One thing feels more and more true to me: we’ve entered an age of information dystopia or chaos.
Who do we believe? It’s a hard question. It truly is.
Eighty years ago, there was no TV, some radio news and perhaps a daily paper if you lived in an urban area and a weekly if you lived in a rural place. I recently scrolled through a year’s worth of microfilm from The Danielsville Monitor in the 1930s, wondering if there was any coverage of a lynching here, which was surely newsworthy. There wasn’t. I saw announcements about local plays, farms for sale, ads for “Black Draught” laxative. There was, of course, the social media of its day, the community columnists, who reported such things as: “Mrs. H.C. Smith spent awhile Saturday with her mother, Mrs. J. Williams.”
News in those days was surely more word-of-mouth than media driven. For instance, I feel sure the lynching was discussed. It was not, however, reported — despite it being picked up nationally. This word-of-mouth form of information gathering and distribution can be both good and bad. If you wanted news about the wider world, you were out of luck. But in a world of greater isolation, when every interaction carries more weight, then a real kindness can take root, a greater neighborliness among those in close proximity. The value of this is huge. And it’s not something to shrug off. No, it’s the hot meal to the grieving. It’s the neighbor helping the friend who falls down. That is the essence of “Southern hospitality” in my eyes. But that same closeness, if it sours, or if it is denied to you from the get go out of some difference, can be suffocating. The pain of this can be immense, too, just as the value can be truly comforting.
I think we’ve ridden sort of a 180-degree information arc since those days to find a new form of information closeness and suffocation via the Internet. We’ve gone from a world-wide information desert to a world-wide web of a jungle, where the volume of information, both reliable and unreliable, is now mixed into a massive thicket. And it can be hard to discern what’s what’s true and what’s false, what’s fact and what’s opinion. This information jungle can be disheartening and disorienting — to those consuming the news, as well as those reporting it.
For sure, the Internet is still young and it’s hard to sum it all up. It’s too early for that. But it seems clear that the Internet broke old media revenue models. It also opened the door for massive information and disinformation campaigns domestically and internationally — for anyone inclined to use it for good or bad. It diminished the old “let’s-serve-everybody” business model that was good for civic journalism and chopped it into niche marketing aimed at people groups who want information tailored to their already established beliefs.
Bias actually sells better than objectivity in the niche market way. This is not good for society. But from a business standpoint, it can be a way to survive in an increasingly fierce click-bait jungle. I hate to argue about bias. We all see what we see. However, I do think it’s worthwhile to widen the camera lens and always think about how an organization is trying to make its money. If there is bias, who’s making money off that bias?
What seems evident today, what is increasingly painful to me, is that the American media profit motive increasingly shrinks newsrooms, reduces newsgatherers, increases hothead opinion makers, highlights conflict over context, and often fills massive space on the cheap. For instance, cable news — left and right — is straight up guilty of all of these things. It’s a 365-24-7 space filler. There isn’t a moment of down time. How do you make money this way? You keep emotions high and costs low. You bark and keep your target audience at a constant simmer. Volatile personalities are a great way to do this. Middle-of-the-road, reasonable commentary doesn’t sell or entertain like an extreme hothead. Neither does straight-forward reporting that actually has contextual balance. No, what sells is whatever brings out the F-bombs from the recliner. Keep ‘em pissed. Right?
If you’re sitting in your living room piping mad, your eyeballs stuck on a screen for hours at a time, you’ve been sold on a media product that is no good for the human spirit. Right-wing, left-wing, whatever. The underlying motive — the true bias — is about money. There is the aim of keeping you emotionally hooked on agitation, not to “inform” you. You are part of a target market. I don’t watch cable news at all. I find all of it sickening, all of it tied to this profit structure aimed at alarm, anxiety and rage.
Well, of course, people are fed up, angry and despairing in such a cynical and rage-inducing information environment. Of course, people want one or two places to get their information and want to limit their exposure to the information cacophony. Who doesn’t want it simple?
But goodness, things aren’t simple, are they? The fact is, being a good news consumer is actually really hard work now. It requires individual responsibility. It requires a lot of critical thought.
I heard that a newsroom was shot up last week and wasn’t surprised. And it feels futile to try and debate the broken workings of this murderer’s mind. He committed this awful act for his own reasons, personal, political, whatever. No one can really be blamed, except this man.
However, as a journalist, I must say, things do feel surreal right now. I see something unhinged and it is scary. I saw a T-shirt, “Tree. Rope. Journalist — some assembly required” and thought, OK, I guess that’s intended as a joke, but I don’t want to explain that joke to my two children. Whatever your profession, insert that instead of “journalist.” It would probably feel strange to you, too. I hear the phrase “enemy of the people” and wonder if I’m included. I honestly don’t know, but it’s on my mind.
The workers at The Capital Gazette who were killed last week made me think of people I have known in this profession. Most people I’ve known just want to stick with the tiny journalism 101 toolbelt as best they can: who, what, when, where, why and how? It’s a job. Sometimes there’s pushback from those who don’t want the public to have answers to those six basic questions. That’s no fun. It really isn’t, but it seems worthwhile to find some backbone when it happens. Most of the reporters I’ve known just see the work as a job, nothing saintly, but nothing evil. They have car trouble. They worry about not being able to pay their bills on small salaries. They worry about their spouse or children. They worry about messing up on the job. They feel horrible whenever they do and want to acknowledge it if it happens.
And they recognize that the product keeps going, even if news happens to them, because time keeps going, and news keeps happening. I wasn’t shocked to see journalists put out a paper immediately after their co-workers were killed in front of them. I think this speaks to something that runs deeper than the profession but deals with human resilience evident in many professions and lives, not just journalists.
Zach Mitcham is editor of The Madison County Journal. He can be reached at zach@mainstreetnews.com.
