To the Editor:
In many industries, "give 'em what they want" is a rallying call towards quality and accountability to the customer. One place where it doesn't work so well is the press. So long as corporate broadcast media form the key means for learning what is happening in the world this will remain a tremendous problem.
What ought we hear from the press? It would be most useful, by almost any metric, to find news that could lead us to change how we go about our daily lives - we ought to hear of wrongs that we ourselves are capable of addressing, of viewpoints and evidence that challenge our own, of the darker side of the systems that we implicitly support, and of positive examples that can give us hope, empathy, and innovative ideas towards improving ourselves, respecting others, and doing various good things.
Unfortunately this is not what we want to hear. We want to hear of things that are distant from us, that we don't have to worry about - we want to be in conflict, worked up, we want to have issues - but issues that are not personal in the least. We want to hear of Kosovo bombings that are not our fault, and are not the nation's that we support with taxes, votes, and apathy. We want to find fault with some incompetent air force pilot: it's something to argue about in the halls, but something completely irrelevant to our own lives.
We want tragedies, because when we hear of someone doing good things - running a soup kitchen or providing free legal advice or whatever - there's always the thought that we ought to be doing something like that, but with tragedies it is absolutely correct (and easy) to shake our heads and say "so many young lives." We want ethical dilemmas like cloning and the Clinton scandals because they are so far from real life, where most often it is obvious what's right, just difficult to do it.
This is not a problem with the liberal or the conservative press, this is a problem with all mass media which is published by a small group as a marketed product. Until we find a workable peer-to-peer solution for news, we will remain locked in ineffectual conversations and lifestyles and in intellectual communities which oversimplify the truth due to a lack of evidence.
Until then as individuals we can only hope to avoid talking about current events as they are popularly portrayed, to try to get news from volunteer sources and from real people with stories to tell, and to keep our minds vigilant against our own tendencies to want the easy way out of the news.
