Newspapers Are Dumbing Down America, Author Says

by Allan R. Andrews

Sommerville doesn't trot out the usual attacks that the media is not credible, not compassionate, not ethical, or not concerned about ordinary citizens. He doesn't blast members of our profession for being greedy or egotistical, or for being sycophants to big government, big business and big entertainment. He doesn't even argue -- as do many old school critics -- that we've lost our objectivity or that editors are too cozy with accountants and marketing sorcerers.

The history professor makes the blunt and seemingly arrogant pronouncement that in our work as information collectors and disseminators we make people dumb.

Furthermore, Sommerville isn't blasting easy targets. To be sure, he assails superficial infotainment, but his charge aims at the news media at its best; i.e., the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The leaders in journalism are as guilty as their poorer imitators, Sommerville insists, because they practice the delivery of the news in a similar faulty manner.

Round-the-clock news merely extends the absurdity, Sommerville argues.

"The last thing the news people want to do is end a good story," Sommerville writes in his 1999 book, "How the News Makes Us Dumb."

Instead, the author says, modern publishers and editors offer the public "news as striptease." This daily delivery of partial stories, Sommerville contends, is intentional on the part of the powers of journalism because it represents "the best way of getting customers to come back for tomorrow's edition."

This is a disarming thesis because it confronts a bedrock assumption of journalism: That news and information must be delivered daily and as quickly as humanly possible. News organizations, though slowed by the electronic revolution, continue to value the "scoop" and the "first with the latest" mentality.

Sommerville's extended argument suggests this "striptease" approach to news mitigates against reflective and wise decision making. Journalism -- especially daily journalism -- in Sommerville's eyes has been a profit-hungry contributor to what his book's subtitle describes as "The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society."

We journalists are leading the charge toward a world without wisdom. That's the history professor's judgment on us.

Crucial to Sommerville's argument is his contention that journalism has engendered a "debilitating news consciousness" in readers (and in watchers). Daily news, which has become an "industrial product" through the modern media, "deconstructs our experience of the world and blocks the higher mental processes" -- or to quote his title's words: "makes us dumb."

What is disarming in this argument, of course, is that the very thing we value most -- our information-gathering and its rapid publication -- is, in Sommerville's view, our Achilles' heel.

There are many counterarguments to Sommerville's thesis, of course, but it lends credence to his critique that so few in journalism are equipped or predisposed to produce the systematic and philosophical rejoinders his argument demands.

It has become too easy for journalists to dismiss the need for corrections or for follow-up explanatory reports on once-sensational stories that have gone stale.

While newspapers are bemoaning their loss of circulation, Sommerville sees some good in such a trend. By driving people away, newspapers are forcing them into alternative means of receiving information, and that, in his view, can only bode well for the populace. Getting out of the daily "news fix" is actually beneficial.

"News," Sommerville says, "has no sense of scale." Instead of doing what we all think it's doing -- broadening our minds -- the news instead concentrates our attention to the immediate moment.

As an old editing colleague of mine continuously complained about newcomers to our profession, "They don't read."

Sommerville, not attempting any Will Rogers wit, complains that the only thing they read is the daily newspaper, and he almost concludes that is worse than not reading at all.

The critic touches on electronic journalism, worrying that we're headed for some warped virtual society instead of real community, but that's another tale.

For me, Sommerville's analysis provides a red flag to any news person or organization on the Internet who thinks the royal road lies in following the newspaper model.

I think I fairly paraphrase Sommerville in saying: Newspapers don't even demonstrate the wisdom to know and understand themselves.