But what should we want?

Heard the news? Everyone is talking about falling readership, including the Miami Herald Philadelphia Inquirer's Leonard Pitts, Jr.:

Dear colleagues:

Have you had enough bad news?

I don't mean the bad news we report. No, I'm talking about the steady diet of doom and/or gloom that goes with working for a daily newspaper these days. I'm talking about reports that, despite all the focus groups, re-designs, shorter stories and bigger typefaces we employ, readership is still falling like a boulder from a skyscraper.

According to Pitts' analysis, that's because the news isn't fun. If American newspapers followed the Chilean lead (in which editorial decisions are ratings-driven), news would be fun, and ratings would, well... Pitts doesn't say (although he does mutter something about opening a bed and breakfast in Modesto):
Publisher Augustine Edwards says he will soon offer a financial incentive for his staff to write stories readers want to read. A reporter's salary will be based on how many clicks he or she racks up online.

Colleagues, I can hear you harrumphing from here. This will never happen in a U.S. newsroom, you say. We have higher standards. We take our profession too seriously.

All I can say is that you must work in a different newspaper business than I do. The one I work in has been hijacked by bean counters. It is a place where costs are cut with the glee of an ax murderer, talented people are being shoveled out the door and editors are required to prostrate themselves before the altar of the holy profit margin. It's not hard for me to imagine newspapers in that industry following the Chilean lead.

After all, what would we have to sacrifice? The obligation to be a watchdog of the public interest? The mind-set that says maybe you publish a story because readers need to know a thing even if they don't know they need to know it?

Get over yourself. How 20th century can you be?

As Edwards puts it, "I am not of the school that says, 'Eat porridge, it's good for you.' I'm focused not on what people should be reading, but on uniting them around what they want to be reading."

In other words, no more stories about budget deficits, congressional hearings, and other boring stuff nobody really cares about. From now on, no news but fun news.

Welcome to the future, guys. Enjoy.

If you need me, I'll be running a little bed and breakfast outside Modesto. Look me up if you're ever in the area.

I think it's fascinating that to see the way the "choice" is framed: what readers should be reading versus what they want to be reading. I may be old fashioned, but it seems to be that the word "should" in this context is about as relevant to journalism as "want."

Let's start with what people "should" be reading. To separate that from what people want to be reading strikes me as a proper job not for a journalist, but for a parent of a lazy child who'd rather spend the summer watching TV or reading comic books when he should be reading Charles Dickens.

How is what "should" be read or what people want to read a journalistic function in any way? While there's no way around the fact that some people will find certain stories more interesting than others (that's why most newspapers have different sections for things like sports, business, entertainment, human interest, local news, etc.), there's ultimately no way to force anyone to read anything, much less make them want to read it. One person may want one thing, another person may think he should want something else.

I mean, suppose, like Leonard Pitts, Jr. you're a bit of a political junkie. This means that politics and political developments (maybe even political gossip) is what you want to read about. It strikes me as the height of arrogance to decide that other people should want to read what you want to read.

I tend to ditch the sports sections as well as entertainment and fashion sections. Should I be reading them? Probably. I can't tell you anything about "Friends" (a show I have never watched) nor do I know much about which sports team is ahead. I don't read SciFi either. I consider it regrettable to be so culturally illiterate, but I'd be very suprised if I opened my paper only to be greeted by scornful editorials telling me that my newspaper will go broke because I'm not reading enough stories about TV programming or fashion. Or that I should care whether the contents of the sports section is henceforth to be driven by ratings and popularity of the various sports and teams.

But it's a fact of life that politics and current events are placed in the category of shoulds, while fashion, entertainment and sports are in the category of wants.

What about bias? Would I care whether a local sports columnist favored the Philadelphia Eagles (pronounced "Iggles") over a rival team? Would I have as much fun scrutinizing his columns for evidence of bias, parsing his thoughts for logical errors, as I might with a column apologizing for or minimizing Kofi Annan's corruption or misstating the history of the Vietnam War? I doubt it.

But hey, I'm feeling reckless and dangerous, so let's give it the old college try, right now! This is from today's Philadelphia Inquirer Sports Page:

This game was 6 ounces of water in a 12-ounce glass. The way you view it says as much about you as it does the Eagles.

Was it, at long last, a competitive game with an NFC East rival? Or was it proof that the division is so bad, the Eagles can turn in a stinker and still win?

So which is it? Are you an optimist or a pessimist, a believer or a cynic?

Wasn't that a thrill? Even a Roman stoic would be amused by the philosophical conundrum posed by the sports analyst. Maybe I'm missing something by not searching the sports pages for hidden insights. After all, human nature being what it is, there's lots of nature -- with all its ugly, raw beauty -- occurring there, but my editorial bias keeps it out of Classical Values. (This despite the well-known mania of the ancient masses towards sporting events makes me wonder whether I'm guilty of hypocrisy . . .)

Does this make my preference for politics over sports a correct one? Should everyone else prefer politics to sports? How the hell should I know? I'm not here to judge the readers of this blog, but I guess now that I think about it, if I spent more time on sports and entertainment I might draw more readers who want that, and I might eventually lose the political junkies if I went too far. Considering the plethora of sports talk radio around here, it wouldn't surprise me if more people read sports blogs than political/cultural satire, but sports blogging is not what I do.

Should I?

I don't see how to make the word "should" enter into my thinking or that of any reader. I write about what I want, because what I want to write about is what interests me. Often, I think I should write about something (Mr. Pitts' column is a perfect example) and then I force myself to write about it. But the decision to force myself results from my own moral judgment on myself; whether readers want me to do it or want to read it is something over which I have no control.

What if I played the role of Leonard Pitts' hypothetical editor?

I will write not about what you want to read, but what I think you SHOULD be reading. No more fun! I'm not going to unite you around what you want to read, but I will feed you politically correct porridge. You will eat it, and you will like it!

Otherwise, it's to bed without breakfast for the lot of you!

Before you go to bed, though, here are a couple of items which may (depending on reader preferences) fit into either the "shoulds" or the "wants" categories of discipline and restraint. (The former is from a blog recently linked by Glenn Reynolds, the latter (via Drudge) is a favorite old theme.)

Is the pleasure/pain principle implicated here? I'm reminded of one of life's lessons which I still refuse to learn.

Well after my adolescent crisis had passed (but before my midlife crisis had been fully developed), a well-meaning relative honestly believed that I should play golf even though I hated it. He thought that it was socially the right thing to do, that it would advance one's career, and all that morally righteous stuff. But the bottom line for him was that he loved golf! So, he could carry on all he wanted about how golf was good and even virtuous, but the fact remained that it was fun for him, and torture for me. The odd thing is, when I was a kid I noticed that many of the harder working men used to criticize men who enjoyed playing golf as shirkers of their responsibilities. (Like the doctor out whacking a golfball while his patient dies from complications.)

Where does that leave someone like me who, if I played golf, would absolutely hate it? Shouldn't I get some moral "credit" if I force myself to do something that I hate? Is it fair that others would have a good time doing it? How do we know that many of the people who lecture us about what we "should" do aren't secretly enjoying themselves while doing what they want and scolding the rest of us for not wanting what they want?

Why should I want to do that?


MORE: In a related vein, here's Roger L. Simon on freedom of thought:

If there's one thing I have learned in the last few years it's that allegiance to any political party should be transitory. I don't care what the party thinks. I care what I think. The minute it is the other way round, I have lost freedom of thought. The same thing is true of "isms" for me.
While other people have every right to to tell me what they think I "should want," freedom of thought consists of being in charge of one's own wants as well as one's "shoulds." The constant struggle between independent thought and the creeping tyranny of "isms" is worse than the Culture War.

(And what if it is the Culture War? Are we being rendered increasingly unable to see individual people through a vast "cultural" forest of "isms?" With simple language being ever distorted and simple communication ever obfuscated, how are we to know?)

posted by Eric on 12.13.04 at 08:57 AM





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Comments

I believe there are some things in the news we "should" be interested in. Not because it's "good for us", like golf, or "builds character", but simply because it's "good for us", in the sense that we need to know what's going on in the world - or at least, the country (or at the very least, the city).

Television, that medium of once great promise, became "a vast wasteland" (Newton Minow, FCC Chairman, in 1961). And it's become an even vaster wasteland today because they "give us what we want". Not what you, or I want, evidently. But evidently what the people who pay the bills want: bread and circuses (the bread comes from McDonalds). How many channels would I have to turn through (of the hundreds there are) to find discussions about Greek philosophy?

I think that ultimately, the "shoulds" have to come from within, a product of education (not instruction) and life experience.

Blogs can fill the void. It's up to people to find what they need - and it's a duty of teachers to show people how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Mike   ·  December 13, 2004 03:10 PM

Hmmm.... Very interesting. People have often asked me whether I read for "information" or for "entertainment". I read almost exclusively for "entertainment". But the things most people consider "entertaining" bore me to sleep, and the stuff I love to read is what a lot of other people would find boring.

Takes me back to when we were watching TV back in the early 1970s. My Mama hated sports, so we watched some news program, and there was a conservative commentator. My parents were "died-in-the-wool" liberals, if you will, and didn't like that stuff. My Dad asked rhetorically: "Well, would you rather watch sports or Right-Wing editorials"? The way he said that sounded like "rattling editorials". I preferred the rattling Right-Wing editorials myself even though I was still a socialist at the time. I've often thought about that.

I'd rather read a book or blog about an ideological spectrum or spectrums than anything else. I often dream about such books. That includes books by liberals/Leftists such as George Lakoff ("Moral Politics") or Charles Hampden-Turner ("Radical Man", "Maps of the Mind"). Their descriptions of the Right make me like the Right all the more.

That's the thing about me. The things that are funny to me are nearly always the things that are unintentionally funny. Show me a comedian and I'll just sit there thinking about something else. Show me a crackpot and I'll laugh my head off. John Derbyshire once wrote that he always found the word "Lesbian" funny -- and I immediately thought: "That's funny, I always have that same reaction whenever I see the name 'John Derbyshire'." It would be hilarious to have a "sitcom", "The Odd Couple II", in which John Derbyshire and Andrew Sullivan have to share a room.

Some of the funniest books I ever read were W. Cleon Skousen's "The Naked Communist", H. L. "Bill" Richardson's "Slightly To The Right", and Revilo P. Oliver's "All America Must Know The Terror That Is Upon Us". I also love Jack T. Chick's tracts. I love people with no sense of humor. I love Ayn Rand's condemnations of humor. Holy Dawn and her holy Negro wife Norma have absolutely no sense of humor, nor do most of my characters.

The sexiest books for me are the books condemning sex, advocating repression, censorship, or prohibition of all perversion, pornography, promiscuity, etc.. Right-Wing writings against pornography and obscenity usually turn me on more than most pornography itself. I must confess that that my libido went way high up after Santorum's interview and during the denunciations of Lawrence and Garner vs. Texas. As Justice Scalia pointed out, we must see to it that masturbation is never legalized. Thinking about Dawn's and Norma's stiff laws against adultery makes me very stiff indeed.

I'm so deviant that I deviate from the deviants.

I've always thought of "Friends" as "That 90's Show". That's all you really need to know. (I've never watched either of them.)

Hal Duston   ·  December 13, 2004 03:45 PM


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