Throne and Altar

Now we come to the deepest problem with journalism.

From time to time, I’ve been told that I “really should” read a newspaper like the New York Times so that I can “be informed”, “know what’s going on in the world”, etc.  It seems that many people regard newspapers as not only necessary but also sufficient for being properly informed.  No one has ever told me that to understand the world, I must have read the Koran, understand atmospheric physics, take a course in macroeconomics, or study history.  If something in these subjects is important, I suppose I should expect to hear about it from journalists, who will distill what I need to know.  Like physics and sociology, journalism presents a self-inclosed view of the world–because it seems to say something about everything, it is easy to imagine that journalism is the truth about everything.  Now, in the case of physics (and, to a much lesser degree, sociology), the insight we gain into the world by looking at it in this particular way is so vast as to make the danger of epistemic arrogance worth taking.  For journalism, the case is very different.

News distorts the world because it only concerns itself with individual cases and with direct causes.  The disciplines concerned with rigorously extracting general principles from compilations of individual cases–statistics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and philosophy–are outside the domain of journalism.  When a person forms his worldview, however, what he needs are general truths, not a collection of disjointed facts.  Newspapers should admit that they cannot provide any general truths, i.e. that they concern themselve entirely with ephemera.  The New York Times is really no different from a celebrity gossip magazine, except that the celebrities it follows are politicians.  But newspapers don’t admit this.  Instead, they have “editorials”, in which other journalists extract general truths from the daily headlines for us.  These editorialists, however, need have no special training in statistics, the scientific method, or the social sciences.  Even if they do have such training, they are not paid in their columns to use it.  One will never see an attempt at rigorous scientific analysis in an editorial.  Rather, editorialists just take the news story of the day which is most emotionally gripping, or the one that just happens to suit the writer’s own prejudices, and then they recklessly overgeneralize from that case.  For example, if page one presents a corporation being exposed for some financial malpractice, an editorialist might sight this as proof that capitalism is irredeemably corrupt.  The next day, the headline might reveal a case of egregious waste in a government program, and a libertarian editorialist will declare this proof that all public services should be privatized.  The issues raised in both cases are economical, and they can only be really addressed through the general science of economics:  analyzing incentives, constructing mathematical models, etc.  Exceptional individual cases, which tend to involve unrepresentative circumstances, are of very limited use in getting at the general truth.

This reckless extrapolation from particular cases would be bad enough if it just gave random answers.  In fact, it’s even worse, because it skews the conclusions one is likely to get in a particular, pernicious way.  It is the case with many social restrictions that they inconvenience or harm a few people directly while benefitting many people, but indirectly.  Newspapers are designed to register the first effect, but not the second.  For example, there used to be a strong stigma attached to fornication and illegitimacy.  This was certainly unpleasant for unwed mothers (and unwed fathers, when they were identified), although being fornicators, they deserved at least some of their shame.  For the bastards themselves, it was quite unfair.  This stigma had a powerful, positive effect on society, though.  Boys and girls knew there could be a real penalty in status for them if they failed to remain chaste until the wedding night.  A man who impregnated a woman and then ran away would have a strong extra reason to feel guilty.  Many couples were moved to continence before marriage and fidelity afterwards.  However, in almost no case was fear of the illigitimacy stigma the overriding conscious consideration.  When the stigma served its function well, it never got the credit it really deserved.  Couples did the right thing partially out of fear, and doing the right thing caused them to grow in virtue and love until the fear was unnecessary, and they forgot (as we always forget what we don’t want to remember) that the fear had ever been a factor at all.  So, when the news looks at this situation, what does it see?  “Poor woman and child looked down on by heartless society!”  What about the other side?  There will be no child to step forward and say “Fear of the social stigma against unmarried sex led my parents to marry, so I owe the stigma for the fact that I’m being raised by two parents!”  The stigma doesn’t work that directly.  (Nor would we want it to.)  Thus, the newspapers couldn’t see the value of the stigma at all.  Not surprisingly, the editorialists jumped in to declare the illigitimacy stigma to be “cruel”, “irrational”, “superstitious”, and “outmoded”.  So it fell, and now half of all children are bastards.

One could name all sorts of issues like this, where the victims of a law or custom are much clearer (but much less numerous) than the beneficiaries, or the ill effects are much more direct (but perhaps also smaller) than the good effects.  One well known example from urban economics is rent control.  Most economists, I believe, agree that rent control is a bad idea, because it just creates shortages.  Public perception, of course, goes the other way because of newspapers.  Journalists can point to particular people who can’t afford an apartment at the market price.  To think about how a price cap would affect the business decisions of landlords would require that one for a moment stop being a journalist and think like an economist.  Then there are the journalistic world’s favored solutions to all of Africa’s problems:  debt relief and condoms.  What they never consider, because they’re incapable of considering, is how these policies 1) affect incentives so as to encourage self-destructive behavior, and 2) affect the percieved meaning of loans and sex in was that encourage self-destructive behavior.  Not surprisingly, our “help” for Africa has been futile at best, and so it will remain as long as we see the world through the eyes of journalists rather than social scientists or philosophers.

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Consider the following:

1. A soldier bravely risks death in battle to defend his patria.
2. A soldier is caught raping a civilian woman.

or

1. A father works long hours to provide for his wife and children.
2. A father is caught selling his daughters as prostitutes.

or

1. An elderly couple is assulted by inner-city gang members
2. An elderly couple is assulted by Franciscan Friars.

What do the 1’s have in common as opposed to the 2’s.  One correct answer is that the 1’s show behavior consistent with social expectations.  “Soldier” and “father” are respected social roles, and in the first two examples, someone is fulfilling those roles properly.  “Gang member” is a recognized but disapproved social role.  We expect gang members to do bad things, although we would prefer that no one took up this role, and we do what we can to stamp it out.  In the 2’s, a social role is being violated.

What else do the 1’s have in common as opposed to the 2’s?  How about this:  the 2’s are news, but the 1’s are not.  Nobody would ever write a story about the daily sacrifices parents make for their children.  It’s only news if they act against their role and abuse their children.  Similarly, the same mugging would be page 1 if the perpetrators are friars but page 10 if they’re lower-class minority youths with criminal backgrounds.  So we have the following definition of “news”

news = violation of social roles

newspaper = a compilation of social role violations

Now consider what a distorted view of the world one gets from newspapers.  You would get the impression that most parents are negligent or abusive, most soldiers are sadists, most friars are violent, and most gang members and drug addicts are innocent saints.  All of this is, of course, exactly backwards.  Having a distorted view of what the average father, priest, drug addict, or whatever is like is bad enough in itself, because it can lead us to make bad decisions.  “I’d better walk down this gang-infested inner city street so that I can avoid having to walk by the rectory!”  That’s not the worst of it, though.  Constant reading of newspapers causes a person to actually associate the vices opposed to a given social role with that social role itself, because that’s all that gets reported.  If the press digs up enough stories about cowardly soldiers and heroic deserters, people will start to associate “soldier” with “coward” and “deserter” with “hero”, even though these associations are exactly backwards.  This would lead people to despise the role of soldier itself.  This in turn will demoralize soldiers and make them cynical, so that in fact they do become less heroic.  Now, the news media is doing this to all of our social roles, so the entire society is being demoralized.

This has got to stop, so for heaven’s sake, put down that newspaper!

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“Oh, but we need a free and adversarial press to keep people in authority honest.  Without someone watching them, they would abuse their position.”  Nobody seems to doubt this statement, but is it true?  Note that the claim “people are more likely to abuse power when they’re not monitored” is, by its very nature, unverifiable and therefore in a sense unscientific.  We can’t take two sets of authority figures, monitor only one of them, and then see which abused power more often.  We have to make inferences from what we know of human psychology.

Why is it that people with power generally don’t abuse it for selfish ends?  Apologists for journalism follow the “accountability paradigm”:  abuse is limited by the fear of exposure.  A more sophisticated version might admit that many people use power responsibly for other, more creditable, reasons.  However, some subset will be motivated only by the fear of accountability, and these the press can influence in a positive way.  What about the others, though, who use their power well?  What are they’re reasons?  If press campaigns undermine them, they may prove to be counterproductive overall.  For example, if negative press coverage instills fear in 10 basically bad officers but destroys the idealism of 90 basically good officers, the overall effect may be negative.

Many people in authority positions are impressed by the dignity of their office.  They see it as an enormous honor to which they must aspire to be worthy.  They look back to the deeds of exemplary past officeholders for inspiration.  What happens when a media campaign against a certain office destroys the dignity of that office, so that the office’s code of excellence is regarded as a joke and all officeholders are presumed by the public to be venal, lazy, and cruel?  Remember that accountability by journalism is a particular kind of correction–it is correction by public humiliation.  Any organization that gets serious journalistic oversight can expect to have its reputation in the dirt.

Do negative stereotypes and presumption of guilt encourage good behavior?  Sociologists have studied this question in the context of racial stereotyping.  While I think these studies tend to overstate the degree of race-based stereotyping in American schools and workplaces, there is widespread agreement on the effects of negative stereotypes.  They discourage good behavior; people tend to live down to them.  With no positive role models, minority youth drift into delinquency.  When people assume that you’re a crook, you’re much more likely to end up a crook.  Nor do negative stereotypes tend to prompt constructive self-criticism.  Rather, they make the stereotyped class hostile and defensive towards outsiders.

When journalists put the heat on a crooked politician or bishop or general, they will often make that individual watch out and behave better.  The cumulative effect of these sorts of exposes, however, is to demoralize the occupation as a whole.  These authority figures lose their sense of the dignity of their office (because it no longer has any) and the high responsibilities it entails; they see that they’re just public punching bags, and they become cynical.  Furthermore, fewer honest and motivated people will be attracted to the beleaguered profession, causing it to sink still lower.

So, does accountability by a hostile press improve the honesty of an organization overall?  The answer is less clear than it first appears.

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