News: Seeing the Unseen

As we consume information, we first need to cultivate a healthy skepticism. Don’t trust or believe something just because you read it in a book, saw it on television, or heard it from an expert who tosses out statistics. Take a few seconds to compare what you hear with what you know. When it comes to data, official statements, assertions, and opinions, it’s hard to beat that old Missouri slogan, “Show me.”

Don’t confuse skepticism with cynicism. I have friends who believe that everything that comes from the major networks is filled with liberal bias, and other friends who think the media is full of “corporate bias.” None of these people are likely to gain a deep understanding of the world around them. If you suspect hidden agendas and dark motives in everything you hear, you’re probably assuming way too much about our information providers.

In my experience, most of the bad information we get comes from people who are inexperienced, who are “innumerate”—that is, illiterate when it comes to numbers—or are just poor observers.

Although I believe our free American press is one of our country’s greatest assets — in fact, one of the world’s greatest assets — it has one inherent problemm as a source of ideas and information. Journalists are normally focused on news, and news is often not very important.

A central truth in the life of a news editor is something called the “news hole.” There are so many pages of newsprint that have to be filled with news each day, so many minutes of radio time, so many hours of television time. No matter what happens in the world, the news hole must be filled. If nothing of note happens, the newspapers and airwaves still have to be filled.

If you watch CNN Headline News (one of my favorite sources of leads for information), you know that it used to place state headlines at the bottom of the screen, rotating through all fifty states. I’m confident that the CNN editors were working hard to pick the most important stories. But on some days, nothing much happens. Consider these headlines, all taken from CNN on the same day (February 21, 2000):

Even when the headlines really are important, like “Vicente Fox wins Mexican presidential election,” the big news is often not what follows the page one headline but the story that ran a year earlier, probably buried on page fifteen: “Former Coke executive makes bid for Mexican presidency.” The people who write the news, who live by the daily headlines, naturally tend to focus on the most recent event, when the real story includes events that happened at many times and in many places. It’s often left up to us to piece it together.

When headlines reading “Greyhound declares bankruptcy” appeared some years ago, the real story occurred several years before: “Congress deregulates airlines.” When Boeing took over arch-competitor McDonnell Douglas in the 1990s, much of the real story dated from forty years earlier, when Boeing got its 707 passenger jet into service a year before Douglas launched the DC-8.

From Hooversworld, here.