From the Online News list
Subject: Re: [ON] News: Missing the Context?
From: Stephen Downes < stephen@downes.ca >
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 15:09:35 -0400X-
Message-Number: 2

Terry Steichen wrote:

 *** This message was posted to the ONLINE-NEWS list. *** Stephen,

In your 10/31 post to the Poynter online-news discussion list ([ON] Re: Failed/Ineffective News Media?), you made several references to the absence of context in news reporting: "..this debate is presented in an almost context-free manner", "..doesn't place the story in any sort of context at all," and "The media have left the population effectively disarmed, fundamentally unable to distinguish between the rational and the irrational, between the accurate and inaccurate." I'm particularly interested in your views on what to do about adding context. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions about how that missing context might best be supplied? Are you thinking about longer, more in-depth articles in general? Including more news analysis articles? More background articles? Or, something else?

There are several aspects of context which need to be brought into play:

- general knowledge - a person on the ON list admitted that she actually had to look up Bhutan to find out where it was - to me this is simply astonishing. She would therefore have no knowledge of the history or culture of Bhutan either. How could such a person write knowledgably about Bhutan? How could a reader - with even less knowledge - understand events in Bhutan? Sooner or later, there will be a significant event there - as you know, the entire Indo-Sino borderline is rife with numerous tensions and unresolved issues. People need to be exposed to the geography, culture and history of regions around the world - goodness knows, they certainly didn't get it in school.

- points of view - when I am in the United States - and I travel there fairly frequently - I feel like I'm in this bubble. News from outside the U.S. ceases to exist, and the only voices I hear are of Americans (this is not literally true, of course - I may hear an Arafat sound bite or an excerpt of a bin Laden tape). 'International news' in the U.S. is not defined as 'what happened in the world' so much as 'what our leaders had to say and/or do with respect to the outside world'. Again, as with any of my generalizations, it is easy to find exceptions, especially in publications like the NY Times, but by and large the media's representation of non-American points of view is wretched (this applies not just in news media, but across the board - in the field of educational technology, for example, it's as though a technology doesn't exist until it is discovered by an American, at which point the US press interviews this person and then credits this person with the technology - Americans have no idea how much is being developed outside their own country, imported, and then attributed as American inventions)

- political spectrum - in the U.S. there are two shades of politics - right-wing, and far-right-wing. There are no center or left-of-center points of view expressed at all, save for the rare cases when Norm Chomsky is allowed to say a few words. You may say that what I am calling right-wing and far-right-wing are representative of the American body politic - but that body politic has a symbiotic relationship with the media (not a causal relationship - that's a straw man as addressed by that WaPost article recently linked on ON). It is not possible for a population to opt for a political option that is not put before them, and even the most 'liberal' columnist or opinion-maker quoted in the U.S. press would be considered right-wing in Canada, Europe and elsewhere in the world. No wonder the U.S. populace cannot understand why Europe or even Canada (when it ever thinks of Canada) hold such funny views.

- Science, scientific methodology, scientific principles - sadly, the U.S. education system has left Americans with about as much knowledge of science as of geography, which means for most of them it's indistinguishable from witchcraft or (if they like it) magic. This has a wide variety of effects on their belief-sets: the belief in magic-pill solutions not only in medicine but also in world affairs, the economy, and technology. It leads them to believe in a world of simple cause-effect relations rather than complex webs of inter-relationships. They don't understand scientific doubt, they don't understand methodology, and modelling and simulation are absolute mysteries to them. They need to know how science works, not simply about the new wonder drug or discovery of a new planet.

- Probability, statistics, and reasoning in general - the principles of reasoning are ill-understood by the bulk of the population - another thing they do not learn in school (which, I have concluded, is as much an exercise in propaganda as education for today's American student - it is not *normal* to get children to pledge allegiance elsewhere) - nowhere are basic logical principles ever explained (I once started writing a column on logical fallacies for the Washington Post but never followed up after the first publication because of a mix-up in intentions - something like that, no matter who wrote it, would have been a useful bit of context-building).

This is just an introduction, an overview, of the sort of background and context that I feel is missing from press reporting today. It seems to me that there is as much of an onus on the press these days to educate as to inform, because it is not possible to comprehend a complex world without that knowledge. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to express a point of view, beyond the mere yelling that seems to typify most opinionists in U.S. publications, without mapping out these and similar domains of knowledge.

-- Stephen