Thread: Maybe we're the problem

Maybe we're the problem

In a too-much-information age, a selective electorate is simply reinforcing rigid ideologies. Yet we blame our elected officials.

By Philip Meyer

A dysfunctional Congress? Maybe that's not the problem. Consider the possibility that it is a dysfunctional electorate that keeps anything from happening in Washington.

As newspapers lose their advertising support to newer media, we're all concerned about how to pay for the journalism that keeps citizens informed and engaged.

But there is more to the problem than getting the journalism done. We also need a public that pays attention and is willing to act on its information. Without it, the congressional gridlock we've been seeing all year has no cure.

What also matters is whether information brings us together or divides us. If a liberal cocoons himself in the writings of Paul Krugman, the sarcasm of Keith Olbermann and the rants of The Huffington Post, has he become more enlightened, or simply hardened? If a conservative spends an hour with Sean Hannity, absorbs the prose of Charles Krauthammer and camps out at The Weekly Standard, does she truly have a better understanding of "ObamaCare," for instance?

Washington reporters share some of the blame. They do a fine job of reporting all the detailed twists and turns in the fights between the Democratic majority and the Republican minority. They are not so good at showing the big picture and motivating us to act.

Information overload

Paul Lazarsfeld, the great sociologist who died in 1976, co-authored an article naming this problem more than half a century ago. Too much information, he said, can lead to "narcotizing dysfunction."

In other words, a voting public besieged by a plethora of details and inside baseball will just feel helpless and apathetic. We might know a lot, and that makes us feel good, but we let knowledge become a substitute for action.

The media world that concerned Lazarsfeld was very different from today's. Fewer than 1% of households had television. Still, between radio and print, there was a flood of information. The average citizen, Lazarsfeld said in 1948, took "his reading and listening and thinking as a vicarious performance. He comes to mistake knowing about problems of the day for doing something about them.

"His social conscience remains spotlessly clean. He is concerned. He is informed. And he has all sorts of ideas as to what should be done.

"But ... after he has listened to his favored radio programs and after he has read his second newspaper of the day, it is really time for bed."

Today, with many more channels of information, including cable TV, Twitter, Facebook and the multitude of blogs, we are even more inundated with potentially narcotizing information. But we're not any smarter. The level of political knowledge in the USA has been fairly stable over time.

However, since Lazarsfeld's day, and especially since about 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee decided to call the thing he had invented the World Wide Web, we have been consuming a different kind of media content. It is more specialized. There is less attention paid to areas of common ground where people of different views can try to understand one another. That lack of a media commons makes representative government a lot harder. When there is no interest in trying to learn and understand the views of others, there can be no deliberation. We fall back on a simple approve-disapprove method of voting. When things go badly, we just throw the rascals out.

Revolving door

The Democrats won in 2008 because the economy was souring. Republicans noticed, and so their highest priority is for President Obama to fail so that Democrats will be the rascals in 2012. They have been fairly open about that.

Where is this going?

If it works, what's to keep a 2013 Democratic minority from undermining President Sarah Palin with more gridlock? If making the government fail is the route to victory, we're in what software engineers call a loop. Round and round, and we can't get off.

Don't blame Congress. If a narcotized electorate won't get involved, the enemy is us.

Philip Meyer is professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author of The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/03/ ... .html#more

This is the most interesting and most informative article I have seen in years.

Good article, but a few things were "left" out. The media has been under the influence of left leaning political orientation. The only place where I can find a balance is online. Same for the TV media. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't more like a propaganda briefing. If it was "unbiased" journalism, and less sensational, I would still be buying the paper, but around 1988 I began to see a definite change in reporting, that made it seem like I wasn't buying the News so to speak, so much as I was buying a watered down version of the pulp rags at the supermarket checkout lines.

It's all about content. It's all about content.

And the first thing you did was just what he is talking about.

BLAME SOMEONE ELSE.