This cat is learning more than you will learn from cable news on any given day.
I’ve figured out another reason why I can’t stomach televised news. There’s something about the format and approach that says to me: “You didn’t know about X when this show began, but by the end of our show, you will know tons more about X.”
I take offense at implicit statements like that. You aren’t going to intuitively grasp foreign and domestic policy directives in 42 minutes. Worse, we’re often taken on an impromptu emotional therapy ride that has nothing to do with factual content.
I’m not just talking about Glenn Beck, either, although he is the best example. Even so, the most pedestrian of newscasts feature press-mold personalities brimming with over-earnestness. They sweep us up in hallucinated fictions that comprise “what we believe.” It’s not like we need newscasters; humans are adept at this by nature.
The point of the newscast is to hook you – to make you feel a bit helpless – and then to return you to “normal” by the end. This should not be confused with education.
Science Reporting
One of the many reasons that science reporting is less than adequate.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in science reporting. If you want to know why your right-leaning family is asking why you don’t think man-made climate change is a myth, look no further than the average science piece in the paper.
Beck and his ilk get a lot of mileage out of misrepresenting science, but he’s not a science reporter. I actually forgive him for having the critical reasoning skills of an uncooked Cornish game hen. His approach, and the heat of his arguments, can be traced to basic scientific illiteracy among the public.
We can get as angry as we want about what batshit crazy thing he said, but he is not responsible for decades of scientific ignorance. He’s a symptom, not the cause.
Robin Hansen published a great article about this basic failure back in February. In the post, he references a piece by Colin Macilwain:
There is a need for dedicated newspaper sections, radio and TV programmes, more akin to existing sports coverage, that can provide detailed, critical assessment of the scientific enterprise for people who really like science. Reporters and editors could then engage with sets of findings and associated issues of real societal importance in the news pages, asking the hard questions about money, influence and human frailty that much of today’s science journalism sadly ignores.
Robin asks why we got where we are:
First, we are far more suspicious of bids for dominance-status than for prestige-status. We see politicians and businesses as threatening to dominate us and so we are eager to watch out for illicit power grabs. In contrast, we see science, arts, literature, etc. as only awarding prestige, not power, and we are less worried about illicit prestige grabs. We mainly care about prestigious stuff as ways to see who is more impressive, and a tricky “illicit” prestige grab is itself pretty impressive, so little harm done.
Matters of Perspective
The more distant a subject is from our personal experience, the less emotional attachment we have to it. One of the reasons we scream so loudly about politics is that politics affects everyone. It’s not a discussion about the particular merits of one model over another in the field of molecular biology. It’s far closer to us.
Which is especially why I find the “you’ll know lots after we’re done” approach so distasteful. Just because we’re personally affected by something doesn’t mean we’re educated about it. That closeness quickly stands in the way of understanding precisely because we’re too close to make a reasoned analysis.
Even if we are educated about this or that issue, there’s still the chance that we’ll get it wrong. If you have letters following your name, the risks of hubris increase steadily. You could be like Keith Ablow, the MD that gives credibility to every foreign object flying out of Glenn Beck’s mouth:
“If I seem to say things with certainty, it comes from being able to register underlying truths that I feel very clearly about,” he says. “I don’t accept that these ideas have to be relegated to analysts’ couches or therapists’ basement offices. That’s the stuff of stigma.”
I agree, in the most general sense, with that statement. But someone who can field a stark answer immediately after learning of the existence of a complex problem isn’t telling us the whole story. I might get something of value out of it, but what’s your motivation? Are you sharing because you want to explore an issue, or hand-feed me a conclusion?
And where does this leave me? I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t have an MD and I’m not an expert, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I just know that my opinions won’t be perfectly resolved by the time the end credits run.
