity of time and space, but with a multitude of possible angles. After the initial reports of death and destruction are confirmed, the stories of survivors and public authorities nearly write themselves. An Australian can know more about a mild tremor in the Caucasus than the average European knew about the 1755 Lisbon earthquake or the Great Plague of London. No great art, though, is likely to emerge from today’s disasters, or near-misses. The news-consuming public’s senses are soon bombarded by other events, and the esthetic distance needed to contemplate any single event vanishes.
Contemplation may even lie outside of the news discourse, increasingly taken up with the spectacles of sports and weather. They lend themselves to coverage, but they have little direct impact on the public. In sporting events there is little at stake for anyone besides participants, support personnel, and compulsive gamblers. As for the weather, in the industrialized world not much depends on it outside of crisis conditions.
Other newsworthy spectacles include tips of icebergs that surface at regular intervals, with extensive lead time. Diplomatic summits at predetermined sites produce a blandly worded, non-binding communiqué, Athena of the lowest common denominator proceeding full-grown from the forehead of a tepid Zeus. The preliminary work and the actual follow-through, if any, will be conducted by nameless staffers and civil servants. Their successes and failures may cost blood and treasure, but little newsmen's ink.
Likewise, annual trade shows provide a ready supply of facts. There is usually a record or near-record number of attendees and exhibitors, along with trends, stand-out products, and celebrity appearances. The template on which news is reported demands these recurring high points, easily extracted from press releases as deadlines approach.
What is covered, then, is that which lends itself to coverage. It is the story of the man looking for a dime under a streetlight because he can see better there. In the United States, where our Enlightenment-fed view of progress creates high expectations, almost any unpleasantness constitutes news, and this approach is not without benefits. One should know when taxes increase, or which lakes yield inedible fish.
The negative bias of the news discourse meshes poorly with lived experience. This disjunction is periodically addressed in attempts at reporting “good news.” The social service projects or human interest stories featured are demonstrably good in a utilitarian, non-controversial way, but these items merely serve to reinforce expectations or provide another example of what is presumed to be the norm. These accounts consequently fail to generate interest and, failing, confirm the power of the prevailing approach.
An even deeper flaw involves the coverage of effects rather than causes. Reported facts are post facto, effects proceeding from causes, but purveyors of news often skim the surface and claim that they have explored the whole pond.
At one level journalists and their public cannot be faulted. As we have learned the limits of knowledge in general, we have also learned the limits of individual modes of inquiry. As philosopher Nelson Goodman has noted, the meaning of Ulysses cannot be translated into an equation. Nor is journalism equipped to investigate the inner experience that underlies or accompanies events. The superficiality of most religion reporting, for instance, is breathtaking.
Inner experience makes bad copy, and worse footage. Even its expressions are hard to cover. Somewhere men and women decide once and for all to clear out garage and basement space so they can work on designs and inventions, some of which will succeed. One addict knows a moment of clarity and steps away from his poison, while another rushes toward it. A person who can say “yes” to another’s aspirations offers or withholds the word. In the woods of Ontario a hermit, having canned his own produce and chopped his own firewood, fasts and prays through the winter. Spending little, staging no events, committing no crimes, he eludes measurement and summary. These experiences have yet to receive adequate coverage. If they ever do, that will be news.
--J.D. Smith, 2005