News Anarchy

Why, not how, do we consume news?

With the advent of news blogs, specialty magazines and partisan Web publications, much has been made of how people are consuming news in the 21st century. The choices available to tailor our experience have exploded beyond FOX or CNN, beyond NPR or Rush Limbaugh. But few are asking why. Why do people consume news? What are they after? What are the expecting?

I started to question readers’ expectations a few months ago when someone wrote a letter to the editor of the San Antonio Express News complaining about David Brooks’s column. Brooks, a syndicated columnist from the New York Times, has always been my favorite conservative commentator, so you can imagine that it wasn’t his politics that south Texas readers were complaining about. It was his language. Words. Too big. Why do you run his column if we can’t understand it? 

I was further embarrassed this weekend, when San Antonio’s ombudsman Bob Richter felt forced to write a column to assuage the ire of E-N readers, inflamed this time by the story about President Bush getting a shoe thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist. We all know it by now, as front page headlines and nightly news programs featured the story for days. But several people had written into my hometown paper complaining that the story should not have been on the front page of the paper, or in it at all. 

Our news literacy in this county is already abysmal, and would be made worse if  newspapers canceled an intelligent column because readers don’t own a dictionary and don’t want to read things that challenge them, or if national news was tucked away and under-reported because it might embarrass someone or enlighten them to a harsh reality. 

The Pew Research Center offers a 10-question news IQ test that demonstrates why we can’t let newspapers slip away, and why the contemporary news culture of tailoring our consumption to our political views can be dangerous. I scored a 10 out of 10 on the test (which asked about big, well-covered news items) placing me in the 93rd percentile. The national average is a whopping 50 percent. 

I was raised to view reading the newspaper as a learning experience. As a child, it expanded my worldview and my vocabulary. It taught me about different viewpoints, which in turn helped me to develop my own. I fear the day people can wholly refuse to be aware of any news they care nothing about, living in a hazy, partisan oblivion of laziness and self-absorption. I call it “news anarchy” (a state of disorder resulting from the nonrecognition of relevant news).