Missions Resources - Bibliography
How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society
Authors: John Sommerville
ISBN: 0830822038
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Number of pages: 150
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
The news we see is big business. News corporations are publicly traded, and accordingly publish quarterly income statements. Billions of dollars are involved in the production of what we call the news.
Of course there are ongoing debates about political and religious bias in the news. Specialists of all stripes get exasperated by oversimplification of complex realities. But John Sommerville is not engaging that debate. He is looking at the process, and the psychology of the news itself. Sommerville is professor of history at the University of Florida.
If the average American watches x hours of television each day, how much have you watched since the war began? Events unfold far more slowly than in the movies. A sandstorm blows for two days, and the troops spend countless hours in the field waiting, and waiting, and thinking more about the rocks in their boots than about the looming battles. We don't become any smarter, wiser or even well-informed by watching the war unfold, minute by minute. What we should do is observe the coverage instead. How are they creating tension? How are they hooking us to stay tuned?
Remember, the TV stations make all their money from advertising. While war critics have blasted the military for sponsoring embedded reporters in Iraq, what these critics haven't noticed is that no one has forced the journalists in to the units. Journalists on the field have indeed risked much to cover the war, but war coverage itself has meant big money to the TV stations. Embedded journalism has included correspondents from several countries: it's not propaganda affair. Still, even the most "patriotic" media outlets have a prior commitment: to serve their customers. And their customers are advertisers. The producers at NBC, ABC, etc. are selling a product to the advertisers, and you are that product. They are selling an audience that hasn't the willpower to turn off the TV. The news they create is simply the means to keeping you engrossed.
This is not a conspiracy theory; it's economics. The broadcast comes to us free through the airwaves (unless we pay for cable); the cost has to be recovered somehow. The vast majority of television revenue comes from advertising. And advertisers choose the stations according to their best estimate of the exposure their ad will get, relative to the cost of buying the air-time. The more viewers the station can provide to the advertiser, and the higher the quality of these viewers - meaning the likelihood they will stay tuned through the advertisements - the higher the rates the station can charge. Of course, the news is just one medium of television, along with reality shows, sitcoms, talkshows, sports, etc. But the news is a big money-maker.
How the News Makes Us Dumb will change the way you look at the news. You will see how the news is primarily a money-making enterprise, and only secondarily about making us better, and more informed people. You will see the gulf between social scientists' and journalists' use of statistics. You will learn a bit of the history of the news media, in its paper origins.
This book is almost a must-read. Put down the paper, turn off CNN, and spend a few short hours reading this book, and you'll start to see the "news" in a fresh light, compared with the avenues for deeper learning about the
world's goings-on.
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