Year: 2009

Recent research has given a more nuanced picture of the decline of the American Indian.  Two facts—and they are facts—seem to have captured the imagination of the reading public and the media:

1. That many American Indian societies in North America were already in decline when the Europeans arrived.
2. That the diseases the Europeans brought with them killed millions of Indians (as opposed to the Indian Wars, economic warfare and the depredations that follow the uprooting of whole nations from their long-time homes).

My evidence is only anecdotal, but my sense is that these two facts are used to the exclusion of all other facts in current discussions in the news media of the decline of Native American civilization.  And while both of these facts are true, writers of all persuasions cite them in a wide variety of contexts nowadays, far more than we hear about racial genocide and property expropriation as causes for the decline of Indian civilization.  By reporting these relatively recent discoveries of historians, the intelligentsia is in a sense saying, “It’s not our fault about what happened to Native Americans.”

The latest example is in Steven Stoll’s otherwise fine piece that opens the November 2009 issue of Harper’s in which he discusses at length William Ruddiman’s demonstration that the Little Ice Age supports the view that man has had an impact on global warming and cooling for about the last 10,000 years. 

Stoll reports that about the time of the Little Ice Age, which took place roughly from 1300-1700 C.E., there was an enormous increase in pandemics throughout the world.  About North America, he says:

“When Hernan Cortes invaded the Valley of Mexico in 1519, his armies brought smallpox, influenza and mumps, setting off among never-before-exposed people a series of devastating infections, that, as the diseases moved north and south, killed between 50 and 60 million over the following two hundred years.  The destruction of life cut so deeply into Indian societies that many never recovered their earlier populations.” 

Note the subtext of the statement, which silently absolves the Europeans of guilt in the decline of the Native Americans and their civilizations.  Afterall, we can’t be blamed for the germs we carry.  (Except of course, for General Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who knowingly gave Indian tribes blankets infected with small pox.)

Interestingly enough, Stoll’s discusses the decline of other nations, e.g., France and Italy, from disease during the Little Ice Age, but reports that all eventually regained their former population.  The reason for the difference in the fates of the French and the Native North American nations is so painfully clear that it makes one wonder why Stoll ever writes the sentence: “The destruction of life cut so deeply into Indian societies that many never recovered their earlier populations.”  The article would have been better without this extraneous explanation, but then it would have been without the important ideological subtext that we’re not to blame for what happened to Native Americans.

In her weekend story about San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s withdrawal from the race for the Democratic nominee for California governor, Associated Press reporter Juliet Williams shows how so-called mainstream reporters confuse the basic terms of political discourse by accepting the long-term labeling propaganda of the Republican party.

Here’s the paragraph I want to analyze:

“The telegenic mayor tried to connect with voters at town hall forums across the state, but never finessed his message.  He excitedly skipped from topic to topic, promising never to blunt his left-leaning positions on gay marriage, the environment, immigration and universal health care to win votes.”

Environmental regulation and universal health care are both left-leaning positions because both involve more government regulation and, in the case of the environment, more constraint on the individual.

But shouldn’t support of gay marriage and immigration rights be positions of the right?  Afterall, to outlaw gay marriage and hamper immigration both represent government interference through regulation plus constraint of the individual, two things that the right-wing vehemently oppose.  In fact, uninhibited individual rights and minimal government regulation are two of the foundation stones of the right-wing.

The third foundation stone of course is promulgation of a certain value system that reflects the aspirations that the religious among the upper classes set for the working classes during the industrialization of the second half of the 19th century, a.k.a. the Victorian value system.  As Paul Starr depicted in detail in “The Social Transformation of American Medicine” some 25 years ago, the Victorian era is also when physicians supported passage of laws restricting abortion as part of a program to drive out the competition.  This value system has no place for gay marriage, even if that means committing the abomination of regulating private activity. 

The New York Times was perhaps more accurate in its version of Newsom’s politics:

“His political views were unlikely to play as well across the far-more-conservative center of the state than they did in the Bay Area.”

To be precise, it’s left versus right, and liberal versus conservative, but the news media throws right and conservative into one pot and left and liberal into the other.  So because right-wingers are swimming in the same soup as conservatives, they are opposed to gay marriage when in fact, they should be in favor of it.

In today’s USA Today, Al Neuharth, the founder of our national MacPaper, chimes in on the controversy that has ensued since some Obama Administration officials said what seems to me to be res ipso loquitor, which in Latin means “a thing that proves itself”: that Fox News colors its presentation of news so much that “it is not really a news station,” as David Axelrod put it.

Neuharth’s main point is that one should not pick a fight with “someone who buys ink by the barrel,” which of course ignores the fact that any large organization, be it a government or a large corporation, also either buys ink or buys the people who buy the ink through buying ads or setting the topic and tone of coverage through the large amounts of information they provide to the news media.

But what I would like to examine today is Neuharth’s ancillary point that “most of you understand the difference between news and views.”  He’s just wrong, and not because people are dumb or undiscerning—they are not—but because the media can be so subtle and unrelenting in their conflation of news and opinion.  Most people just want to read and listen to the news and don’t have the time to spend analyzing the fact content nor the rhetorical devices being employed to color the facts with opinion.

Here are some ways that media can color the news.  It’s not an exhaustive list, just some of the more obvious tricks of the trade that come to mind at six in the morning:

• Labeling, as Neuharth himself does by calling The New York Times and The Washington Post liberal, when in fact both newspapers prove themselves to be centrist to slightly right virtually every day.
• Selection of facts, as again Neuharth does when he tosses off the names of TV personalities Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews and Lou Dobbs who are tied to certain viewpoints to make his point about news, instead of actually analyzing news reporters.
• Expert selection, which National Public Radio does every day when it interviews E. J. Dionne and David Brooks to give their views, which in a world that could encompass opinions ranging from A to Z is akin to spanning that small territory between L and M.  By doing so, NPR narrows the field of discussion, and if you listen carefully you’ll realize that this narrowing takes the discussion slightly right of center.
• Conflation, which is the equating of two things that are not equal.  My blog entries over the past few months examine several examples of this technique.
• “Matt Drudging,” which is the quoting of assertions that someone else has presented as facts so that the reporter can present the false information as “a fact” without having to actually look into it. The best recent example was the right-wing news media quoting other sources to substantiate the ridiculous claim that 2 million people attended the so-called “Taxpayer March” last month.
• Telling or reporting lies:  Let’s not beat that old but painfully bloody and expensive horse that has crippled our economy and brought misery to millions too much, but the best recent example of telling or repeating lies were the Bush administration claims, widely reported without proper fact-checking, that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” that it is was ready to use.
• Ideological subtext, which is using details of the story to make an unstated point.  Again, you can see several examples of ideological subtext in recent blogs.
• Deciding what is and is not news.

My point is that much of what we call news is in fact dripping with opinion.

Here’s another example of a reporter transmitting one of the foundation myths of our current ideology as communicated in the ideological subtext of news stories, magazine articles, ads, popular fiction and TV shows: that children are naturally uncurious, anti-intellectual and uninterested in science. 

It’s in a Baltimore Sun article by personal finance guru Eileen Ambrose that has made the round of reprints in other publications and websites this week:

“One of the big hurdles of teaching personal finance to children and young adults is how to do so without boring or confusing them with lectures about compound interest and annual percentage rates.”

Now why would compound interest and APR bore or confuse a child?  It didn’t bore or confuse me, or my brother, or my son, or virtually all of my cousins.  But then again, we all grew up believing that learning was fun and important. 

In situation comedy after situation comedy, in ad after ad, in newspaper article after newspaper article, the secret but not silent message in the subtext is that learning is not fun and that the normal child does not want to do it.  While it is a primary responsibility of the family to promote values, the great mass of media, programs and ads we call popular culture also has the ability to communicate what our values should be. 

Why would our mass media want to promulgate this value, which in the long run is harmful to people in a knowledge-based society in which those who educate themselves make much more money and report much higher levels of happiness in studies?

My view is that the dissemination of this anti-intellectual attitude reduces the possibility of social mobility because it makes those at the bottom rungs not value the very thing—knowledge—that will help them to rise.  I think that maybe a few of those who initially floated the view that “learning is not fun” decades ago did so cynically, to keep the poor down. But that was years ago and never included the great mass of thinkers and writers.  There couldn’t possibly be a conscious conspiracy today to promulgate this falsehood because there are just too many players, just too many sources of this pernicious myth.  So why does this anti-intellectual attitude remain so much a part of the subtext of our cultural documents?  I have no answer (at least not today), but it’s an area of social history worth exploring.