 The job of the media is to make interesting what is important.
That was Bill Maher's challenge to CBS's Lesley Stahl on his show last
night. He's exactly right. What the legacy media do mostly now, an
indication of lazy, cowardly, chintzy, risk-averse journalism, is try
to make important what the lowest common denominator of viewers find
interesting -- irrelevancies like celebrity trials and sensational
crime stories. In a recent post
I said it was time to give up on the mainstream media and create new
ones with a progressive compass and a deep sense of journalistic
responsibility -- the responsibility to do precisely what Maher
challenges them to do.
The example he used, and which he has used more than once on his show,
is the environment. I'm delighted that he understands this as one of
the most important issues of our time. He even took Howard Dean to task
on this issue. The way you make this important issue interesting, he
suggests, is to present it in a context that people can personally
relate to, and can and should be outraged about -- the poisons in the
air, water, in our food, and in the medicines largely doled out to remedy
the poisons in the air, water and food. He blames big agribusiness (and
the massive agricultural subsidies paid to them by governments of every
stripe) for the poor state of nutrition and the accumulation of toxic
products in the food we eat -- hormones and antibiotics in meat,
over-marketed milk, and high-calorie low-nutrition corn-based sugars
that are added to almost everything on the grocery shelves. (Contrary
to rumour, he's not a vegetarian, though, like me, he is working
towards it). And he suggests that big pharma is quietly working in
cahoots with big agribusiness -- the former selling people treatments
for the illnesses the latter are negligently and recklessly causing.
The American and Canadian media have been at least sporadically on
issues like trans fats, asthma, and the dangers of aspartame, e coli
bacteria infection, anti-depressants and, of course, the Swine Flu
threat. They appreciate that these items are news, and they have even
done a bit of investigative journalism on them. The problem is that the
media are set up to deal with news that are either one-shot events that
are reported and promptly forgotten, or ongoing stories where there is
a continuous feed of new facts to report. Because they fit this model
so well, stories about crime, law and justice make up over half of all
legacy media news reports. "What is important" -- issues like the
environment, the debt crisis, the cycle of poverty and illness in the
third world, global warming, domestic violence, the treatment of
prisoners and the mentally ill and animals in factory farms and
laboratories, the lunacy of the 'war on drugs', etc., do not lend
themselves to this model -- they are not manifested in a single
'event', nor is there a continuous daily flow of new information that
'keeps the story alive'. So what are the media to do?
The answer: Change the model.
Unless you're cynical enough to believe most people don't care or want
to hear about issues that are really important, the media need to come
up with a new model of how to report the news, one that does
accommodate and "make interesting" important news stories. The New Yorker
has done this by providing insightful, in-depth investigative
reporting, and analysis, and allowing its journalists to write about
meta-issues that have nothing to do with daily events -- issues like
learned helplessness, the tipping point, and the wisdom of crowds. The
success of the magazine and the many successful books it has spawned
(not to mention the volume of online journalism that has picked up the
conversation on these issues) suggests that people do care and want to
hear about these issues. Programs like '60 Minutes' have tried to
emulate this model by doing in-depth analysis and even some
investigative reporting, and such programs are quite popular.
 But
as worthy as these attempts are, they do not constitute a new model,
and have had minimal impact on the quality or quantity of information
conveyed to the average viewer, listener, or newspaper reader. We need
a completely different model to "make interesting what is important".
That new model cannot pander to the short attention span or passion for
gossip of the audience, nor can it self-censor information that the
audience might not really want to know, because it's unsettling or
suggests popular wisdom is wildly misguided. Such a model should be
built on the following principles:
- If a news item is not actionable by the audience, it isn't news and should not be reported.
This is a lofty principle, but if we really believe people are so busy
they only have time for thirty minutes of new information a day,
shouldn't that scarce and valuable time be spent telling people about
things they can actually act upon? This means an end to crime blotter
reporting, coverage of local fires and distant natural disasters
(unless they call for immediate humanitarian action), and regurgitation
of 'press releases' and 'press conferences', the greatest abominations
of the fourth estate, which are advertising, promotion and public
relations, not news.
- News items should be long enough to inform the audience what needs to be done. That means no sound bites, no items less than 1000 words or shorter than 15 minutes, and that time should be spent conveying only important information and discussing its implications in an interesting way.
This will require a complete revamping of the layout of newspapers and
news broadcasts, and weaning the consumers of news off the 'empty
calories fast-food' news diet and onto a completely different one with
a lot more fibre. The best way to do this is by simply presenting
something that works better. If people realize that a nightly detailed, hour-long
explanation and analysis of an important and actionable issue is useful and interesting,
and that they don't miss in the least the old-style news broadcast or
newspaper with its useless and superficial coverage of events that they
can't do anything about anyway, they'll vote with their feet, and the
other media will be forced to switch to keep up. Just because that old
model has been around since the invention of the telegraph doesn't mean
it's the right one for today.
- Reports should be assessed
on their position on Covey's urgent/important grid, and only items in
quadrants I and II should be reported. And if someone asks the
meaning of 'important', just tell them to consider whether 'urgent'
news like the state of the Pope's or Michael Jackson's bowel movements
or the arrest of a local arsonist will be remembered as important five
years from now. If it won't be considered important with the benefit of
hindsight, it's not important now.
- The media should abandon the pretense of objectivity.
There is no such thing, especially when you start telling people what
action to take. The reason Faux News is so popular is that it tells
people what to do with the (dis-)information it perpetrates -- lobby
their representative to attack Islamic oil states, assassinate abortion
doctors, kill homosexuals, nuke Canada. The fact that this advice is
abominable is beside the point -- people want information that is actionable, and they want guidance on what to do.
That's why there was such a frenzy over duct tape and plastic sheeting
after 9/11 -- Ridge was the only guy meeting this need, albeit
incompetently. Everyone else was just saying 'be vigilant', and the
public found that advice completely useless. If there's no action
needed, it's not news, so stop talking about it. And be honest enough to say 'we believe' before you tell the audience what you think they should do.
- Every story should be followed up on a regular, scheduled basis.
If it's important, it's not going to go away, and that means the
actions you recommended on the first broadcast should be built upon in
the subsequent programs. The media should actually like this, because
it makes their job easier -- every second Thursday is Environment Day,
so they can stop running around looking for news and do some advance research, analysis, and investigation in an orderly, measured, scheduled way actually reporting
the news -- the important issues that five years from now people will
look back and say "Whew, good thing we learned about that and took
action in time."
I think that's all the principles. To me these are common sense, a
simple explanation of "understand what the customer needs and deliver".
But the implications are enormous. Imagine a whole daily paper
consisting of 50 in-depth stories on a single subject, each concluding
with well-reasoned advice every reader can take. Imagine that at the
bottom of page one of that paper it says "No paper tomorrow -- our next
issue on Saving the Family Farm will be out Thursday". Imagine the
content of these newspapers being so useful -- so valuable -- that readers keep them for years in their library and refer back to them regularly (especially if you're an advertiser).
If you think this is a stretch, recall that newspapers started as
broadsheets -- partisan, single-subject reports cranked out by
activists, and that at one time people were so engaged in long-term
thinking that they flocked to meeting halls to hear advocates,
philosophers, scientists, and writers talk at length about one subject, and then
retired to the local bars to debate about what to do.
Now, think about the current model for online
journals (blogs). Let's see, we write mostly short articles talking
about events we read or heard about in the legacy media, those articles
are displayed in reverse date order, and after a week or so, they
disappear into the 'archives' never to be seen again. Hmmm...
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