The Trouble with Choice: thoughts on the decline of newspapers

I read the New York Times (or parts of it) online every day. At a minimum, I scan the headlines and read a few Op-Ed columns. I also always check the box at the right of the screen with the “Most E-mailed” list (simply because it is the default mode of the box; the other options are tabbed as most blogged, searched, and viewed, but I usually don’t bother comparing and contrasting the lists unless I have quite a bit of time on my hands.) It is an exercise of my ‘freedom’ to read only what I choose.

This experience is vastly different than reading the print version of the Times.  As I unfold the crisp paper and smell the ink, my eye is fixed on the top half of the first page. My glance encompasses the headlines on that page, and as I track a story into the depths of section A, B, or C, I’m led past other photos, headlines, and paragraphs that catch my eye, exposing me to information that I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to read. The juxtaposition of disparate topics regularly leads me to discover threads and themes that I had completely missed reading online that very morning. In one instance I remember reading (in the physical paper) about an act of corporate pollution (having to do with mining in South America, if I recall) and catching, by the by, a small story about how the EPA has had to shelve more than 1500 legal actions against companies for polluting thanks to an ambiguity in the language of the Clean Water Act. (Namely, the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by the law; companies claim that the language of the regulation, which states “navigable waterways”, allows them to dump oil, carcinogens, and bacteria into lakes and rivers that aren’t used by commercial ships.) By these lights, 45% of company polluters are outside of regulatory reach. A separate article in a different section concerned a particular cancer that is tied to environmental toxins (a fact I knew because of my work; this wasn’t the focus of the article). In other words, a bigger picture emerged through reading the physical paper than I would normally get from following only my own pre-conceived interests, my choices, online. (Oddly, when I returned home and tried to find the article about the EPA online, it was difficult to locate, and certainly not on the landing page.)

This difference in subjective experience is related to Amazon.com’s marketing technique of tracking member purchases and sending perky emails every so often with ‘new recommendations just for [me]’. If I purchased a recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, the email will list five other recordings of Beethoven piano works or recordings by the same artist. I admit that on rare occasions I’ve been intrigued by some item they’ve proffered, but 99% of the time their algorithm fails to come up with anything that actually speaks to my interests. Past amazon.com purchases are a poor prognosticator of my future purchases, not just because I buy a number of gifts online that reveal little of my personal preferences, but because I actually purchase a good portion of my books in actual book stores (where they are not privy to amazon’s nosy little tactics), and, most importantly, because all a computer algorithm can do is give me more of what I’ve already got, and generally that is not what I am looking for.

Don’t get me wrong, I find amazon.com very handy. But when I visit the site I am usually looking for a particular title I’ve seen mentioned somewhere. My search is focused. I might purchase the book online, but more likely I will trek to a bookstore—an excursion that invariably exposes me to all sorts of tantalizing diversions on the way to whatever obscure shelf I’m seeking.  As with the newspaper, the experience of being in a bookstore is quite different from being in the virtual website environment.

The same contrast obtains between listening to cd’s at home vs. going to a concert, where you're likely to hear music you wouldn't have chosen to listen to, and hear familiar music in a different way. I could go on, but I think the point is clear: consumer self-selection is ultimately self-limiting. This is one serious drawback to asking students to evaluate "the relevance" of what they've learned in a course right at the end of the semester. Chances are, they'll not be in a position to judge, perhaps for some time.

Given how challenging it can be to expand our repertoires, it's easy to see why we opt for the familiar. But we are the poorer for it.  We need to cultivate an ability to tolerate uncertainty, ignorance, feeling a little bit lost, in order to savor the joys of exploration and self-expansion. Perhaps this is why the proliferation of pre-set social identities has seemed to generate only an increasingly flat and stereotyped sense of self.

This is why marketing strategies seeking to “give the customer what s/he wants” are so insidious. They cater to all the lesser appetites and, by doing so, create a more ignorant, more limited consumer while inflating that consumer's ego with a false sense of empowerment. Who is a child to know what a healthy diet is? Who is a student, to know how a professor should teach, or what material needs to be covered? Who is a reader or listener, to know what news is important and how the stories fit together? (Notice that I do not call the child, student, reader or listener "consumers" of parenting, education, or knowledge—a forced economic identity that is itself repulsively thin and one-dimensional.)

Newspapers are in trouble in part because they’ve failed to uphold their journalistic responsibilities in the name of giving readers what they want. I happily pay for journals that present analysis and good writing; I see no reason to pay for schlock. Yet in their desperate race for popularity—their first mistake—newspapers have shirked their duties to inform, educate, stimulate, and challenge readers or the powers that be. Instead, they have been bought by the powers that be, which has driven them even further away from their calling.

The latest capitulation in the war on journalistic integrity?  The New York Times, apparently feeling anxious about its decision to put up a paywall, is cozying up to some pretty powerful economic interests. To wit (from ClimateProgress.org):

Media stunner: New York Times partners with Shell Oil to peddle elite access

What is the New York Times thinking?  The one-time paper of record has partnered with a major oil company to sponsor a private, elite conversation whereby Shell gets to leverage the credibility of the New York Times brand along with high-profile journalists (Frank Rich!) to attract an elite audience to peddle its greenwashing.

It’s bad enough I have to skip over ads when I view articles online, but this morning I received an email from NYTimes.com with the subject line: "Enjoy unlimited access to NYTimes.com, courtesy of Lincoln." Yes, Lincoln, as in those humongous gas-guzzlers driven by TV crooks in 70’s cop shows. Here’s the text of the email:

Dear NYTimes.com reader,

As a frequent reader of NYTimes.com, you’ve demonstrated an uncommon interest in a wide variety of today’s most important topics. This makes you anything but average. In fact, it can’t help but make you “smarter” — just the kind of person we at Lincoln want to engage.

Though NYTimes.com will soon begin charging for unlimited access, Lincoln is offering you a free digital subscription for the remainder of 2011. Enjoy all that NYTimes.com has to offer every day—investigative news and special reports, videos, blogs and more. It’s all yours at no charge, compliments of Lincoln.

Aside from the peculiar language and punctuation (why is “smarter” in quotes? what does Lincoln seek to “engage” me in, exactly?), I find the brazenness of these new partnerships with Big Oil and the auto industry disturbing. How will the Times report about climate change now? How will this affect their reporting on big industries, or on regulatory policies those industries want to crush?  And didn’t the Obama administration just bail out the auto industry?  If this is the result of our taxpayer investment, how can anyone complain about a measly 20% federal support of NPR? I’m just waiting to see Big Pharma get in on the game; maybe Viagra will sponsor a year's subscription to The Economist.

I don’t object to paying for good journalism; I simply doubt that the blatant industry interests the Times is courting are compatible with it.

The notion of cultural choice is touted as our pre-eminent political and economic virtue, but the truth is that a host of grandly leveling market forces have foreclosed choice. We think we’re empowered, that we’re free to choose anything money can buy. But the market has laid siege to our private lives; our social and political institutions are being hollowed out from within. Educational institutions, affordable housing, healthcare, and even prisons are now largely private growth markets. Patient, employee, and consumer rights are playthings for lobbyists; the sacking of the public sphere is taking place right under our noses. Where are the papers that will publish the analyses we need, to show us what our choices have wrought?

Oh, I forgot: when everyone is 'empowered', there's no need for criticism.

Preliminary thoughts about character, national and individual

It is natural that the recent disaster in Japan should turn our thoughts toward the possibility that our own homes might be vulnerable to similar upheavals. We vainly attempt to calculate the most likely disaster scenario, imagine for a few seconds what heroic actions we might take, what route we might use to escape, what neighbor we might rescue along the way (or not). And in a few days, most of us will have successfully buried these anxious-omnipotent fantasies, reassuring ourselves that we're exceptional or that technology will save us or that there's nothing we can do anyway.  Denial, grandiosity, fatalism.

But it is worthwhile considering the hard truth that there is no place on earth that can guarantee our safety from some form of disaster—earthquake or flood, drought or famine, hurricane or tropical storm—and it's only going to get worse. Not just because we're now subject to socio-economic catastrophes with global reach (financial meltdowns, endless wars, dwindling resources) or the ravages of human greed on a grand scale (corporate pollution, misinformation promulgated for political or commercial gain). As Bill McKibben argues in Eaarth, we have created a planet that is increasingly inhospitable to life, a planet profoundly changed from the one many of us were born on. Sometimes human society itself seems inhospitable to life: abuses of power, abuses of privilege, abuses of one another....all of which are usually intimately related to the afore-mentioned financial meltdowns, wars, dwindling resources. And, while I’m delineating kinds of suffering, I might as well mention illness, which afflicts us as individuals yet can have profound consequences for people around us (and which also can result from natural disasters as well as acts of evil).

Seneca summed it up: "What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears." 

But if denial and grandiosity aren't viable options, neither is fatalism.

I’ve argued in this blog recently that we have to address problems at the level of scale at which they occur: our global environmental crisis, for example, requires coordinated responses among countries and corporations and not just individuals using less plastic. But there are, of course, appropriate responses that can take place only at the individual level. If you find yourself injured, for example: 1) you could deny it (a frequent response—at a public hospital we frequently see patients who’ve let a tumor get so large it becomes much harder to deal with, though that’s usually for lack of money rather than pushing the problem away from consciousness); 2) you could "push through the pain" (and likely injure yourself further); 3) you could collapse into a helpless heap and make everyone else around you cater to your needs; or 4) you could learn what you can about the injury and the circumstances leading to it and tend to the injured part until it heals, being particularly careful in the future to not make the same mistake.

I’m thinking response #4 reflects the healthiest approach, the one most likely to prevent further problems. But it requires knowing how to recognize an injury, having had a prior experience of being cared for and healing (thus knowing what it is to take care of the body), having a certain amout of hope and creativity in utilizing available resources, and a lot of patience, determination, and capacity for self-reflection. In a word: character.

One of the striking things about reports coming from Japan is that they regularly mention how calm and cooperative the displaced have been. The New York Times today reported:

Many Japanese have endured the privations with a similar mood of quiet stoicism, and the strong sense of community that still prevails in these northern rural areas. Even the hardest-hit areas have remained orderly and friendly, and crimes like looting are largely unheard of.

Without making too many generalizations about different cultures, I think many could agree that such communitarianism is comparatively weak in the U.S.  We live with a surfeit of information but a lack of integrity; all we seem to talk about is how to make more information available to more people (internet for everyone!), while few explore ways to enable individuals to make good use of that information. Analytic skills and understanding how to participate in a civil conversation can be shockingly absent even among professional groups.

We are, I believe, suffering the consequences of two powerful ideas combined into a distinctive political ethos: the central tenet of liberalism, which prioritizes process over substance (see Stanley Fish's provocative essay in the Times about this), and a central tenet of capitalism, which values competition.

We now habitually confuse means and ends, and our conceptions of goodness have grown dangerously thin. All that matters is winning the game, whatever the game happens to be at the moment. Is the game SAT scores? Let's teach to the test. Is the game about getting a degree? Let's plagiarize and cheat our way through school. Is the game winning an election? Let's lie about our opponent and stir up fear. Is the game about being popular? Let's talk about bipartisanship and hope no one has the audacity to remind us of the actual problems that aren't even up for discussion. Better yet, let's talk about "winning the future" and “out-educating the world” and hope no one asks what that even means.

I submit that a host of our ills reflect bad character, and that our contemporary process-oriented, competitive ethos has eroded certain conditions essential to human flourishing.  Over the course of future posts, I want to explore the notion that ethical behavior begins with attaining mastery of a practice, trade, or art—playing the piano, laying bricks, cutting hair, tending bar, raising chickens, designing gardens. I believe that through these ordinary social practices, which put us repeatedly and directly in touch with the effects of our actions, we develop a range of virtues that are necessary for our own happiness, the success of our relationships, and the health of the earth: humility, attentiveness,  self-discipline, circumspection, perseverance, sensitivity, taste, patience, perspective, connectedness... virtues that cannot arise either from the top-down application of abstract moral principles or from the practice of white-collar jobs whose express purpose is to manipulate people or money.

To be continued...