Here’s the deal: I’m tired of the news and the recent, concerted effort of ideological morons to manipulate history, literature, and news. As a former journalist with a great deal of admiration for good reporters, librarians, and researchers, that’s not an unusual statement. I have a Ph.D. in Modern American Environmental History and American Literature. My patience with the efforts to manipulate the democracy by altering the truth in news, literature, and history is at an end.
Let me say before I go on that there never was a “golden age” of American journalism or academics. Rather, both fields in the Western tradition have been in a constant state of flux since before Gutenberg invented the printing press. Wider availability of the printed word and increasing literacy changed the way we saw the “news”—a word that dates to the 14th century—and these shaped the news itself. For a long time, “media” consisted of books, pamphlets, and circulars. If that wasn’t enough, each publisher published whatever he or she wanted. They sought to shape the culture and politics around them. In some instances, they even promoted or started revolutions and wars. The interpretation of these events has always changed with the accumulation of knowledge and research. The stories that arise from the culture in which these events occurred have shifted with the times.
As tech advanced, so did the ways in which media, academics, and literture shaped audiences and the way current events were consumed. News no longer waited for the morning edition. We were getting it, after the earliest days of television, two or three times a day from media empires. Corporate media reigned supreme in national and regional news, while local newspaper told people about themselves—or, at least, what the local editor or newspaper publisher wanted people to know about themselves. With television, we didn’t just get news served with TV dinners. We watched in the morning before work, as we read local and national newspapers, and on the radio as we tootled about doing daily and weekly chores.
Fluency with technology and democratic access to the personal computer brought the immediacy of events and notions of research independent of the ivory tower into the home. No longer would we, as consumers, have to wait for newspaper editors, book publishers, or television producers to endow us with knowledge. We could reach out and grab it. To say that the news and literature today is much different than before, say, 1995 when the internet gained broad user access and audiences across the world, would be to say that fires don’t burn prairies and forests anymore.
What’s occurred is that the perspectives on occurrences we call news and history have become granular. No longer is the news and historical events or changes in literary language adjudicated by an editor or producer, but by you and me. My view of the world is likely much different from yours. I get to “spin” an event any way I want. As you do. As anyone with a camera in their phone or access to a website does. As the old saying goes, “Everyone has a novel in them and that’s where most of them should stay.”
The result is a cacophony of not just several takes on a particular event, but thousands and millions. What to choose from? How am I supposed to judge the veracity of facts in a world where every belief, dream, and opinion is presented as fact?
As a college professor teaching American History, I have the onerous responsibility of teaching students what is an acceptable source of research and fact and want is not. Here’s where I sometimes get into trouble, as I get to make the rules. Primary and secondary education in the United States is pretty good about producing literate workers who can fill in forms and discern levels of productivity. But producing independent thinkers or book readers are not the education industry’s strongpoints.
And it’s set up that way for a reason. Reactionary forces have won this fight in the schools. What’s the good of teaching students how to appreciate art and music and a full account of history when they will have to push buttons and operate machines for the rest of their lives? Critical thinkers tend to be troublemakers when they find their lives dissatisfying. Best to leave critical thinking and book reading to those who can afford college.
Even then, reactionaries have undermined the importance of a college education by preaching a kind of materialist, acquisitive model of education where higher education no longer is a means of learning about oneself and one’s society but a means to an end. College education since the Reagan Era has meant more and more that this endeavor is an investment or a risk/benefit enterprise. If a person is to invest thousands in higher education, then they should enjoy outsized returns for their effort.
So, it is here that I try to help students distinguish between the true and the spun and the false. Reasonableness is a difficult thing to convey to the student. After all, they may have been served a lifetime of unreasoned spun and sold as reasoned. Websites take on the look and feel of legitimate news and research and literature sites. Debate flares between those who see hyperbole and speculation and those who see reasoned, fact-based journalism and academic research. Book banning is again in vogue.
Basically, I have to teach these students what I have learned from hard-won experience and a lifetime of education. I attempt to show them the earmarks of good research, what it looks like. Where do the scholars they use get their information? What are their sources? Do they come from libraries, universities, and archives? Or are the sources from what is dressed up to look legitimate? Are the sources reasoned and based in research accepted by a broad spectrum of scientists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists? Or are the documents from speciously reasoned or widely discredited sources?
I remember a student who asked me if he could use a certain news report for his final paper in my class. It was a website video that portrayed the Australian turn toward gun control as a means to justify American politicians confiscating guns. I tried to show him how the video was specious and its reasoning illogical. The student’s infantile logical fluency would not let him see that the authors were manipulating him, appealing to his fears and emotions to achieve a result. The architecture of his intellectual world was constructed by others for their means. He did not see himself as a tool. I tried in a non-ideological and reasoned way to convince him to look to more legitimate research. He would not have it. He refused to finish the class due to what he saw as my leftist ideological agenda.
This is tricky territory. After all, academia supported and promoted eugenics until Hitler took the pseudoscience to its logical outcome. Then, they worked like animals to promote a more democratic, all-inclusive society (without Black Americans). Didn’t the news and media promote propaganda and racist theory during the Great Wars? The Korean conflict? Vietnam? isn’t The Turner Diaries a piece of American literature? Wasn’t the work of the John Birch Society American literature?
All this is true, but there was enough competition in the media and academic and literature markets to cut through the spin and propaganda and allow Americans to think for themselves. The problem today is not that people are tuned into social media. It’s the way in which we define research and discriminate between sources of information. Without a firm footing in critical thinking, we are just puppets with masters pulling our strings.
And there’s an acquisitive pressure to consume. Consume and be informed and fashionable is the truism of news in 2024. But consumption does not convey knowledge. It’s a means to get eyes on the page, and more importantly, eyes on the advertisements and onto websites to buy, buy, buy. People do not become and remain influencers unless they are making money. There’s a demand to be a part of their success. We all like what we like and consuming what we like can be detrimental to our intellectual health.
So, reason and logic still matter. The noise is so loud, the competition for my attention so great, I’ve reached the point where I swear off the cacophony, the battle to be the loudest voice in the room.
I have decided to consume when I want and not due to pressures to consume. I’ll be a reasonable human being and limit my access to the noise. It’s just upsetting. I don’t feel like I know my people and my community better when I scroll from one loudmouth media outlet to another. I don’t feel I know more about the American people when I consume santized history. I do not feel more fulfilled when I read the pulpy ideological novels.
I’ll carry the mail until time for me to stop, which is soon. I’ll read history and literature and poetry. I’ll make my own way.
No one will miss me. I sure won’t miss them.
Comments