Telling Us What To Think About
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Tuesday, July 14, 2009 3:00 PM
My journalist father taught us kids that the power of media isn’t in telling us what to think, but in shaping what we think about.
Denver’s Archbishop Chaput made that very point in a recent address on our relationship to the press.
I think you’ll find it worthwhile reading and thinking about—particularly his observation about how the sheer pace of the news cycle is changing our culture, quite apart from any question of bias.
America was born as a nation of readers; a nation of the printed word. The foundational defenses of our constitutional order, The Federalist Papers, first appeared as newspaper articles. The 85 essays are remarkable exercises in political philosophy. They’re done with an intellectual skill unmatched anywhere in the modern news media. Unfortunately, if they appeared today, few of us might read them. The reason is simple. Reading requires discipline and mental effort. But for the past 50 years our culture has been shifting away from the printed word to visual communications, which are much more inclined to sensation and passive consumption. This has consequences. When a print culture dies, the ideas, institutions and even habits of public behavior built on that culture begin to weaken.
A little more:
Visual and electronic media, today’s dominant media, need a certain kind of content. They thrive on brevity, speed, change, urgency, variety and feelings. But thinking requires the opposite. Thinking takes time. It needs silence and the methodical skills of logic. Today’s advances in technology have increased the sources of human information that the average layperson can access. That’s a good thing. But they’ve also undermined the intellectual discipline that we once had when our main tools of communication were books or print publications. This is not a good development. In fact, it’s a very dangerous thing in a democracy, which is a form of government that demands intellectual and moral maturity from its citizens to survive.
This is an observation that is particularly timely in the wake of news that Congress is voting sweeping changes to vast swathes of our economy without anyone—certainly not us citizens and not even the members themselves—actually reading the bills they’re voting on. When the House of Representatives passed its version of “Cap and Trade,” for example, the clerk of the House had no bill in hand at the time. He had a draft and a package of irreconcilable amendments. Not a single person who voted for or against that bill can claim to have known what was in it—it didn’t yet exist! Does that not strike you as it does me: hasty, imprudent, even cavalier with the lives of our citizens?
Forget for a moment who’s right about alternative energy and the environment. I’d argue that fidelity to the oath of office required members to walk off the floor and refuse to vote until there was an actual bill with identifiable content. Instead, for both parties, “urgency” trumped deliberation. That’s not a recipe for wise governance. (This kind of thing has one Conservative group asking Congressmen to sign a pledge not to vote for any health care bill until they’ve read it and the bill has been posted on the internet for 72 hours so we can all read it. I’ll be curious what sort of response that gets.)
His reflection also seems timely in the week the Holy Father released an encyclical reminding the world that no system of government can withstand an immoral (or amoral) citizenry.
Archbishop Chaput didn’t intend his address as a jeremiad against the press or against technology, and I don’t intend this post as that either. Ours is not a nostalgic faith, longing for the mythical golden age. Christianity is for the real world. The same advances that can tempt us to be careless in our decision-making also make information more accessible to more people, which is a genuine good.
Now, we can’t wish away breakthroughs in technology any more than we can unlearn the rules of mathematics. Nor should we want to. Social media like Facebook and Twitter may shorten our attention spans, but – as recent events in Iran showed us – they can also be a very powerful force for publicizing the truth and pursuing justice.
Plus, without these technologies, we wouldn’t be having this conversation!
The point is only that every development has both positive and negative and unforeseen or unintended consequences, and we should ponder how to use new tools in such a way as to shape them more than they shape us. He’s addressing something far deeper than the surface question of “bias,” which is where, at least in my perception, our current discourse about the press tends to get stuck. What’s harder to see is whether a particular story is worth our attention even if it’s reported neutrally, or if we are debating the right things.
I like his humorous take home message: “Refuse to be stupid.”
On another note, keep Archbishop Chaput in your prayers as he recovers from back surgery undertaken July 9. In addition to his already full schedule, he has the additional project of helping with the Vatican Visitation of the Legion of Christ, so he needs a swift and full recovery!
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