Well, I’ve found fresh font of fury, which is always welcome in the blogosphere, from this Seattle PI story about how people under 30 tune out the news. See, I read it about 15 minutes after reading Part 5 in Tom Friedman’s War of Ideas series.
The world as it stands, as I see it: Evil people purporting to represent 1 billion Muslims have declared war on us. They mean to destroy our society and kill everybody they can’t convert. What part of They Want Us All Dead Or On Our Knees is so comical that young people feel they can afford to get their news from The Daily Show?
We can’t take all the blame for generations of people whose most pressing concern is the expiration date on their Visa cards. But we can’t shirk our role in it either. The kids are telling us news has become a joke anyway, so why not get it from the professionals?
I won’t waste pixels rehashing how we got here. What matters is where we go next. I think it has to start with recognizing what makes news a joke.
For starters, I’d look to the sanctimonious preachings of the press itself. We’re all about reform for everybody but ourselves. We wrap ourselves in the First Amendment and then slather Michael Jackson all over the front page. Sane people could be forgiven for thinking: they’re not serious about the news, why should I be?
Then I would admit: we are fallible, we often get it wrong, we beg your forbearance and forgiveness and please ask that you give us another chance to do better next time. In other words: humilty before the people, who deserve it, and the truth, which is far more elusive than we care to admit.
Next, I would vow to stop terrorizing people with vague threats and help people understand the explicit ones.
And high on my priority list would be drawing stark lines between news and fluff, and giving the most attention to news. My job deals entirely with fluff. That is, pop culture and consumption. This stuff all matters to people, and having some of this stuff leavens our coverage and makes it more palatable, but don’t equate it with real news.
The hardest part will be finding a way to stand outside the culture we live in. Reporters and editors are obsessed with celebrities and other titillating trivialities because we live in the same society as everybody else.
None of this would matter if the rest of the world shared our obsessions. The problem is that a small collection of deadly serious people think our unserious ways mean we’ve gotten too far from God; they are wrong for a million reasons, but it’s not like reason is part of their equation.
There really is a war on out there, and there’s way more at stake than the possibility that all those guys getting called up into the Reserves are affecting the TV ratings. What happens in the next 20 years in the confrontation with radical Islam could be the setup for centuries to come: will it be a new renaissance or a return to the Dark Ages?
Serious stuff, for sure.
Just occurred to me something I left out: have a sense of humor about ourselves, and our work. Force The Onion to find some other profession to lampoon. People living in the most wretched conditions of war, famine or oppression have found relief in humor. It might be our humorlessness that is driving people away.
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