What's Wrong with the Press of Daily News? A Book Review

Back in November I borrowed How the News Makes Us Dumb The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society, by C. John Sommerville.  It was sitting on the shelf in the guest bedroom in the home of a friend who was taking exceptionally good care of me on an overnight stay.

There were many books I could have chosen but I picked up this one because I didn't like the title.  I don't like being told I am dumb, even when I'm  aware of the severe limitations anyone of us has, myself most certainly,  in vast and multiple realms.  Shouldn't I be reading more news to learn more about the world at large?  Why did my friend have this book?

I read chapter 1 before I fell asleep and got interested enough that I wanted to continue.

My friend, an avid reader, told me in the morning that she had not read the book yet herself, but was quite willing for me to borrow it and read it first.  She said the title had already reminded her to keep her reading heavily weighted in the history, biography and literature realms. When I got home with the book, I got busy with other things, but this last week, after a particularly heavy week of news reading, I picked the book up and was again drawn in and questioning my own response to, and my occasional immersion in,  the available daily leads and speculations of the media.

It isn’t as one might suspect, a book about the alleged bias of the news, be it conservative or liberal editors in question. It’s not about techniques of linguistic or factual manipulation. It’s not about journalists using events or people to become celebrities themselves. Nor is this book focused on the sheer incompetence of some journalists or the daunting tasks of what it would take to be an expert in the multiple realms that journalist wind up covering. It’s not about the sound bite oversimplification of television news or the concentration of news to a few corporate chains. Sommerville says that while all these issues worry him, that all these critiques have already been written as well as futile recommendations to improve the news industry by people who believe that daily news is important.

Critique of the news media is certainly not new.  Sommerville suggested  a snippet of Thomas Jefferson's critique could be stitched on a sampler.  Wanting to see the context I searched  the world wide web and found that when John Norville wrote to Thomas Jefferson  in 1807  "It would be a great favor, too, to have your opinion of the manner in which a newspaper, to be most extensively beneficial, should be conducted, as I expect to become the publisher of one for a few years." he  received a reply in which Jefferson first recommended authors to read on government and history, then very specifically critiqued  newspapers:

 To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, `by restraining it to true facts and sound principles only.' Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.  (see Jefferson's complete letter at http://www.britannica.com/presidents/article-9116906)

Sommerville's book isn't new either. It was released in 1999. The irony is the fact that the examples are not up to date and that actually helps demonstrate the thesis of the book. As he says in his preface,        “Items in the news always seem a little homeless and disconnected when we stumble on them later. We have forgotten what they once meant, what the bigger picture was. That is because the news industry succeeded in destroying the context of those items, which is the best way to make money off them."

Sommerville, also author of a more academic book on the history of the news industry, says that in the three hundred year history of the industry it has developed in line with its essential nature and now at maturity demonstrates its essential flaw. His concern is the way in which “daily news” deconstructs our experience of the world and blocks the higher mental processes.

The industry isn't likely to go away. Those news deadlined columns will  be written, the air time will be filled even if the story isn't known yet; the news is a changing tide with waves of conflicting information  flooding in daily. As it says on the back of the book,  this is a book for those "dissatisfied with the state of the news media, but especially for those who think the news actually does inform them about the real world."

So if the news can’t be fixed, and Sommerville does make a good case for that, and one wants to be aware and informed on important events, wants to be an informed citizen in ever widening circles, local community, state, nation, the world, what is one to do?  Here's part of Sommerville's answer:  “If news were just one of the many things that we read each day, it wouldn’t have the same impact. If we would read science, the classics, history, theology or political theory at any length, we would make much better sense of today’s events.” Page 16.
 
This book is really about changing our relationship to the news media and that starts with being more aware of  how the news media is a flawed vehicle of social bonding and how important it is to be in our world rather than simply observe it through the lens of the news industry.  Sommerville thinks we, the consumer, have acquired an addiction, and news people are just supplying the market.

It is a short book, 150 pages.

“It will take a short book to show all the ways that dailiness constitutes a bias all by itself. Of course dailiness is necessary if we are to have a news industry. And that is why the news can’t be fixed. Consuming this industry’s ‘news product’ actually makes us dumb.” Page 10  

Sommerville's last chapter,Virtual Society or Real Community,  makes it evident that he is a historian and a caring citizen of this day.  He is an encourager and has real suggestions for how you can "personally learn to inhabit your world instead of just observing it...  Let's not think what we must all do. That is the way of the news-addressing us in the anonymous voice of an imagined public..."

I'll be giving this book back to my friend this next week when I get a chance to see her again in person.  Maybe she will read it now...maybe you might too?  Or if you don't, maybe you will read a good biography or get into a subject in depth...plunge into your own life and interests in some way that your world and the world of those around you is richer.  Tell a good story...we all need to hear one.

Why Do We Do the Things We Do? Basic Assumptions: A Paradigm to Use and Share.

I was reminded lately of a model, a simple paradigm, which has been helpful at times in thinking through things.

What got me going was an exchange between a man and a woman, fortunately they weren’t married to each other, about typically hot topics all having to do with control: sex, choice, population, babies, birth.

They came at each other from diametrically opposed viewpoints. It wasn’t the content of their attempts to influence each other’s stance that triggered my thinking; I was only privy to a description of it by one party, but rather an image that formed in my mind of two people with their feet definitively planted trying to change each other’s posture by whipping each other’s heads around, or suggesting a different tilt of the hips.

                             ( I am resisting popping in pictures of Indian wrestling here. How about just a small picture of attitude from an Engelbeit birthday card?)

Although I have shared this framework, this paradigm with others, it was always shared in person and I could draw charts and crisscross them with arrows and ask questions to employ examples to make sure the applicability of the connectedness was getting through. It will be a good challenge for me to simply write about it but don’t be surprised if I wind up sticking pictures in here and there.

THE PARADIGM

Here’s the rough framework: Basically, out of underlying assumptions we develop values, which are in turn directly tied to more specific concepts and beliefs. Beliefs shape our methods and methods, ideally, are focused on achieving particular goals which would themselves be in sync with our basic assumptions.

GOALS

METHODS

SPECIFIC CONCEPTS & BELIEFS

VALUES

BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

You can approach this paradigm from either end. In some ways it makes most sense to me to explain it from the ground up. It’s the way one builds a house and the concreteness of that image makes it memorable for many.

So that’s how I will explain it from the bottom up.

However, I’m typing at a word processor and we read top to bottom and one could as easily make the argument that before you lay the foundation to build a house you first need a vision and a plan. As soon as you ask what the structure is for, you are at the top of the chart with goal and purpose. Both goals and primal assumptions have operative and transforming power directly over each other.

How you wring any value out of the line up might depend on your own style of learning, but in as much as I have conceded that the approach is arbitrary, perhaps you’ll suspend whatever your preferences might be and look at the bottom of the list above.

Basic Assumptions:

?? Is it a created universe, is there a creator or is it just a material world? How we answer primal questions about reality, time and space and what we think of human nature, it is out of such basic or underlying assumptions, even if our assumptions are sometimes fuzzy or obscure, that values develop.

Of course we have assumptions about smaller questions in life as well. I was taught about this way of exploring things in the early eighties in a university class focused on designing effective lesson plans. Bernice Goldmark emphasized offering students alternative ways to learn. She hypothesized two teachers where one assumed that all people can learn the same way and the other who assumed that there are variations in how people learn. It is relatively easy to anticipate the different values, core concepts, and teaching methods likely to emerge from such different basic assumptions, even if both teachers’ goals were ostensibly the same.

I don’t remember if Professor Goldmark attributed the basic assumptions paradigm to anyone in particular, but as I wrote this post I found online the work of MIT professor Edgar H. Schein whose work on cultural awareness and organizational behavior explores these concepts at depth.   Not that these ideas belong to anyone in particular, they are laced throughout the lives and writings of  many.  Studying  the life of  President Lincoln  to elucidate executive strategies for current times,  Donald T. Phillips, in his book, Lincoln on Leadership,  encounters these same concepts. Phillips wrote that Lincoln's understanding of decision making was backed by solid visions, " not simply a string of individual orders.  Rather...a continuous, uninterrupted process that is similar to the beating of a heart that sends blood throughout a body."( p 97)
In the concluding chapter of his book, Phillips writes of Lincoln, "He lifted people out of their everyday selves and into higher level of performance, achievement and awareness." (p 173)

I suppose one reason I think the paradigm  I am sharing is helpful in making one more conscious in  thinking and relating in our complex world, is that of the many things over the years I have studied, I remembered it and found myself, in various settings, putting it to use.

As with many houses, the foundation of why we say and do the things we do isn’t always visible but  a foundation determines the footprint and bearing capacity of the structure built upon it.

Values often reflect what we think should happen, how we think things ought to be. Whether or not we articulate them, what we have learned and chosen to value under girds and shapes our more specific concepts and beliefs in life.

I know I'm not always fully tuned into what  I actually value.  For example, I can say I value fitness, and that I believe that it would be good for me to walk as much as possible everyday, but I didn’t walk today. In reality, in my free time, I valued the other things I wanted to do more and now it is way too dark and cold and … well you get the point. While my espoused value was fitness, my behavior valued comfort or productivity in another realm. I didn’t value fitness in a way that was expressed in a solid actionable concept such as “I will walk whether I am inclined to or not.” Maybe I really believe that I can get away without taking care of myself? That belief could certainly shape my daily choices, my daily method. Actual values and specific concepts and beliefs can become visible in scrutinizing one’s methods or way of life.

I ask myself, why am I writing this essay?  I am sitting down to do it, I could be out taking a walk with my cat.

As with all tools, this paradigm has its  proper uses and limits; generally speaking I might use it to help myself read carefully. Or when listening to people argue and I am trying to make heads or tails of what is going on, it helps me to pull back and try to find a path into what either person’s priorities might be, and ask myself if I can begin to understand how life looks for them and out of what assumptions  they might be operating.

Well…it’s all up to you in the comment section now…

What say you? Let me know if this gestates any new ideas…or awareness about your wiring or helps you decode an encounter, a book or even if you got to the finish line here!

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Rainy Weather Predicted Didn't Arrive: Here's the Bluest Bright Day We've Had!

All these photographs were taken on Thursday, October 28th.  It was just one of those days.  I'm feeling somewhat better, but still not suppose to be bending down...so I took my camera with me to walk the garden so I wouldn't be tempted to start plucking up weeds.

The Pacific Ocean is peeking through the cypress trees and the air  was balmy...fragrant...temperate....so fine.

 Click on the pictures if you want to see a larger version.

Today is cloudy...and the water appears less blue than yesterday.   It was fun to download yesterday's pictures and realize I wasn't making up the sensation of color I remembered of yesterday.

I wonder how many rocks there are in the world named

Bird Rock?   Well there's one of them...

                                                                 

I know, I know, this is my essay and  writing blog...but I just had to share the green grass, the waters  so blue, the rocks, the clouds,  the sky...  Thanks for visiting and come back soon...I'm working on a few things.

Here's a little story written by shell fossiled in stone...

maybe it will prompt more writing from someone, perhaps from you?

You've Got Rocks in Your Head - Dizziness and Vertigo -What Gives?

Putting it down as it falls... I'm only talking about typing right into this post box without quite knowing what it is I am going to share, but it is an apt image for what walking around feels like for me right now.

It's Sunday morning, almost noon now.  I am moving slowly. I've had to learn a little lately about vestibular disorders.  If you ever need proof that we are, as Psalm 139 proclaims, fearfully and wonderfully made,  make a cursory study of the inner ear and the astounding mechanisms of balance.  To have a disruption of one's orientation on this spinning planet is demanding.

As with many troubles,  the cause is often hard to pin down with any certainty.  One of the disturbing things I have learned this week, when I mentioned in as unwhiny a manner as possible to several folks that I was  experiencing and being treated for Benign Positional Vertigo, is that many people experience BPV and are not offered the brief and  non- intrusive treatment that is available for this merry-go-round.  

 LINKS FOR YOU

So, in case you ever are in need...here is a website that has tremendous information:  Vestibular Disorders Association and in addition to learning about the trouble and the treatment, there are links, pick your country, pick your state, to trained practitioners in a variety of medical services.  There is also information for  practitioners of healing who want to become competent in more modalities as well as some self- help guidance for patients. The other helpful site I found is Dizziness and Balance written by Timothy C. Hain, M.D. of Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of many of the circulars used by the VDA and is clearly a leader in this field.


In my geographical area both the local hospital and a physical  therapy office have people trained in the various movement vertigo treatments such as the Epley and Semont that have roughly an 80% cure rate. Both maneuvers are named after their inventors and are intended to move "ear rocks" out of the sensitive part of the ear to a less sensitive location. Both maneuvers take about 15 minutes to accomplish.


Yesterday I was talking to one of my  relatives who is in her eighties who says she has suffered light headedness and vertigo  for years and while her doctors have ruled out serious causes she has never heard of or been offered the simple maneuver treatments.  I jumped onto  the Vestibular Disorders website in her behalf and  found out that in her California town there is a practitioner who is associated with a geriatric health service that does home visits to help people with vertigo and dizziness.  If you need and do not find  someone near you through this  network, you could still learn enough of the terms to better quiz your local health services about possibly unadvertised treatment options in your area.

I feel as if I have turned my blog for today into a public service announcement, but that is sometimes the purpose of  writing; nothing fancy, just a sharing of information that might be the word in need  for another person. I hope my readers never need any of these specifics... but if any of you do, now you've got them.
And about being fearfully and wonderfully made, it's one of the reasons that I am trusting I will get better, healing is one of the wonders of inherent possibilities.

A Tincture of the Truth: A book review of OLD SCHOOL by Tobias Wollf

Old School, a 2004 novel by Tobias Wolff is an American tale, set in the 1960’s in a boy’s college prep school that has a tradition and the ability to host distinguished authors such as Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. The students who are aspiring writers get caught up in competitions to win a private audience with the renowned visitors. Or as the unnamed student who is the narrative voice says, “We contended for this honor…”

Tobias, who teaches English and creative writing at Stanford University has written well about writing, self-consciousness, identity, social distinctions, making mistakes and outliving them and accepting fault and flaw in life; it’s a story that believes one can learn about self, others and life from story.

“How did they command such deference, English teachers? Compared to the men who taught physics or biology, what did they really know of the world? It seemed to me, and not only to me, that they knew exactly what was most worth knowing. Unlike our math and science teachers, who modestly stuck to their subjects, they tended to be polymaths. Adept as they were at dissection, they would never leave a poem or novel strewn around in pieces like some butchered frog reeking of formaldehyde. They’d stitch it back together with history and psychology, philosophy, religion, and even on occasion, science. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identitfy with the hero of the story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you too.”(Page 5)

After reading the novel I read a number of on-line reviews of Old School and was surprised it was not more universally well received. I noticed a bit of a pattern; people who said they didn’t like the book were hankering after more action and plot complexities. It’s a fast paced world for the young, and if there isn’t a kinky plot on one campus, there is some serpentine cruel and tragic tale brewing in some other university.

Large plot lines can show all manner of actions and consequences, but it’s important not to underestimate the loss we risk when we give what’s going on around us too much power, and when we long for social status and measure ourselves in external realms. I liked the interior quality of Tobias Wolff’s novel.

“Say you’ve just read Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” Like the son in the story, you’ve sensed the faults in your father’s character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable; left alone, you’d probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal-of the self and the world outside the circle of blood.

You’ve never had this conversation before, not with anyone…” (Page 5)

Page 5 and the narrator is already confessing to us, already owning up to his own self doubt, emotional frailty and incomplete honesty. The character knows he is deficient and he tells his misdeeds in a matter of fact tone.

While the book is about a young man who becomes a writer, later, much later, the narrator tells us that the story he has told isn’t really about how he became a writer because:

“The life that produces writing can’t be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention there are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.
No true account can be given of how or why you became a writer, nor is there any moment of which you can say: this is when I became a writer. It all gets cobbled together later, more or less sincerely, and after the stories have been repeated they put on the badge of memory and block all other routes of exploration. There’s something to be said for this. It’s efficient, and may even provide a homeopathic tincture of the truth.” (Pages 156-157)

 The headmaster’s struggle is also a significant element in the story and it will help you to read Wolff if you know to pay attention to the character and his details early on.

“…had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity- it’s roots sunk deep in pride, flowering in condemnation and violence against others and oneself. For years Arch had traced this vision of the evil done through intolerance of the flawed and ambiguous, but he had not taken the lesson to heart. He had given up the good in his life because a fault ran through it.” (Page 193)

Well, I don’t want to spoil the book for you. If you come across Old School it is a good read and in some ways it's a bit of an antidote to the brass and bully news stories, such as the one I wrote about in a recent post, coming out of schools across the country of late.

Waiting for the cat to come on home.

It's night. She likes to prowl around. Or perhaps she just likes to curl under a bush and sleep.  Whatever the case, I am waiting for the cat to come home.  I'd be happy for her to be free to come and go, but she can't have her own door or other creatures would wander in and it can be dangerous at night, other animals, wild cats, roam the cliffs.

Sometimes, after staying out all night, she wants to sleep all day, on my bed.  Seeds tangled in her fur, she curls up and wraps a paw over her eyes.  Don't bother me, I'll groom later.

Sometimes if I wait, she will come and whisk her face against the window, or press her outstretched front legs on the door latch while she stands two legs on the back of a stuffed chair at the entrance.   When I can wait up no longer, I get ready for bed, her whereabouts unknown.  After I've brushed my teeth and am ready to shut the lights, I check one more time at the front window.  I step out in the night and call her. I am grateful she has drug me into the night, whether the sky be cloaked in fog or full of stars, I feel the night, the balm of air.  I call to her again.  I hear the waves crashing on the rocks below. This is the night she stays out in.

It is fortunate that we have no neighbors to hear my plaintive meow.  Later, as I am falling asleep, I  may hear  meowing  and see her silhouette through the skylight.  That doesn't mean if I go out into the night that she will climb down off the Spanish tiles of the roof  or come inside.  But we play that game too, me  barefoot in my nightie, pleading to a cat on the roof. 

Like tonight, she  came to the door and  it was opened for her and she ran off into the forest.  What a tease.  I am waiting for the cat to come home, but I think I'll go brush my teeth and then check one more time...later.

Civility: treating others with dignity, compassion and respect can save lives

On September 22, 2010 at Rutgers University, a young man who had apparently been pitilessly spied upon, videotaped and broadcast on the World Wide Web ( later reporting did not confirm this) in private dorm room moments, left a one-sentence suicide intention note on his Facebook page and subsequently jumped to his death.

Whatever glorious potentials his life may have held for him are now ended and his parents and others near and dear must weather his loss the rest of their days.

Who are all the actors in this forlorn story? Transitions in general and developmental leaps in particular are times when many of us need help. Various aspects of coming of age, such as leaving home for the first time, living amongst strangers, intense exposure to new people with different backgrounds and values, becoming sexually aware or active, loss of a first love, school or other performance pressures, unwieldy group dynamics or being singled out for differences, can put a strain on the most well adjusted young person.

Who can calculate the added complexities or intensities of one's privacy being shared on social networks?

The danger that is created in such circumstances of vulnerability should never be underestimated. People sometimes enact in one moment of despair an irreversible end even if every other moment of their lives and the instincts of their being would stand against the threat they, in their pain, suddenly pose to themselves. For reasons perhaps forever beyond knowing, Tyler Clementi did jump from the George Washington Bridge to his death in the Hudson River. Tyler Clementi was eighteen years old.

The alleged tormentor, Dharun Ravi, is eighteen years old. As he faces his capacity for hard heartedness toward his roommate, what other depths of feeling will he reel through? He’s out of school now, but likely learning about how fast things can spin out of control and how unintended consequences can leap in a single bound from the shadows of our deeds.
Was Ravi’s alleged partner an active participant or did she just witness the travesty and do nothing? If she did just stand by, Molly Wei, may be realizing how dangerous it can be to be complacent about other’s bad ideas, and what it can cost to be passive or afraid to stand up for what is right.

And what of those individuals who tuned in and watched and wrote about the invasion of Tyler Clementi’s privacy without concern for him or the principles, ethic and laws violated? We err in commission, but there are also errors of omission.
Mr. Clementi’s family statement has been quoted in several news stories I have read:

"We understand that our family's personal tragedy presents important legal issues for the country as well as for us," said a statement from the family.

"Regardless of legal outcomes, our hope is that our family's personal tragedy will serve as a call for compassion, empathy and human dignity," the statement said.

We are already a land of many laws. Even if it weren’t illegal to invade another’s privacy, to do so is gross disrespect of others; and ultimately we cannot disrespect the lives of others without diminishing our own. What we need to enact is heart for others, not just for people like us, or for people we understand, but for everyone....for  we are the  people, that hold  such truths "to be self-evident, "  that is to say, to be part of natural law.  Person by person, will our social institutions affirm that development of character evidenced by respect for others is of primal importance and the foundation of any real education?   I hope so.

Life is fragile and civility, treating others with dignity, compassion and respect, can save lives.

I want to believe that the Clementi’s are not asking for the impossible.
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