The Force

When I say The Force above, I mean not Star Wars but U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller's admonishment of the news media for "surrendering to the forces of entertainment."

As reported in The Hill (actual link to story above):

"Instead of a watchdog that is a check on the excesses of government and business, we have the endless barking of a 24-hour news cycle," Rockefeller said in his prepared remarks. "We have journalism that is always ravenous for the next rumor, but insufficiently hungry for the facts that can nourish our democracy. As citizens, we are paying a price."

It's the nourishment of democracy aspect that catches my eye, especially since I write here often about the role the news must play in a healthy democracy.  To be fair, Rockefeller also goes after our two favorite cable TV networks -- Fox and MSNBC -- for spending too much time on the right and left and not enough on quality news.

I'm shocked, shocked, to think anyone finds either network lacking in actual news coverage.  Let's face it, Fox spends more time talking about the news than actually covering it.  MSNBC, more reporting thanks to the resources of NBC News, but still an awful lot of chatter in prime time.  But that's what people apparently want, so in a sense Rockefeller is asking the new orgs to go not where the audience is or wants to be, but rather what's best for our nation and our democracy.  What's up with that?  Capitalism comes first, senator.  The media, unfortunately but logically, go where the audience takes it.  Yes, it sucks, but that's what's happening.

In terms of what people know, as I've discussed many times here, this shift to entertainment-style news is leaving us with, instead, what people feel.  Or to put it in social science terms, affect is winning out over cognition.

On a positive note, this leaves lots of room for scholarly research not only on how the news is changing, but the effects these changes have on the audience -- cognitive, and affective.

The Need to Know, and the Need to Feel

There's been a shift in the news media audience in the past 10 years or so. Yes, it's fragmented. Yes, it's shrunk. But interesting to me is how people seem to be shifting from a need to know to a need to feel.

News media serve a surveillance function for many people. Journalists feed the need to know, the need to keep up with what's happening, a sense of connectedness and knowledge that many people find vital, if not absolutely necessary, to get through their day either because of jobs or because they're news junkies.

But of late, with the growth of TV and radio talk shows but most especially thanks to cable TV news, there has been a replacing of the need to know with the need to feel.

Talkmeisters of all partisan stripes, from Lou Dobbs to Sean Hannity sell one thing today and it's not knowledge. It's anger and frustration and righteous indignation. Sure, they pepper their gabbing with bits of information, but even a fan has to acknowledge the info is skewed, that straw men are set up and knocked down. Hannity and Bill O'Reilly can't do a show without name calling, for example, and they often falsely or incompletely portray the other side. No wonder they hate the idea of a fairness doctrine (btw, so do I).

They want people to feel more than they want people to know.

If they wanted people to know they'd offer fairer portrayals of the other side. If they wanted people to know they'd cover topics other than those laced with partisan and ideological intrigue -- some of it nonexistent except in their own minds (saving Christmas? Jeez, ever walk into a real store?). If they wanted people to know they wouldn't openly mislead, which happens all the time on these programs (don't even get me started on how they screw up science to fit their partisan beliefs).

But people don't want to know so much as they want to know what to feel.

All news, especially cable TV news, continues to edge this way. The news audience as a whole has shrunk and as a result has become more partisan and ideological. The battle is on for this smaller yet passionate group and the results ain't pretty. CNN dodges left and right trying to find an audience. Fox News has been doing this bit for years, spending more time talking about the news than actually covering it. MSNBC is doing well with a small, loyal liberal audience. Foundering newspapers may be next to get on the bandwagon, but I don't know if it'll save 'em.

In some ways this is not so bad. I think we'll see the growth of advocacy journalism not unlike, in superficial ways at least, the old partisan press prior to the 1830s. This will free journalists and cause innumerable problems as well, but that's for another post. Indeed I've proposed an undergraduate class in advocacy journalism to explore what I think our new journalism will look like -- even offered to swap out a graduate class to teach it -- but I've heard nada from my boss. Ah well.

Great Quotes

Yeah, this blog is What People Know. So what are some great lines that use our favorite blog-name phrase? My favorite so far:

The Almighty is not served by the accuracy of what people know, but by the exaltation of what they feel. Appleton's Journal, 1873.

Kinda neat. Gets at the tension between the secular and the religious, between knowledge and affect, and honestly from a religious perspective gets at the crux of an age-old argument between a religious transformation that is emotional (sudden) versus one that is more intellectual (over time). That's about as far as I want to swerve into that debate, though it's an old argument that I've always found fascinating, so much so that I even did some research on it once to examine political attitude differences between those with a sudden versus a longer born-again experience.