The Importance of News
October 16, 2007 | By: Josh SowinCategory: Commentary
Tyler's post on news got me thinking about how to determine what kind of news is important. We live in an odd time — we have access to incalculable amounts of information with a few clicks of a mouse. This has led, at least for me, to internet information binges where I come out with a dazed confusion as to what exactly I’d been doing the last two hours. Being informed, I guess.
C.S. Lewis was not one to spend most of his time reading news. He said:
The most unliterary reader of all sticks to “the news.” He reads daily, with unwearied relish, how, in some place he has never seen, under circumstances which never become quite clear, someone he doesn’t know has married, rescued, robbed, raped, or murdered someone else he doesn’t know.1
He might also have said, like Thoreau, that “news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”2 Of course Lewis and Thoreau were both curmudgeons, but the point remains that most news doesn’t really matter — it satisfies our curiosity but rarely affects anything we do.
So we should have a personal news filter — that is, something to determine what news is actually important to us. As I thought about this, I determined that for me, news is important to the extent that it (1) affects me or those I care about (from my family in Florida to wider areas of social justice), (2) applies to ideas I care or should care about, and (3) allows me to take action on it. With that in mind, I can seek out journals, magazines, blogs, etc. that filter news close to my critera. That way I don't waste my time looking at headlines like “Ex-lacrosse coach sues Duke” and “Is your handbag killing you?” which are just two samples from the CNN homepage on October 13, 2007.
But even reading important news is pointless if we don’t have context for interpreting and judging it. For instance, the minimum wage was raised 70 cents in July 2007. Someone without knowledge of economics might be excited about it, because it appears to help low-income and unskilled workers. But they would probably not be excited about it if they discovered that minimum wage laws actually increase unemployment for low-income and unskilled workers.3
That is, without understanding the context, knowing even important news is only going to make us people full of baseless opinions.
Reading commentary — from both sides4 — helps us learn and understand context. Scanning headlines and watching the evening news might enable us to chat around the water cooler, but it rarely gives us more than superficial opinions on issues. Commentary, on the other hand, challenges us to think deeply and differently about an issue and helps us make historical and ideological connections that would otherwise escape us.
Another way to say this is that all news is important to someone. But most of it isn't important to us. We must “sort the trivial from the profound,”5 judge it appropriately, and then, if needed, act on it. Without this, we may find ourselves overwhelmed with information — or, worse, giving opinions when it would be better to remain silent.
1 Lewis, C. S. An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge University Press: 2004), p. 28.
2 Thoreau, Henry David. Walden in Walden and Other Writings (Barnes and Noble: 1993), p. 78.
3 “It would be comforting to believe that the government can simply decree higher pay for low-wage workers, without having to worry about unfortunate repercussions, but the preponderance of evidence indicates that labor is not exempt from the basic economic principle that artificially high prices cause surpluses. In the case of surplus human beings, that can be a special tragedy when they are already from low-income, unskilled, or minority backgrounds and urgently need to get on the job ladder if they are ever to move up the ladder by acquiring experience and skills.” (Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: Third Edition (Basic Books: 2007), p. 215.)
4 If we think we understand the “other side” from only reading our side, we are probably mistaken – especially regarding complex issues. How many of us thought we understood Christianity or Calvinism, for instance, when we were agnostic or Arminian? Without reading thoughtful material from both sides, we will inevitably see straw men instead of real arguments.
5 “The oddly 'democratic' procedure makes all bits equal—the cat who fell off a roof in Topeka (and lived) gets the same space as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Equality is a magnificent system for human rights and morality in general, but not for the evaluation of information. We are bombarded with too much in our inordinately complex world; if we cannot sort the trivial from the profound, we are lost in terminal overload. The criteria for sorting must involve context and theory—the larger perspective that a good education provides.” (Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (Norton: 1991), p. 91.)
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