"News Illiteracy," Speaking Logic to Power — and Little League

"The power of news illiteracy. At the heart of the Russian fraud is an essential,

embarrassing insight into American life: large numbers of Americans

are ill-equipped to assess the credibility of the things they read.

The willingness to believe purported news stories, often

riddled with typos or coming from unfamiliar outlets, is a

liability of today’s fragmented media and polarized politics.

Even the trolls themselves were surprised at what Americans would believe."

 — Evan Osnos, New Yorker, 16 February 2018

            Since the comments I incorporate here were in an e-mail post on a "thread" that got archived I can tell you exactly when I wrote this version of one of my standard themes; it was "Sent: Tuesday, April 7, 2009 6:03:57 PM GMT." I was responding to a post about Poetry Slams and went on to discuss what I call — and relevant here — "The Little League Syndrome" (a minor obsession of mine). I was pleased to learn about poetry slams since the description had them sound like the youngsters involved are getting good experience using language, and getting back to at least some of the roots of (satiric) poetry: judged competitions. Throw in competitive insults, and you're in the teen culture I grew up in and back to the Old English and Old Irish traditions, and more recent cultures in fiction and the real world.

            The most immediate poster on the thread had used a sports analogy for poetry slams, which I thought a good one. The more hopeful side would be if young people start to take seriously the serious joke among intramural sports organizers that "Something really worth doing is worth doing poorly." The downside is that adults rarely want to let the kids run things. The history is the semi-professionalization of college and then high school sports, with intramurals among high school SAC's (Social/Athletic Clubs) giving way to "the Little League Syndrome," plus varsity sports, and adult organizing of intramurals. There's a good chance well-meaning/control-freak grownups will do the same with poetry slams - and the kids will have to move on to something else.

            This is nothing new. Back in Chicago in 1961, a control-freak senior-class- ... Coordinator(?), well, Semi-Administrator accused me of "never" participating in our high school activities. I told her that I did participate but, indeed, not all that much since, "I can never be elected principal; so I put my effort into groups where I can at least have some clout." When asked by the director of a new Jewish Community Center what they could best do for the local teens, I said, "Mostly, leave them alone. Rent to them - at a fair price - but let them run their own events. Let them learn to organize."

            Alexis de Tocqueville praised Americans for the ability to organize themselves and not wait for some State official to come along and organize things. What with the Little League Syndrome in sports and probably poetry, dance, and music, things may be getting worse for civic life and civil debate. What I learned about politics I partly "absorbed" growing up in the warm, corrupt heart of the Chicago Democratic Organization, but mostly from adult-independent clubs in high school and my fraternity in college. The down sides of such groups have been rightly stressed, but even a street gang teaches important lessons, including the various means of getting your peers to do what you want (them) to do.

            When it came up in discussion — I have no idea what the context was — some of my university undergraduate students were surprised to learn that in the high schools in my area we kids organized our own sports leagues. ("Hey, we didn't build the parks! We just organized a schedule and signed up.") Some kids have never even organized a pickup basketball game.

            Earlier than that 2009 post, I wrote a piece for a newspaper guest column and guest lecturing with a suggested title something like, "Be Happy Johnny Can Talk," riffing on titles like, "Why Johnny Can't Read," "Why Johnny Can't Write." I wrote there about Little-League Syndrome and what has since been called "Helicopter Parenting." Between the two, and other influences, Americans were producing a lot of middle-class kids who make highly proficient (figurative) drones and worker bees in public- and private-sector bureaucratic hives, but not very good citizens.

            Johnny and later Jane weren't and aren't encouraged much to think critically and argue civilly.

            Not in classes in school with rote learning, machine-graded exams, and the student methodology of "cram and regurgitate." Take a moment to think seriously about that last figure of speech. Cram it down; don't "chew on a thought" — and then vomit it out as soon as possible, lest you chew on an idea too long, decide to swallow it, and then digest and assimilate it, making it part of you, maybe changing you.

            But classes are only part of school, and school is only part of kids' lives. Also part of school is "the life of the mind" on the school-yard and with friends — or lack thereof or utter contempt therefor. And home-life counts, especially with actual children.

            A friend suggests any chance you give her that American discourse has gone straight downhill since families no longer eat together and kids don't get supervised practice in arguing with one another. I stress the decline of more or less lawful kid-run activities and the increasing horror of "free-range kids." (Hitchhiking, for example, had its advantages of meeting strangers and talking with them, as well as the danger of the occasional serial-killer psychopath.)

            I suspect a crucial reason John and Jane Q. Public don't think too good is that they're not called upon that often to think much at all, combined with a media and advertising environment where they're encouraged to make decisions based on impulse, emotions, and spurious appeals. "The bigger the burger, the better the burger. The burgers are bigger at Burger King," to quote a classic commercial ca. 1967. Uh-huh. "And," as we wise-ass youngsters and young adults used to ask, "if it's a shit-burger?"

            Certainly American kids aren't asked to do much formal analysis of commercials, propaganda, political, ahem discourse, or the things their superiors lay on them.

            Coach says s/he wants "110% from each of you for the team"? Will Johnny Jock or Jane Sports-Bra get praised for a raised hand and, "Coach, you can't have more than 100%, and even 30% of our time and effort is way too much. We understand that you want a kind of blank check from us — but just how much of our time and effort do you actually want? We have other commitments." I wouldn't count on that going over very well. Worse if instead of Coach it's your boss.

            Indeed, at an older age, approaching 30, I sat next to the President of Miami University as a new, untenured, almost-assistant professor (don't ask), while he looked out the window at a campus traffic jam during New Student Week and intoned, "If we got rid of the 'No Car' Rule, we'd have a jam like that every day." I thought for a half moment — after a full moment I would've known better — and said, "Non sequitur, Mr. President; that doesn't follow." He looked at me. I replied, "Those are parents' cars for the most part; we don't know what it'd be like if the students drove up on their own … or during the year … no parents' cars around." And then some ancient part of my brain that handles survival stuff kicked through to the speech mechanism and shoved a spear into the gears, while screaming without words, "Shut up, already, you idiot! Shut up!!!" A bit after retirement, I asked our now-former President if I recalled that incident correctly — he had a phenomenal memory — and he replied that, Oh, yes, that's how he remembered it; he'd never forgotten it. Which was reassuring about my memory, and ambiguously reassuring on my suspicions on a small part of the reason it took me so long to get tenure, get promoted, get … anything.

            As Kurt Vonnegut points out somewhere, Americans are programmed less to be thinking entities than agreeing machines. Speaking logic to Power is probably not in the program.

            And it's not just our failures to be courageous or exquisitely tactful in talking to others. It's bad enough that we don't listen to other people and take them seriously enough to argue civilly with them; most of us much of the time don't even listen carefully to ourselves.

            Listen to yourselves and others with (for my example for the last few months) "everybody," "nobody," "best," "worst," and other absolutes. With "best" and "worst" and such there's an old tradition here, going back at least as far as Beowulf and other Old English heroic poetry where it's almost always "the best sword," "the best mead hall," "the worst monster" until when you get a simple assertion like "That was a good king," the line stands out. As Mort Sahl pointed out in the 1980s or so, we don't have to give "The Grimmy Award" and something doesn't have to be the worst!! to be bad. Or the best to be good. And if the assertion is about "everybody" or "nobody," it can be refuted with, "Uh, I don't" or "I do." (And if it's on something sexual, check out a porn site: what you think nobody would like probably has its own pages and a standard abbreviation.)

            One of my frosh writing students started an essay with, "Since the beginning of time, Man ___________." I asked, "Are you dating 'The Beginning of Time' from the Big Bang or the rise of consciousness, or God's creating the world or what?" And he said he hadn't thought about that at all. Uh-huh, and
Does 'Man' include boys and girls and women and …?" He was getting uncomfortable, so I said, "Let's put it very formally, what's your data-set here — just who-all are you talking about?" And he said it was "me and my buddies back in high school." And I said, "Then you should start out with "Me and my buddies back in high school" — or "My buddies and I" for a formal essay, and then get on to just what you can talk about." I didn't add, I meant talking about without bullshitting his readers, most immediately me.

            "The worst disaster to hit America in modern times"? You've heard variations on such a line. I don't think they had what we'd think of as America in Medieval Times. Does that just mean "recently"? "That I can remember?" "That me and my buddies back in the newsroom could think of off-hand?" And a worse disaster than the burning of Washington DC during the War of 1812? Worse than the Civil War? Spanish Flu? The Great Depression? The attacks of 11 September 2001? Does some bad thing have to be the worst before your audience will pay attention?

            Maybe

            So we get the sort of language-inflation and hyperbole we have gotten used to — and inured to — in advertising.

            About once a year back when I was in the Ed Biz in English, I'd write across the chalkboard in large letters, WORDS MEAN. And meaningful words should go into sentences and paragraphs in at least a vaguely coherent manner and add up a fair amount of the time as an insightful description or useful set of instructions or even a rational political analysis and sensible recommendations for action.

            Meanwhile, it'd be nice if people could as least read such discourse and differentiate it from what we can compact into a set labeled bullshit.

Happy Birthday, Jesus (Sometime Before Spring of 4 B.C.) [28 Nov. 2012]

  In Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (2012), Pope Benedict XVI notes, as a lead in the UK Daily Telegraph puts it, "Jesus born years earlier than thought." What I find most interesting about this story has been that it was news.

            In 1950, in a totally non-controversial passage in the history textbook The Ancient World, Joseph Ward Swain of the solidly Big Ten, classically Midwestern, University of Illinois, wrote that "Jesus was not born in the year 1," or, I guess, Zero. "Two of our four Gospels tell us that he was born under Herod the Great, who died in the spring of 4 B.C."

            Working through other information in the Gospels, the scholarly consensus by the late 1940s was "that Jesus probably was born about five years before the turn of the century" — in the Christian counting of centuries — and that it's "fairly certain that he was crucified on April 7, 30 A.D." Swain adds, "There is, of course, no evidence regarding the exact day of his birth, and not until several centuries had passed did Christians agree to observe Christmas on December 25" (II.476-77).

            Of course. And then Swain moves on to the significant historical stuff about "His" — Jesus's — "Preaching and Crucifixion," the next subsection title, and then a long discussion of the rise of the Church.

            So Jesus was "born years earlier than thought" by whom?

            Americans are a people of strong faith, but as surveys pretty consistently indicate, "large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions — including their own";  and, I'll throw in, that "large numbers of Americans" includes a lot of reporters.

            The United States is not "a Christian nation" mostly because we're not a nation at all; it's "the American Republic," and the Republic is a stew or chop suey or mish-mosh (not a melting pot) of races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions. Which is a damn good thing.

            We are, though, strongly … let's call it inflected by Christian culture, and Americans, for understanding our country, need some knowledge of Christianity. Also of the other world religions, but that's for another time.

            Christians especially should know Christianity, and it shouldn't be some sort of traumatic shock if someone tells them that it's a fair guess that Jesus was born in the spring — "when shepherds were watching their sheep in the field by night" (Luke 2.8) of 4-5 BC, and that it's no coincidence that Christmas in the northern hemisphere is a Festival of Lights like Diwali, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa: it's the winter solstice, people, and the time of the old Roman Saturnalia, so December was and remains an excellent time for a winter holiday balancing spring holidays like Passover and Easter. (The Islamic New Year, Muharram, is a quieter holiday.)

            It's Constitutional for secular public schools to teach about religion, and in principle the US Supreme court and NGOs like The American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way are all for such teaching. Still, serious religious education is politically risky for a school district and undoubtedly expensive: doing the job decently requires well-educated teachers.


            Someone, though, needs to do a better job, and the various Christian churches and Christian households are obvious places for serious study of the faith. One good way to start a discussion would be hitting kids with the neat paradox that Jesus Christ was born "B.C." and checking out what the Gospel narratives actually say on the subject. For that exercise, Pope Benedict has definitely supplied a "teachable moment."

Literally (Word Usage Literal and Figurative) [28 April 2013]

            I'm going to start out with a kind of disclaimer. Shortly I'm going to talk a bit about a segment on The Colbert Report and note that it's kind of fan-boy esoteric. Since I don't often write about The Colbert Report, my reference below might imply that there's something unusual about a bit of allusive complexity on Colbert, and I want to clarify that the segment I'll refer to is a tad more esoteric than the Colbert-ian norm, but not much; indeed the one I'll get to is barely in the same sport, let alone in the same league, as the awesome nerdocity of the first J. R. R. Tolkien-geek smackdown between Colbert and James Franco (5 April 2011). The Colbert/Franco scherzo and fugue on Lord of the Rings trivia reached levels of dorkoid esoterica I have never encountered, and I am a member of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, have friends who have written books on Tolkien, and was named first faculty advisor (as the first chapter prank) by the Miami University Society for Creative Anachronism.


         That being clear — I've hesitated to comment on misuses of the word "literally" in part because Stephen Colbert said all that needed to be said on the subject — for some audiences.

         The occasion was one of the long series of Republican 2012 Presidential Primary Debates, one a couple weeks after President Obama announced the withdrawal of most US combat troops in Iraq. Candidate Rick Perry said in the debate that he'd return US troops to Iraq, lest we "see Iran […] move back in [into Iraq] at literally the speed of light." Colbert sensed the figurative blood in the figurative water and figuratively did whatever the technical term is for what sharks do when they take a big bite out of a thrashing, wounded prey creature: “The speed of light," Colbert quoted. "Not figuratively, literally. […] Folks, forget nuclear weapons. Iran has developed the warp drive. Those centrifuges were actually enriching dilithium crystals. And unless we stop them, Captain Mahmoud Ahmad-kirk-ejad will soon be getting it on with 72 space virgins.”

         To truly, if figuratively, savor this moment, it helps to know that there seems to be no way that matter in our universe can move as fast as or faster than the speed of light; as one version of the T-shirt has it "299,792,458 meters per second. It's not just a good idea, it's the law!" It also helps to know that science fiction writers fudge one way around the limitations of the speed of light barrier by invoking theories of a space warp where the shortest distance between two points in our universe can be through one or more higher dimensions so that a space ship at point A can get to point B in what looks like a speed faster than light.

         This idea became canonical for a generation with the Warp Drive, especially on classic Star Trek, the series featuring William Shatner as Captain James Tiberius Kirk. It made sense in the 1960s. One way to get FTL (Faster Than Light) travel was to have a chapter explaining theories how it might be possible, as Arthur C. Clarke did in his novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Another way was just to say, "Warp two, Mr. Sulu." If humans can break the Sound Barrier and go faster than sound at Mach 2 and 3 and all, it stands to whatever substitutes for reason while we watch a movie or TV show that going "Warp 2" or "Warp 3" will get us FTL. It's what Walt Disney called "The Plausible Impossible" (Disneyland 3.08, which is blocked on YouTube, so don't bother).

         And the Warp Drives on vessels on Star Trek were powered by "dilithium crystals," which have something to do with antimatter.

         Further, the President of Iran at the time was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and one set of Muslim beliefs has it that male martyrs to the faith will be greeted and serviced in Paradise by seventy-two virgins — morphed into "space virgins" by the old SciFi convention of "skify-ing up" a phrase by just putting "space" before all manner of words.

         Follow that?

         Enough members of Colbert's audience could that Colbert got a laugh, and the clip seems to be popular. So for some folks, for a while, a figurative stake has been put into the figurative heart of "literally."

         It's not enough, though, and it is too much.

         The Colbert routine isn't enough because of the limited demographics; it's too much for a number of reasons, starting with all my uses above of "figuratively."

         We use figures of speech all the time, including the hyperbole of "all the time." To say "figuratively" every time would, as the figure has it, get old fast.

         And the word in question, "literally," can get complicated.

         In the section on his "[…] Theory of Symbols" in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye contrasts literary symbols that are descriptive and refer to things outside the text, and those that are what he calls literal. As the Wikipedia article has it, "To Frye, literal means nearly the opposite of its usage in common speech; to say that something 'literally' means something generally involves referring to a definition external to the text. Instead," in Frye's usage, "literal refers to the symbol's meaning in its specific literary situation while descriptive refers to personal connotation and conventional definition."

         Uh, huh. Even among those of us who continued to like Frye after the 1960s, this usage of "literal" never caught on. But no less a serious thinker about language than Northrop Frye used "literal" that way, and, if you go back far enough, he had a point. The Oxford English Dictionary's etymology for "literal" begins, "of or relating to literature (beginning of the 14th cent.), of or relating to the ‘letter’ of a text," — and only after the 1300s came to mean "of or relating to the ‘letter’ of a text, obtained by taking words and passages in their primary or usual meaning" — i.e., what we usually mean by "literal" and "literally": the words as they usually mean, not getting figurative (metaphorical, allegorical, mystical — fancy schmancy) on their figurative asses.

         Fairly recently, but long before the 2012 elections, some rhetorically daring people came upon the (bad) idea of using "literally" figuratively, as in the OED's definition 6.c, noting a colloquial literally, "Used in figurative or hyperbolic expressions to add emphasis or as an intensifier: veritable, real; complete, absolute, utter" and giving as their first example a quotation going back to a magazine article from 1857: "We hurried on to Baden Baden. Let no American send his son thither if he have any penchant for the card-table or the roulette. It is a literal hell." The OED editors immediately add that this usage is "Often considered irregular in standard English, since it reverses the earlier sense ‘without metaphor, exaggeration, or distortion’."

         No shit?!

         Baden Baden is a spa town in southern Germany, and it may've been a very sordid place in the 1850s. Still, it wasn't hell or even, literally, "a hell"; at worst, it could be seen as a very large "gambling hell," in the manner of, say, Las Vegas.

         Irregular usage, though, is no big deal, and no one should spend time attacking Northrop Frye for getting ingenious with "literal" or for anyone still using the phrase "gambling hell."  What is a big deal is "literally" as a hyperbolic intensifier. Nowadays we suffer from serious language inflation, and overstatement is becoming not just an issue of grammar but of politics and ethics.

         "He's literally as bad as Hitler" is figurative language; the figure of speech is hyperbole, overstatement — and unless that statement refers to a mass murderer on the order of Genghis Khan, Tamburlaine, Stalin, or Mao, the statement on its face — no argument necessary — is overstatement that's massive and bordering on the obscene. Matthew White gives for the death toll for World War II as some 66 million people and cites for "Who usually gets the most blame: the Axis, especially Hitler" (The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, p. [400]). Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature passes along as at least plausible, theories of "No Hitler, no Holocaust" and no Hitler, no World War II, at least not as the "hemoclysm" World War II became (208-9).

         "As bad as Hitler" — literally? Cut the crap. Figuratively.

High-Speed Car Chases (2 June 2013)

        I just watched a Fast and Furious movie — it was the 2013 edition, but that's irrelevant — and then Now You See Me, a somewhat more thoughtful film, although that's not saying a whole lot.

       Anyway, I enjoyed both movies, and the previews for similar films, and I got thinking about a lot of movies I've enjoyed less because I've been bored by the car chases. And then I got thinking of my life in the greater Cincinnati area 1971-2007 and about real-world high-speed police chases.
       And then I got pissed off at the makers of many "action" films.

       The web is unfortunately overstocked with troll-attorneys trawling for business, but try a search for actual "high-speed police chase" and accusations of "wrongful death." What popped up first in my search was the story of how "Kelly Spurlock, the widow of NASA engineer Darren Spurlock who was killed when he crossed the path of a high-speed police chase in 2008, is moving forward with her wrongful death lawsuit against the fleeing driver, the City of Huntsville [Alabama], and three officers who participated in the chase" — apparently a "high-speed chase at midday" in a busy area "where it […] put other motorists at risk."

       The Cincy case that comes up early on Google is the recent one reported by the AP with the lead: "The wife of [Mohamed Ould Mohamed Sidi,] a Cincinnati cab driver killed in a crash at the end of a high-speed police chase" in March of 2011 "is suing the city." The short form of the story ends with the sentence, "Cincinnati Solicitor John Curp said the city is not responsible for the criminal acts of others." Now it is certainly true that the City of Cincinnati is not responsible for the criminal acts of its "civilian" residents, but there remains the question of the potential responsibility of the City if three of its police officers "were negligent and caused," fairly directly, "Sidi's death."

       (The "civilian" isn't part of what I'm quoting; it's in "scare quotes" because I recall the chuckles when I first heard cops talk of "civilians," meaning their non-cop fellow citizens. That was during The Troubles in the spring of 1970, on a college campus in central Illinois and far, far away from the slaughter of the Vietnam War, where there were more old-fashioned varieties of civilians and combatants. This encounter with a new word-usage occurred at a meeting between police and protesters arranged by local Christians who took their faith seriously ["Blessed are the peacemakers"]. We protesters chuckled and then both groups adopted the usage: "'civilians', plural noun: neutrals at demonstrations or just in town, not cops and not protesters — folks neither out protesting nor policing the protests." But I digress, though relevantly.)

       It may be hidden on the web — at least without LexisNexis — but very strong in my memory is the debate over high-speed police chases in Cincinnati occasioned by one that killed, injured, and/or endangered a mother and child. My memory is a baby in in a baby carriage while the mother pushed it across the street, resulting in legal action where the cops were cleared and so was the City — although the City at least undoubtedly struck some deal out of court.

       The point here is the debate, which included some older police officers' complaining in public about cop cowboys and an tendency among their younger colleagues to substitute for "Serve and Protect," "Get the Motherf*ckers!"

       I paraphrase, or at least I paraphrase what went into the media, but some older cops did criticize strongly a kind of macho cop culture. The accusation was general, but as the debate went on, at least one cop blamed COPS, the TV show, and nowadays I'll blame even more the techno-porn speed-worship of the high-speed car-chase movie, especially when those chases are engaged in by officers of the law. Cops and many other armed agents of the State are sworn to serve and protect; and the have at their disposal such low-key technological wonders as radio, not to mention nowadays traffic cameras and computers and devices for tracking down an escaped suspect.

       Some place along the line, I want to see a movie where some sympathetic hot-shot cowboy cop buddies hit that baby carriage, kill the little girl therein (and her new puppy) and have to live with that the rest of their lives. I want to see some movies where the camera goes back to a flipped car and gets some medium-duration fairly close shots of what a real-world-style traffic disaster actually does to the human body.

       I came out west mostly for the climate, but in part to live on the edge of the film industry and as much as I can whore myself to Hollywood. So far — in my usual joke — I've made it only to Chicago chippy and Toronto trollop, with some hope of getting to Burbank bimbo; and, indeed, I lust after the sort of resources that allow filmmakers to execute a high-speed chase sequence. Also I taught literature for forty years and film long enough to know that most people can differentiate quite well between real life and power fantasies.

       But come on, guys!

       Those chase sequences normalize policemen behaving badly, irresponsibly; they set up a kind of perverse ideal of disregard for everyday people. This fits into a larger pattern of normalizing bad behavior by cops and other sworn agents of the State — more on that elsewhere — and such normalizing (romanticizing, idealizing) is not right.


     The City of Cincinnati is not responsible for the criminal acts of criminals, and moviemakers are not responsible for stupid and dangerous acts by people who don't know fantasy when they see it. The City of Cincinnati is, however, responsible at least in part for the actions of its employees and agents; American cities and film-makers, story-tellers and artists are responsible when they encourage bad behavior by peace officers by presenting as an ideal the shift from the wimpoid "To Serve and Protect" to macho (and nowadays macha), "Get the Motherf*ckers! (And if Some 'Civilians' Get Smashed, Well, They're Not Our People)."

Food Porn (30 Sept. 2013)

            As often noted, it says something significant and disturbing that commercials on CNN and the other cable-news channels trend toward advertising catheters, large cars, Cialis and other drugs for old people: the audience analysis for the news channels is, apparently, the same that has newspapers' placing their editorials right after the obituaries. What I've been noticing lately, though, is the commercials on the day-time re-runs of the fake news shows: the restaurant, cooking-school, fast food, booze, soft-drinks, and candy commercials with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

            I'm on the treadmill or elliptical trainer, switching from MSNBC to Comedy Central to my iPod, with the TV on mute and trying really hard to deny my ears and eyeballs to the hucksters during the interminable commercial breaks. But up there before those eyeballs are incredible images, impossibly perfect images, of impossibly perfect food.

            I'm trying to diet and get exercise, and I've just heard a very clever Colbert riff on Michelle Obama's plugging for Americans' drinking water (as an alternative to sugary drinks), and then I find myself staring at a double cheeseburger with bacon, slowly dripping what looks like extra-rich bourbon barbecue sauce. If I ate that thing I'd have to spend another hour on the treadmill and have a salad and fiber bar for dinner, and I'd still be over my "Lose It!" calorie allowance — no shit; there's an exclamation mark in the name — I'd still be over my calorie allowance for the day.

            CNN and MSNBC are catering to old farts, and Fox-News is trawling for old farts with anger issues. Comedy Central et al. are going for younger demographics, who are apparently strongly into highly fattening food, or, perhaps, can be tempted to buy highly fattening food.

            This is not good.

            In terms of minute-by-minute content, the youngsters are getting better news than their elders, but they're also getting the message that it's not only normal behavior but downright cool to eat a 1300-calorie superburger, washed down with beer or sugar-cola and followed with a casual chaser of M&Ms and Cheetos.

            In throwing Eve and Adam out of the Garden, God pronounces a severe sentence on them, but He has his harshest words for the serpent that tempted them. Arguing "On Liberty" in 1859 — he's in favor of it — John Stuart Mill allows that society probably has to tolerate a lot of, as I'll put it, whoring and «john-ing», but we are freer, if we choose, to regulate pimps or at least bring down upon them social disapproval. It's one thing to get your rocks off illicitly; it's another to tempt people into such behavior and make your living at it.

            In terms of US public health, pimps who provide STD testing and condoms are less of an threat than the hucksters pushing to young viewers a Tuesday-night special of a bottomless pasta bowl, all-you-can-eat breadsticks, and a turtle cheesecake dessert. For that matter, small-time drug deals are probably less of a threat to public health than the hucksters pushing to young viewers deliciously seductive food porn.

            SUGGESTION TO FTC, FCC, AND OTHER REGULATORY AGENCIES ALPHABETICAL: Do require calorie disclosure on menus and flashed across the screen in all those ads.


 _______________________          
ADDENDUM: As often, the satirists were on to a trend way before more earnest folk such as I. See Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park espisode 14.14, 17 November 2010, "Creme Fraiche" — not commercials but full-frontal Food Network!

Media Objectivity? Nah. Honesty & Responsibility? Maybe. (2 Dec. 2013)

 "No blood, no news" — Chicago TV station manager, 1970

(and Dean Rusk, disapproving)

                  "The observer is part of the system." — Chem 101, day 1, 1961

            
            I am not feeling very positive right about now toward American journalism, nor, for that matter, a whole lot of fictional movies and "reality" TV shows. More exactly, right about now, I'm pretty disgusted.

            There was a train derailment in the Bronx this morning, and at least four people are confirmed dead (the number may be higher by the time you read this). The fact of a train wreck is indeed news, and there may be important news coming out of the story, but as of 10 AM Pacific Standard Time on Sunday, 1 December 2013, there was just the quickly-reported fact of the wreck when CNN went full frontal on what they admitted — indeed, stressed — was "BREAKING NEWS" and pre-empted Fareed Zakaria's GPS program to show an aerial photo and get comments from witnesses and, essentially, invite a substantial audience to gawk at a transportation accident.

            Now that, in a sense, is objectivity: the nasty sense of treating other feeling and thinking creatures (your fellow human beings, fellow citizens) as objects of spectacle and whatever the word is for the analog of spectacle when you're not voyeuristically viewing but listening.

            Serious consideration of how we in America have failed to maintain much of our infrastructure, with passenger railroads a prime example — now that is worth in-depth coverage. But the roadbed in the Bronx may've been newly repaired and the tracks in peachy-keen condition; the accident may've been caused by some variety of human error that falls into the category of "Horrors happen."

            CNN didn't know because they were reporting "BREAKING NEWS" and therefore mostly not news at all. They could have shown the recorded Fareed Zakaria program and gotten to the train wreck later — at least, let's say, a day later — when there'd be actual information to report.

            And I'd be a viewer interested in such information, since I take trains regularly and had just e-mailed to a travel agent (younger readers can look up "travel agent") my tentative itinerary for a trip involving Amtrak's Texas Eagle Los Angeles to Chicago and the Southwest Chief Chicago to LA, plus a number of shorter trips on commuter runs.

            However, if I'm in a train that goes off the tracks, I'd prefer it if the media whores — including amateur media sluts with cell phone cameras — kept their distance until there was some solid news, the reporting whereof might serve the public interest. So my elliptical-trainer gym viewing got me pissed off enough to inspire exercise but didn't give help my staying informed.

            I returned from the gym to read a page-one story in my local newspaper, "Americans lose trust / Poll finds suspicion lurks in dealings with others." Somewhat mischievously, I checked out the editorial section to see if there was a mea culpa there from the Editorial Board of The Ventura County Star or some columnist. Silly me! There was, of course no apology from the Star, and I doubt there will be apologies from more than a couple media outlets — out of hundreds or thousands (depending what you count) — for their contributions to American distrust of most institutions and of one another.

             "If it bleeds, / It leads," as they say in the TV news trade, and, more generally, "Good news is no news." American news media, along with police dramas and "reality" shows like COPS, present to viewers an America in which dangers to life limb lurk around every corner. Every school shooting in White and/or upscale neighborhoods gets major media play; "sex trafficking" is talked about as if it were the 18^th-century slave trade; and the media offer a figurative megaphone for every member of The Responsible Parents Brigade pushing a doctrine of "Stranger Danger" and the risk of letting children boot up the computer and go on line, let alone out the door.

            Plus, of course, we get all warnings against fraud and scams and the significantly named "confidence games."

            There is nothing wrong with any of this in moderation. Shoot-em-up/Blow-em-up movies can be fun; murder, rape, mayhem, theft and major felonies are news; and there are, God knows, some real asshole gonifs out there waiting to rip off the unwary.

            What is missing in the rough arts of popular culture is some balance of the sort audiences once saw in Shakespeare's obscenely bloody King Lear. There's violence in Lear, but also acts of gratuitous kindness and decency to balance somewhat — the proportion is 1:3 — acts of viciousness. What is missing in the news is context combined with a sense of proportion.

            Instead of the opening news-story paragraphs of disturbing or uplifting "human interest" before getting to, say, some school-house horror, we could have a brief explanation of how rare school violence is and how safe US schools generally are. After we've been reminded that even in dangerous neighborhoods — maybe especially in dangerous neighborhoods — school are about the safest places kids can be, then the reporter can hit us with the grisly, reader-grabbing, ad-selling details of Gunfight at Alferd Packer Memorial High.

            Summary time:

            Objectivity in any strong sense of the term is impossible. As I learned in Introductory Chemistry, and you should have learned somewhere in school, "The observer is part of the system." This is a rule even in physics or astronomy. To measure the position and/or vector of a small particle, you have to measure it, which will change the system in ways that can't be predicted exactly; so you get the uncomfortable fact of Uncertainty: get an exact measurement — an ideal measurement — of position, and you can't know the velocity; get an exact measure of vector velocity (I'm mixing terms here), and you can't determine position. In astronomy, you needn't worry about, say, looking at the Crab Nebula and affecting it. However, you, a human and a specific human, are looking at it, and it may be that the most interesting things about the Crab Nebula can't be detected with vision or any other sense with which human beings have evolved. It may be that the most interesting things about the Crab Nebula can only be learned with senses and/or instruments of which we can't conceive. "The observer is part of the system" even in astronomy if for no other reason than you can't get observations for human-conducted science without involving humans.

            Objectivity in some strong sense is more clearly impossible if you have humans dealing with humans. An anthropologist can't write a paper delivering to us The Village; s/he can only give us the village with an anthropologist wandering around asking weird questions. Or we get the village with an anthropologist viewing it from close enough that s/he will report villagers acting suspiciously, like they thought someone was spying on them — or we get a necessarily vague report from a distant observer.

            Journalists can't give you The Story; they can only give you stories as put together by journalists, who change things just by their presence — think of turning the cameras on at a demonstration — or by asking questions. What's been called New York Times objective style, reporting without the word "I," is always and necessarily at least a small lie. A novelist can give you a story with a "third-person, 'omniscient' Narrator," because the novelist is the creator of the world narrated; reporters can only give you stories with reporters poking around in them: reporters who are actual human beings (most of them) with feelings, beliefs, ideas, ideologies, language, and the other standard human psychological equipment. So some bias is inevitable.

            Objectivity in a literal, moral sense is not desirable; treating journalistic subjects like objects is reprehensible. Objectivity in a literal, "epistemological" sense is impossible: neither reporters nor anyone else can get outside the world and describe it with the accuracy of a god.

            Media folk, though, can try to report honestly, fairly, and compassionately. They can educate their reader about contexts and give some idea of proportion (statistics can be handy here, e.g., in assessments of "Stranger Danger" or risk assessment generally). Studio executives can try to avoid the mildly grotesque voyeurism of "reality" television and shark-week/car-crash news. Studio executives can hire producers who'll use writers who can grab an audience's attention without house invasions or child abductions by pedophile cannibals or "blowing shit up."


            The media can do better than invite us to gawk at car crashes and train wrecks, or play on our fears.

The Liberal Media (and Other Urban Legends) [23 Sept. 2014]

In 2003, Eric Alterman published a book titled with the rhetorical question, What Liberal Media? His subtitle was (and remains), "The Truth About Bias and the News," and his topic was the news media. Still, the point holds far beyond the news: "the media" as a large set are certianly not Leftist, and not even all that Liberal.

            * The "Liberal Hollywood/Liberal Media" accusation, when not just a canard, is based in the fact that many media people are liberals. That fact is significant. As the old rule of thumb says, "Consider the source." More important, though, is the proverbial wisdom, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating, which translates out of outdated British into "The test of a desert is what it tastes like" — and means here that what counts a whole lot more than who's producing the media "product" is what that product is and how it functions socially and politically. What really counts isn't source but content; you have to look at the content of the wide range of media to which people in media-saturated cultures are exposed.
            * Most important for the US and other strongly capitalist countries is the bombardment by advertising: nowadays up to eight out of thirty minutes on a high-earning show like The Colbert Report or The Daily Show are taken up by commercials; and almost every commercial has at least the touch of the subtext, CONSUMPTION IS GOOD; CAPITALISM IS GOOD. BUY! Even if all of news programming has been taken over by rabid Bolsheviks, most of the message of the media still reinforces Capitalism.
            * The very form of traditional genres has political implication. E.g., the plot arc of traditional romantic comedy leads to the domestication of young people by bringing them into a crucial reinforcement of the status quo: marriage. At the end of a traditional romantic comedy, "A new and better world coalesces around a central couple," to slightly paraphrase  Northrop Frye, but not a world that is radically different. This will continue to be true with gay rom-coms leading toward gay marriage (as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, early on and repeatedly, gay marriage is conservative).
            * The very form of the police procedural and Law’n’Order movies reinforces Law’n’Order — and hypocritically or paradoxically undermines law insofar as recent cop dramas endorse cops’ violating the Bill of Rights and reinforce the ideal of the Cowboy Cop/Dirty Harry sort vs. a stick-in-the-mud like Joe Friday on the old Dragnet. And few shows nowadays celebrate defense attorneys like Perry Mason, or a Public Defender. We can argue whether the Right-wing or the Left is more likely nowadays to condemn "jack-booted storm troopers" of the law, but for sure the encouragement of violations of civil liberties is not part of the Liberal agenda.
            * There are anti-war movies; there are, however, a hell of a lot more movies and video games and such that celebrate the military and warfare. More generally, conflict resolution in many films and video games and TV shows is handled by violence, usually without much counting of the cost of violence. From time to time, members of the US Republican Party have complained of "Liberal Democrat [sic] Wars," with some justification; but, still, celebration of the military and, let's say, fondness for force have, generally, not been Liberal.
                        And there is another point with the media, especially war narratives and "action" movies: much of the action is the very casual killing of young men; and easing the acceptance of the guy population as cannon fodder — or maybe drone targets nowadays — makes militaristic thinking more easy. Consider the film The Drop (2014). The film succeeds, and I watched it not as a student of film but like a normal human being and let the movie have its way with me: watching the film with "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith," and, more relevantly, watching and listening with the suspension, for the moment, of my real-world ethical code. In that state I was quite concerned watching The Drop about the safety of a pit bull puppy, and feared for its well-being — but didn't care much when men were killed.
                        Whole genres of films and television shows pander to "the male gaze" and way too many movies and TV shows luxuriate in images of women suffering. Casual handing of the deaths of young men is no better — and both are common, and neither is Liberal.
            * The most basic premise of paranormal/supernatural films is, obviously, belief in the existence of the paranormal (etc.), often accompanied by a denigration of stodgy, commonsensical, and/or scientifically-minded folk who are skeptical of phenomena "beyond our ken." Such exercises in imagination are often entertaining and always, and necessarily, are useful as exercises in imagination. (The muscle analogy is over-used but true enough: a well-toned imagination is as important as well-toned muscles.) Still, there are some people who take the paranormal and supernatural much too seriously — and science-fictional premises like hostile, abducting aliens as well — and carry over into the real world a gullibility for hocus-pocus and suspicion of science, scientists, intellectuals generally, all egg-head authority figures, and common sense.
            * Usually with deaths in drama, "The rest is silence." However, when they open their mouths on the topic, so to speak, most dramas endorse the idea of some sort of afterlife. You may get a film where the funeral features the great poem from Koheleth, "For everything there is a time and a season" — but not even a Biblical quotation on Hey, when you’re dead, you’re dead ("I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them to show them that they are but beasts. For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same lifebreath, and man has no advantage over the beasts […]" [Ecclesiastes 3.19]). Religion and Liberalism can go together nicely, thank you — "Episcopalian Liberal" and "Jewish Liberals" are clichés, not oxymorons — but religiosity and faith in a "separable soul" with afterlife help conservative causes more than that clichéd "liberal agenda."
            * A fair number of movies and TV shows, and some news stories, feature macho assholes with little consciousness that they’re assholes. E.g., authoritarian coaches in sports films, the Drill Instructor with a butt-of-iron but heart-of-cold in old war movies: fairly often such characters are macho assholes, don't know they're macho assholes, and are not recognized in the works as macho assholes. Indeed, my well-to-do, well-bred students at Miami University (Oxford, OH) generally lacked the phrase and concept, "macho asshole" and thought "macho" an unambiguously positive term and much macho asshole-itry as normal and, among coaches and some athletes and such, even normative, admirable behavior.
            * A hierarchical system is usually taken for granted in many works, most blatantly in my viewing experience in the setting up of the Star Trek: Voyager series. The inheritors of the STAR TREK franchise had a chance to come up with a whole new way to run a starship with Voyager, and what did they do? They reintroduce a chain of command, just with a woman as captain and the rebellious sorts integrated into it. Hierarchy and deference to rank is more (small "c") conservative than liberal.
            * Many movies and TV shows are borderline pornographic in celebrating "Life-Styles of the Rich and Famous," with poor folk and workers and other such riff-raff invisible. Workers as such usually show up in Satire or Comedy, and worker issues, such as unions are pretty much invisible. Newspapers have Business Sections; I can’t recall a Labor Section.

Etc., emphatically including conservative and, for a long time, downright reactionary indoctrination on race and gender (Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, Father Knows Best).

Where there’s a legitimate complaint, I think, is from religious folk. The Simpson family isn’t religious, but they do go to church now and then — and that’s unusual in TV and movies. To repeat what I’d like to make into a cliché about most characters in art until recently: "They don’t piss, and they don’t pray." And some of the films coming out that do have religious themes are pretty bad. As Justin Chang says about the film Persecuted, (2014), "At a time when the world offers no shortage of examples of what actual religious persecution looks like, for a film to indulge in this particular brand of self-righteous fearmongering isn't just clueless or reckless; it is an act of contemptible irresponsibility."
            Updating my formula: nowadays we have a kind of karmic balance between films with all manner of release of unprecious bodily fluids and other films where it seems that all they do is pray or get hung up on religious issues; few strike reasonable balances on people as animal animals, and animals for whom spiritual longings and concerns — "a religious capacity" — are at least a human "Mode" of thought based in "the natural capacities of the mind" (from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed ch. 1). 

As Peter Biskind taught us in Seeing Is Believing, an ideological back-and-forth has been going on in movies from at least the 1950s — and before, with films I've mentioned like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, but also Liberal films like Metropolis and downright lying "manifest destiny propaganda like They Died with Their Boots on. So why do we get that, uh, trope of "The Liberal Media"? I'll give the basic answer to that question with another question (hey — I taught for forty years): "Does a fish know it's in water?" Probably not, not unless it's a bottom dweller or flying fish or gets hooked or netted and hauled out. Most Americans are so immersed in capitalist, commercial, basically Conservative culture that we don't even see it. What people notice is the less orthodox Liberal stuff, and with the actual American Left — Democratic Socialists and beyond — having been (mostly figuratively) dead or at least spitting up blood from 1968 on, the Liberal messages sound pretty racy.

Recall that Bill Clinton and Al Gore are basically Eisenhower Republicans, as are many politicians today called "Liberal"; and then acknowledge that America is still a largely conservative country. Our media — generally, in its wide swath — reflect that conservatism, and reinforce it.