I chanced upon the October 2nd Cancun edition of The Miami Herald. Actually, someone left it on the beach during their cheap off-season vacation, and I, a bigger cheapie, picked it up. I am here in Cozumel managing the world for as long as I can reign.
Edward Wasserman's piece on the Opinion page was entitled, "Can books fill the news media's gaps?"* His view is that "Great reporting--factual, richly detailed and burning with significance--belongs on the most powerful and most universally accessible channels we have for news . . . the Internet." In presenting this case, he says that newspapers have "largely" failed in supplying this kind of content, and books by journalists that do measure up fail in timeliness, or the content is packaged in an outdated technology. There is a growing dearth of book readers, I guess.
So here is a journalism guru who publishes an article in a newspaper citing failures or inadequacies in the honored medium while at the same time suggesting that the mainstream and most accessible and appropriate are elsewhere--not in print but online. This is a kind of performative contradiction, using the same medium to discredit it. In addition, is a journalism guru writing in a newspaper talking to average readers today, or fellow journalists or book publishers or blogophiles? I was not quite sure. Regardless, it is a curious message. (I am paraphrasing.) We--journalists--have largely failed you. You didn't get what we promised in newspapers and other traditional media, and most of you won't get it from our books either.
For some reason, I reacted. Something inside said respond. After all, I, an average reader, was reading his piece in a newspaper, which was being cast as irrelevant. Not totally so, but all the same.
Without length and breadth and depth, how will anyone encounter anything other than longish, well sourced and researched and organized texts written or spoken? If factual, richly detailed, and burning with significance is the gold standard regardless of delivery medium, you won't get that in bits and bites. You will and should get it in bytes, perhaps megabytes, whether on a screen, including the best of TV programming, or on the radio, or via printed matter, broadsheet or bound.
If people insist on the cell phone for their news, there is perhaps an object lesson. The phone is an intermediary at best, a medium to read or hear that which you should find out more. Newspapers can also be seen in this light. Read the latest summary, more than headlines but less than the gold standard. And then go online, or to books, wherever you can find the bytes required to be more fully informed. Newspapers may not conform to the standard they once aspired to but now they should to fit with the other media of our times. Instead of delivering factual, detailed, significant, newspaper journalists might focus on representative facts and details plus the possible implications of same, ending with, "Consult our online version or podcast for more, or see our Sunday, expanded news and analysis edition."
The literate, ready to hear what journalists and others write, is estimated to be eighty-two percent of the world's population. According to Internet usage stats though, those connected, and presumably literate enough to consume the news electronically, comprise less than twenty percent of the world's population.** The newest edge may be the Internet. But there is still room in the less-than-fully-electronically-connected world for newspapers, books, in-person commentaries, radio broadcasts, and so on.
That we have journalists' contributions to the library of books we need to read to understand current events may not be the failure of newspapers or how well paid the profession is, but may point to the failure of journalists themselves to deliver the facts in rich detail, burning with the self-evident or highlighted significance as close to now as possible. If this is the case, don't blame how the message is delivered but the substance or vacuity of the message itself.
The way to achieve the gold standard is for journalists to observe and describe meticulously and ask the best, most penetrating questions, reporting today's results without word-smithers, text abbreviators, or content deleters. If we need interpretation or translation of what is going on, the ones closest to the sources and the contexts they are reporting on can also supply these for our consideration--labeled as such.
The front page of the same issue of the Herald that presumably should qualify under Wasserman's standard had these headlines from top center to bottom right of the page.
- Rising tensions, violence in Pakistan
- U.N.: Urban crime scaring investors
- Putin eyes new post as country's prime minister
- Correa appeals for closure of Congress
- Holy Water
Timeliness of news is a relative criterion. For one, always there seems to be a lag between when a message is sent and the time the last person really hears it in its full significance. Taking time to report more comprehensively allows journalists to uncover and see exactly what it is or was without the interference of the immediate. Books serve to order and analyze the frenzies of the moment into synthetic, partial wholes that can be better digested and managed than today's partly boiled details that include the ultimately unimportant.
Passing judgment on the quality of these headlines and articles is also possible without the books journalists may or may not write. Haven't we had useful, timeless texts from other disciplines and professions that have addressed these same central issues of front page articles? Insightful observations from even before the time of [insert name of Greek or Roman writer, or default to William Shakespeare]? Gaining power or position, and keeping it, resorting to political, religious, economic means, was the talk of the town and as these articles evidence still is. These headlines continue a long tradition of interest in the stories of people and institutions that affect our lives.
Maneuvering to maintain or gain power has been in books non-journalistic, and they have shown rather consistently us the likely development and outcomes. Books are not dead nor are the Cliff versions to them we can find online, or in bookstores still. We can learn from history if we can access the messages and lessons and themes from sources plural, from high lit to low rant. And if steeped in the observations and wisdom of the past, plus either reflecting or reading reflections on these, we do not need to repeat ourselves today but rather surmount. We might use our deeper knowledge to manage modern instances of similar phenomena. At the most, knowing what we collectively knew can supply the recognition of the headlines as significant or not and help us quickly determine whether more and accurate details are required.
The faster societies and aspiring ones want it all now and relevant and applicable. Great for the ability to help understand and guide realities local and farther afield. But if we are too busy trying to consume and digest what is going on now, and focus only on the now, we will never be able to act with wisdom.
That quality of praxis comes from experience including, yes, the experience of consuming bytes of text. It involves thinking long enough about things to ask the penetrating questions. It also comes from being able to decode the languages that would confuse or obfuscate. To see with greater clarity surely is the corollary of Wasserman's benchmark. Clarity comes from knowing how to respond to the ebb and flow of themes and decisions that can take us, or not, to acceptance and respect of others, or to what is onward and upwards for those whose priority is action and what would be better.
An apology for education and a plea not to focus too much on only and always getting what is now and relevant and applicable? Positively. Knowing today's issues and voting or taking other action on them can be informed by history, ethics and philosophy, science, and other old as well as new and emerging disciplines that have as their complementary goal or standard, the ability to see implications, relate contexts, learn from experience, create better alternatives and choices. That is education, not some kind of just-for-me, I'm-informed-about-today solution. Journalism in the best sense is to report and to help us understand. And in doing this, journalists just don't cough up information. They also select and digest and interpret it by the very nature of the observations they make and the questions they ask, or don't. Without some sense of what it all means and where it comes from, daily news and book-writing journalists can't ask better, wiser questions.
Well, enough of this. I believe I have conveyed what is Wasserman and some further thoughts. I do not take issue with the guru but would only like to widen the scope a bit and extend his comments from an average reader's perspective. The minimum is--reading or otherwise consuming longer texts is not dead. If journalists early or late deliver, we will pick it up wherever or however it appears and examine it for what it is worth. Today's multimedia buffet includes the traditional as well as the latest and coolest. Different technologies serve different purposes. We are too clever to kid ourselves with the illusion of having the full story from either a newspaper or a Blackberry.
I am here on a beach in Mexico managing the world for as long as I can reign. Send another tourist with a newspaper to discard. More of Wasserman would be fine, and more words like those of Jonah Goldberg*** from the same Opinion page would be nice. (In fact, if you put Jonah's and Edward's pieces together from this issue of the Herald, we are getting somewhere with journalism as Wasserman would have it.)
Some of us are still around but not connected electronically 24/7, and we are still interested in today, relying in part on humankind's yesterdays and a storehouse of insights and lessons tacit or otherwise. We are interested in what could be tomorrow, in part because of deeper experience, performative contradictions notwithstanding. Newspapers and books and all the rest continue important. Internet servers serve; let them. For those who rely on other media, let them. And if Wasserman is talking to others in journalism, noting that they are losing ground to other delivery media, maybe an answer is to hone the niche better, especially with more careful observations, better questions, and less interference, which is another subject for another time.
I gaze over at the residents on the adjacent beach and realize they are among the majority. Am I committing my own performative contradiction here? Who is really the average reader or consumer of news? Regardless, let's not disenfranchise others now that they have their satellite dish and are coming to the table having their conversations about the convergence of the worlds they can now, perhaps for the first time, see and hear and read about. Factual, richly detailed, and burning with significance: A good standard any way we can get it.
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Afterthought
From an interview dated November 14, 2000, the American philosopher/phenomenologist Don Ihde reports,
During a visit to Berkley [sic] a number of years ago, I decided to take a look at the bulletin board in the philosophy department to see what they were offering. As you know, they had a very large graduate program with some very eminent people. I looked at what was offered and found there were two courses that could have been termed historical. There was a course on Kant and one on Descartes. All of the other courses followed the rubric of living authors only.***A prestigious institution weighs in on this issue. And here is an eminent thinker, who adds that by design he teaches his courses in contemporary time with electronic drafts and Internet-published works. The choice for now-only higher education course readings rests in part on the assessment that we "do" the disciplines better nowadays, and so it is better, perhaps more practical, to focus on the cutting edges. Ironically, today's philosophy sits atop the shoulders of people most know by name but perhaps haven't read or studied, Plato and Kant, for example.
My mentor, a highly respected educator with a national reputation, urged me many years ago to read the classic works in the field of education. I argued that I was a product of people who had read and applied "that stuff" on me. I wanted to forge ahead and saw the effort, and going back to graduate school, as a waste of time. That was then. And I did go back to school. (Been in it ever since!)
My "liberal education" bias today may be outdated. But then again, there are inevitable performative contradictions. Ihde and I, although clearly not even playing in the same league much less ballpark, have had the experience of dead teachers and masters who have helped shape our thoughts today. To deny or ignore these formative figures is to commit the contradiction, at least in our cases.
If starting only from now indeed embodies the best of the past, our loss seems to be the experience of first hand accounts of delight and discovery in their words. If modern thought is but a footnote to Aristotle or Plato, do we need to check the original sources from time to time for the freshness of their insights, the skills that can be learned from examining their arguments, the accuracy and novelty of what today's cutting edges claim?
__________
*Mr. Wasserman's discussion is richer than suggested here and worth a read.
** Figures are based on UN world population and literacy rates; Internet-population usage is as reported by Miniwatts Marketing Group.
*** Mr. Golberg addresses freedom of speech, noting in part that saying "I defend your right to say what I disagree with" is avoiding the more important issue of what it is you said.
**** http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/dihde/articles/ihde_interview.html
