Media, Education, and Voting

Update-apparently there some problems with the links. I've psated the articles below.

Please respond to the following articles:

Here's the first.

Meghan Daum:
Hedgehog nation
April 1, 2006


I AM HEREBY declaring the Information Age a complete bust. We may tell ourselves that, thanks to the Internet, cellphones, the 24-hour news cycle and e-mail updates from MoveOn.org, there's no piece of information that escapes our notice. But I am living proof that this isn't true. Take last weekend's immigration rally in downtown L.A., which, as we all know by now, drew crowds of more than half a million. I can't believe I'm admitting this in print, but as of Saturday morning, I didn't know about it. I found out when I stepped outside to get the newspaper and ran into my neighbor, who was wearing a white "Unite Now" T-shirt.

"Going to the march?" he asked me.

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"What march?" I asked.

He looked at me as if I'd just returned from Paris and mentioned that I didn't notice the Eiffel Tower.

As ashamed as I was, it turned out that plenty of other people hadn't gotten the memo either. My sample of the clueless included a lawyer-turned-history professor, an Ivy League-educated writer and, ahem, a news producer. Another friend said she'd heard about the rally but only in the context of warnings about traffic snarls. These are all people who spend much of the day on the Internet, often while listening to news programs on public radio and talking on the phone with friends and associates who don't exactly live in caves.

Somehow I, like so many others, managed to miss the coverage preceding the event. Was this because I was too busy reading Yahoo news items about Jessica Simpson and obscure Australian journal articles about "Darwinian aesthetics"? Well, actually, yes.

Not to throw around 10-cent aphorisms like "the more you learn, the less you know," but I daresay the reason some of us miss major news is because there's just too much news out there. The more information that becomes available, the less informed we are.

I blame this phenomenon on many things — Wikipedia, Anderson Cooper, holiday newsletters from relatives who share the details of their diverticulitis — but whatever the source, I suspect the root cause is the over-customization of information. We may pat ourselves on the backs for being discerning consumers of news, but that very discernment can make us kind of stupid. Think of it as intellectual provincialism. Now that we can tailor our information streams by programming our TiVos, signing up for newsgroups and clicking past boring front-page stories in favor of juicier dispatches about real estate, we can top off our data reserves without the bother of actually learning anything new.

If the old-fashioned way of getting news — three networks, the morning newspaper and (for that rarified but very vocal minority) a daily dose of "All Things Considered" — was an inch deep and a mile wide, today's acquisition process is like researching a dissertation. Instead of branching out, we burrow deep. It's like a peculiar twist on the dichotomy between Isaiah Berlin's famous concept of the fox, "who knows many things," and the hedgehog, "who knows one big thing." Even though we have ample opportunity to know a little (even a lot) about everything a search engine turns up, we tend to sift through all that information to learn more about the stuff we're already interested in. The result is that we've become a nation of hedgehogs.

This isn't the usual take on modern life. If there's any notion that culture critics hold dear, it's the idea that headlines have taken the place of stories and "analysis" is another word for pundits who walk off Sunday morning news shows in a huff. There's some truth to that, but isn't it also possible that the overload of information is gradually reprogramming our minds so that we're actually thinking deeper about a narrower range of topics?

That might explain the look of horror on my neighbor's face. As it happens, he and his wife are professional labor organizers — in other words, dedicated hedgehogs when it comes to immigration issues. And even though I've often thought of myself as a fox (good dinner party conversationalist, miserable academic), it was only then, standing in my yard in my bathrobe and feeling like the neighborhood numskull, that I realized I'm a hedgehog too.

If he'd asked me about German cinema, I would have knocked his socks off (of course, 500,000 people don't show up at German film festivals). As it is, I'm still trying to get over my embarrassment. I never thought I'd say this, but maybe it's time we all got in touch with our inner fox — at least a little. Hedgehogs may be brainier in the strict sense, but it's hard to squeeze those prickly spines into a "Unite Now" T-shirt.

Here's the second.

Why Johnny can't be bothered

By Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago attorney and author, and James Warren, a Tribune deputy managing editor

April 4, 2006

This story contains corrected material, published April 5, 2006. The story as published misquoted Thomas Jefferson.

Also, a photograph that accompanied the article was incorrectly displayed; the visual image was flopped, or reversed. The picture showed a boy reading a newspaper, circa 1940s.

In Chicago for their annual gathering, the nation's newspaper publishers should sit down with some politicians and school principals. All three parties are impacted by the real Culture War. Not the one between left and right over gays, guns and abortion, but the one between the "we" who still read a daily paper and those who don't.

"My wife and I read three papers a day," says a law professor friend. "But my daughter who's in graduate school, not a one. And my son, 19, doesn't read a paper at all either."

Yes, newspaper reading has dropped around the world. But that's a half-truth at best. The share of Germans over the age of 14 who scan a daily paper is nearly 80 percent. The French and Scandinavians, among others, read much more than we do too.

So don't be so quick to blame the Internet, TV news, iPods, IMing or even unrelenting attacks on the evil "mainstream media." It's too facile. Other countries have most of that, as well as Britney Spears, nincompoop shock jocks and pro wrestling. But newspaper reading in those countries hasn't collapsed as far as it has here.

The crisis in America, where ironically we have the world's highest rate of bachelor's degrees, is that if people don't read papers, they generally won't vote. The crisis of the press here is a crisis of democracy too. The single best indicator of whether someone votes is whether he reads a paper, according to political scientist Martin P. Wattenberg in his book, "Where Have All the Voters Gone?" But the converse is also true. Whether one votes is a much better indicator than a college degree as to whether one is reading a daily paper.

The reaction between these two trends, a decline in voting and the decline in the reading of dailies, is what scientists call autocatalytic. One drives the other in a downward spiral. The under-30 young read far less, and vote far less--and according to their teachers, have fewer opinions. Not reading, not having political sentiments, they aren't especially capable of voting intelligently anyway.

What can we do now?

Let's start with public education. In the Northwest Ordnance of 1787, Thomas Jefferson slipped in a famous mandate of public schools for basically one reason: to turn kids into citizens able to govern themselves. But we take democracy for granted. The founders could not. No one had ever attempted such a huge experiment: to test whether the common people could manage the public business.

Critical to public education was telling children not that they merely could but that they had to vote: It was a moral obligation. And to exercise that obligation, they had to be literate enough to read a paper. If they didn't read a paper, they couldn't follow a legal argument and sit on a jury. Unless they read a paper, they couldn't cast a vote; it would be too dangerous to the country. Jefferson opined, "... and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them." The quotation is attributed to a letter by Jefferson found in "The Papers of Thomas Jefferson," according to A Dictionary of Quotations, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress. (This paragraph as published has been corrected in this text.)

But teaching students to read a paper is virtually the last thing anyone in America expects from a school, especially in this test-driven era of No Child Left Behind. The purpose of education is now largely vocational or economic, preparing students for job and career, while filling a dizzying array of state and local mandates, including AIDS awareness, obesity prevention, anti-bullying and fire-safety programs. The civics element is gone. And the industry's traditional link to schools, its Newspaper in Education program, evolved into more of a gambit to boost circulation than a means of thoughtful civics instruction.

History, civics and other "political" subjects need to play a big role not just for the college-bound but also the armies who will at most have high school diplomas. A year ago the Chicago Tribune ran an estimate that only 47 percent of high school graduates from public schools in Chicago went on to any college work at all, and most of those soon dropped out. They depart having been cheated out of the civic skills they need to vote and take part in the great policy debates over allocation of the country's income (Social Security, welfare reform, Medicare, etc.).

There are many ways to recast public education to save the press and the democracy. One approach is four years of civics and four years of American history. "Four years of civics" might include one old-fashioned civics course, a current-events course, a course on problems of American democracy, and a final course that involves in-service learning and volunteer work.

Another approach would be for the state school system to publish a "student paper" that is given every day to students. The paper would consist of articles taken from newspapers around the state. The plan here is to turn the reading of the paper into a daily habit.

If publishers want to save themselves from long-term demise, they must consider reinvention of their papers' content and dramatic hikes in traditionally anemic marketing and promotion efforts. But they should also push for a new public education quite different from that envisioned by No Child Left Behind.

Worry a bit less about the Wall Street analysts and a bit more about the principals and the taxpayers on the local school boards. Sit down with them, but with a bit of care since school leaders rightfully feel put upon by too many mandates. And think about paying something for civics courses, which may turn out your future readers. It's the democratic thing to do--and maybe the industry's best hope to stay alive, even flourish.


Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune