The Decline of our Culture - Is the media to blame? What does this tell us about our history?
April 11th 2008 00:40
“Journalism started down the road to dumbness when it determined news had to be delivered daily”
Society is forged by our heritage; we learn from those who have come before us, essentially, the greatest teacher humanity has is history. The framing of current events and issues are moulded by society’s news values, which reflect the culture of the time. These values are constantly changing and evolving and the media must accept and embrace this fact. The manner in which a story is covered is affected by history; it gives society scope and perspective. History gives us context, which also dictates what society knows and what new facts they will find most interesting and appealing. News is often a long running issue that slowly evolves over time. It evolves because history and journalism are directly linked. As a society, we are constantly gaining knowledge and this newfound information allows us to grow and modify. The journalist’s role is also to report the news factually and fairly, without bias or prejudice. The process of story telling however confines the journalist and transforms historical facts. The media, especially commercial, is entertainment based and as such, public history written in this populist style is simplified and dumbed down. By trying to make the news entertaining, the media is forced to play sharp and loose with historical fact. As the famous saying goes; never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Thus the history written is in a populist style and is more a collective memory of the past rather than an accurate account. Pop history can not and should not be taken seriously; it is something that the fast-paced modern society has created. Many scholars like Sommerville and Wood believe this element that is permeating our media is actually making society dumber. That by simplifying and manipulating our past we are condemning ourselves to ignorance and stupidity. This article will look at these scholars and also use current examples like the Olympic Games to demonstrate how popular history is dumbed down and should not be taken seriously.
“Journalism started down the road to dumbness when it determined news had to be delivered daily” (Sommerville 1999). The fact that news is now defined in a daily format means that reporters have less time to get the facts. Our society demands immediacy of news, this high paced lifestyle restricts the accuracy of information and also affects the context and framing of stories. This movement has created new mediums, with much more available information, but at a cost; the information we are gathering is simplified. It is streamlined and thus dumbed down. Popular history in modern society is a collective memory made up of blogs, pod-casts and press releases. The history consequently lacks depth and realism. Society compounds these myths by engineering them to be entertaining. Thus a ‘popular history’ has been created, one which permeates the media and truncates history into trivial bite-sized pieces of entertainment.
“We are actually undergoing a metamorphous; ours is a post-intellectual era. We are experiencing a cultural transformation that is reversing four hundred years of intellectual evolution” (Wood 2005). Wood argues that modern society is bereft of time and essentially, nobody reads or properly ducats themselves anymore. The great scholars are no longer studied or acknowledged and thus our education and knowledge has stopped evolving. Our fast paced society has led to an inferior and oblivious culture. The media reinforces this by promoting celebrities and sport stars in front of ‘hard’ news. Thus when history is discussed it is inevitably dumbed down to accommodate its target audience. In daily one-hour news bulletins also consisting business, sport and weather there is no time to give a story proper historical context. Each package is roughly one-minute-forty and thus any historical information must be concise, simplified and easy to digest quickly. We are therefore not given real history, but pop-history. A dumbed down, collective memory of what really happened.
Hannah Arendt (1961) raised concerns that a market-driven media would lead to the displacement of culture by the pressures of entertainment. She argues that the media has increasingly neglected its responsibility to provide people with what they need to know. Saying it does this by focusing on the trivial, the voyeuristic and the sensational aspects of the news. “Giving people what they want is not necessarily a good idea when they choose to turn away from knowledge and issues that are important and that actually have a major impact on our lives and instead retreat into fantasy and make-believe” (Arendt 1961). Not every story is going to be interesting, even if it is really important, it can still be a dull subject. The art of story-telling or making something more appealing is in essence dumbing the subject down. We as a society do this on a day to day basis to make things more exciting, more engaging and more interesting. By creating narratives we make history a form of entertainment rather than an actual account. When we talk about historical events, ideally the priority would be to get the facts right before trying to be engaging. This however is not how modern culture is geared, and the pop history that is continually dished out is a direct result of a market-driven media.
“User-generated content and the disaggregation of information by search engines — reducing books, magazines and newspapers to mere collections of facts — damages both economics and quality” (Keen 2007). Keen fears that traditional media companies may be pushed aside and made redundant by the new cult trend of the ‘amateur.’ Media has become an ever expansive term, in this new age of technology; anyone can upload information, from anywhere in the world. With this excess of information it is becoming harder to find reliable, quality news articles. The problem with the new mediums is that the endless information is not filtered. An article written on pop culture by a 5th grader can sit alongside an article written by Keen for example. Both are on the same topic, one from a creditable source and one from a primary school student. If you then add a hundred more articles on the same topic and put it into a search engine you start to create a blended perspective. This is the effect of our new mediums and how the media can dumb down history into a collective memory. Programmes like Wiki Encyclopaedia are very popular, but are intrinsically floored. Anybody can add information and thus it becomes a collective memory. Whilst they have filters in place it is quite common for there to be blaring errors. For media has become an all encompassing industry with everything from newspapers, radio, television, mobile-phones and the internet apart of its web. Each new device adds to the surplus of collected and dumbed down pop history.
“Increased competition and the introduction of econometric methods have radically changed mass media. Media consolidation has reduced both the breadth and depth of stories covered by mass media” (Creamer 1984). Cost reduction leads to the elimination of foreign bureaus and correspondents in favor of news releases by political parties or businesses. Ratings and audience tracking also promotes the most simplified writing and articles with the widest possible interest. This often means celebrity gossip, entertainment marketing, and sensationalism takes priority over more newsworthy stories. This chase for ratings also alters the way in which the stories are written and the motives behind the stories. If writing in a more populist style sells more papers, than the modern journalist is confined to these parameters. In the process of ‘entertaining’ we have lost many of the important aspects of journalism. It is not that the standard of journalism has dropped, far from it; the trend is simply a reaction to commercial requirements. “Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions” (Bentley 1981). The media and society have and will always be inextricably linked. The current trend for immediate news, the quest for immediacy -24hours around the clock has undoubtedly affected how the media reports on history.
“It is apparent that there is less emphasis and effort devoted to foreign news and less genuine investigative reporting. It has been replaced with photographs of pop singers, sport-stars and celebrities” (Mullan B 1997). The tone of these newspapers has moved away from serious, in depth coverage of issues and towards froth, superficiality, and entertainment. “Newspapers that once ran foreign news now feature celebrity gossip, pictures of scantily dressed young ladies, and football; television has replaced high-quality drama with gardening, cookery, and other “lifestyle” programmes” (Bakhtin et al. 1982). This is the point that Sommerville and Wood eluded to earlier, that society as a whole is getting dumber. They maintain that the media are simply reacting to this perceived less intelligent society. Thus the pop history that permeates our media and culture is a direct result of our lifestyle.
Essentially, very little is known of the impact of effect of news bulletins on audiences, such impact depends on how much background knowledge the viewer already has, how much the item directly effects them or can be seen in personal terms. (Mullan B, 1997)
This statement is in direct relation to broadcast news, where most news stories are contained within ninety second segments. These timeframe restrictions affect news framing and information priority as it is in such a truncated time period. They can not give the depth of detail that newspapers can or as much background information surrounding a story. This is where knowledge of ‘history’ allows journalists to make judgements on news values and how to frame or handle current issues. This is also the reason why news values are slow to change and how modern society has evolved to continually devalue our history.
A common memory society and the media continually play on is that of the Olympics and Olympism for example. A collective memory has been created that the Ancient Games were noble and upholding the sport rhetoric of fair play. In reality this is completely an utterly false. Some of the events in the Ancient Games were highly physical and barbaric. The Wrestling and Pankration events were (all but) no-holds barred fights to the death. “Television coverage tends to present the Olympics in a way that has exploited the rhetoric of Olympism and has been intended primarily to serve the commercial interests of the network” (Edwards 1984). Thus, to many people the Olympics have not changed; they think this because the media tells us that the idealism and Olympism are still present in modern society. This however may be far from the truth, the overbearing presence of sponsors have unquestionably modified the original philosophy behind the Olympics. “By the 1990s it became axiomatic in Olympic circles that world media coverage could make or break an Olympics” (Gratton 1999). Thus we can see using the Olympics as an example the way in which history can be dumbed down and altered to appease society.
“Through the ages, humans have passed on their cultural histories, values and norms through narratives and short stories” (Johnson-Cartee 2005). This is the nature of our society, until now it has been our means of improvement, our means of evolution. We learn by our mistakes and from those who are older and wiser than us. The problem is with each generation the art of story telling has corrupted and altered our history to such a state that it really can’t be taken too seriously. Much in the same way ‘Chinese Whispers’ transforms the original message; our media has dumbed down our history. “We take advantage of not only our knowledge of past narratives constructions but also our audience’s knowledge of past narrative constructions” (Galtung et al 1981).
“No story can be told, no accounts or events given, without contextualisation around a set of assumptions, beliefs, and values. This is the nature of story-telling” (McNair 1998). McNair argues that the pop history that has been created is inevitable in society that the storyteller or news writer will always look for common values and beliefs to beef up interest and appeal of a story. “Journalists have in their reporting repertoire a set of previously determined narrative structures or, if you will, narrative frames on which they hang the facts of the story” (Goffman 1974). These predetermined structures are geared towards entertainment and as such, the ‘facts’ are secondary to how the story is framed. “A great proportion of popular culture, including much of the news, embodies the qualities of myth” (Windschuttle 1988).
Public history is written in a populist style for general audiences and is thusly dumbed down and simplified to appease the masses. The media play sharp and loose facts with this history to such an extent that it can not be taken seriously. Wood and Sommerville argue that this need for the media to entertain has essentially made our society more ignorant and less intelligent. Arendt argued that a market driven media was to blame for this ‘pop’ history permeating our culture, whilst Keen was of the view that user-generated content thanks to mediums such as the internet was having an adverse effect on our history. The one common theme that these scholars portray is that the media has created a pop history which can not and should not be taken seriously. Events such as the Olympic Games expose the pop history that permeates our media and our culture. It is a clear example of how a collective memory can be created and manipulated for the greater good of commercial interests. This is the nature of media, no matter how balanced they aim to be, one things remains constant; the need to be financially successful. A market driven media is always going to put entertainment first argues Mullan, thus we can have sport stars and celebrities on the font page of our newspapers. With excessive emphasis on narrative, drama and emotion - public history written in this populist style can not be taken seriously.
Society is forged by our heritage; we learn from those who have come before us, essentially, the greatest teacher humanity has is history. The framing of current events and issues are moulded by society’s news values, which reflect the culture of the time. These values are constantly changing and evolving and the media must accept and embrace this fact. The manner in which a story is covered is affected by history; it gives society scope and perspective. History gives us context, which also dictates what society knows and what new facts they will find most interesting and appealing. News is often a long running issue that slowly evolves over time. It evolves because history and journalism are directly linked. As a society, we are constantly gaining knowledge and this newfound information allows us to grow and modify. The journalist’s role is also to report the news factually and fairly, without bias or prejudice. The process of story telling however confines the journalist and transforms historical facts. The media, especially commercial, is entertainment based and as such, public history written in this populist style is simplified and dumbed down. By trying to make the news entertaining, the media is forced to play sharp and loose with historical fact. As the famous saying goes; never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Thus the history written is in a populist style and is more a collective memory of the past rather than an accurate account. Pop history can not and should not be taken seriously; it is something that the fast-paced modern society has created. Many scholars like Sommerville and Wood believe this element that is permeating our media is actually making society dumber. That by simplifying and manipulating our past we are condemning ourselves to ignorance and stupidity. This article will look at these scholars and also use current examples like the Olympic Games to demonstrate how popular history is dumbed down and should not be taken seriously.
“Journalism started down the road to dumbness when it determined news had to be delivered daily” (Sommerville 1999). The fact that news is now defined in a daily format means that reporters have less time to get the facts. Our society demands immediacy of news, this high paced lifestyle restricts the accuracy of information and also affects the context and framing of stories. This movement has created new mediums, with much more available information, but at a cost; the information we are gathering is simplified. It is streamlined and thus dumbed down. Popular history in modern society is a collective memory made up of blogs, pod-casts and press releases. The history consequently lacks depth and realism. Society compounds these myths by engineering them to be entertaining. Thus a ‘popular history’ has been created, one which permeates the media and truncates history into trivial bite-sized pieces of entertainment.
“We are actually undergoing a metamorphous; ours is a post-intellectual era. We are experiencing a cultural transformation that is reversing four hundred years of intellectual evolution” (Wood 2005). Wood argues that modern society is bereft of time and essentially, nobody reads or properly ducats themselves anymore. The great scholars are no longer studied or acknowledged and thus our education and knowledge has stopped evolving. Our fast paced society has led to an inferior and oblivious culture. The media reinforces this by promoting celebrities and sport stars in front of ‘hard’ news. Thus when history is discussed it is inevitably dumbed down to accommodate its target audience. In daily one-hour news bulletins also consisting business, sport and weather there is no time to give a story proper historical context. Each package is roughly one-minute-forty and thus any historical information must be concise, simplified and easy to digest quickly. We are therefore not given real history, but pop-history. A dumbed down, collective memory of what really happened.
Hannah Arendt (1961) raised concerns that a market-driven media would lead to the displacement of culture by the pressures of entertainment. She argues that the media has increasingly neglected its responsibility to provide people with what they need to know. Saying it does this by focusing on the trivial, the voyeuristic and the sensational aspects of the news. “Giving people what they want is not necessarily a good idea when they choose to turn away from knowledge and issues that are important and that actually have a major impact on our lives and instead retreat into fantasy and make-believe” (Arendt 1961). Not every story is going to be interesting, even if it is really important, it can still be a dull subject. The art of story-telling or making something more appealing is in essence dumbing the subject down. We as a society do this on a day to day basis to make things more exciting, more engaging and more interesting. By creating narratives we make history a form of entertainment rather than an actual account. When we talk about historical events, ideally the priority would be to get the facts right before trying to be engaging. This however is not how modern culture is geared, and the pop history that is continually dished out is a direct result of a market-driven media.
“User-generated content and the disaggregation of information by search engines — reducing books, magazines and newspapers to mere collections of facts — damages both economics and quality” (Keen 2007). Keen fears that traditional media companies may be pushed aside and made redundant by the new cult trend of the ‘amateur.’ Media has become an ever expansive term, in this new age of technology; anyone can upload information, from anywhere in the world. With this excess of information it is becoming harder to find reliable, quality news articles. The problem with the new mediums is that the endless information is not filtered. An article written on pop culture by a 5th grader can sit alongside an article written by Keen for example. Both are on the same topic, one from a creditable source and one from a primary school student. If you then add a hundred more articles on the same topic and put it into a search engine you start to create a blended perspective. This is the effect of our new mediums and how the media can dumb down history into a collective memory. Programmes like Wiki Encyclopaedia are very popular, but are intrinsically floored. Anybody can add information and thus it becomes a collective memory. Whilst they have filters in place it is quite common for there to be blaring errors. For media has become an all encompassing industry with everything from newspapers, radio, television, mobile-phones and the internet apart of its web. Each new device adds to the surplus of collected and dumbed down pop history.
“Increased competition and the introduction of econometric methods have radically changed mass media. Media consolidation has reduced both the breadth and depth of stories covered by mass media” (Creamer 1984). Cost reduction leads to the elimination of foreign bureaus and correspondents in favor of news releases by political parties or businesses. Ratings and audience tracking also promotes the most simplified writing and articles with the widest possible interest. This often means celebrity gossip, entertainment marketing, and sensationalism takes priority over more newsworthy stories. This chase for ratings also alters the way in which the stories are written and the motives behind the stories. If writing in a more populist style sells more papers, than the modern journalist is confined to these parameters. In the process of ‘entertaining’ we have lost many of the important aspects of journalism. It is not that the standard of journalism has dropped, far from it; the trend is simply a reaction to commercial requirements. “Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions” (Bentley 1981). The media and society have and will always be inextricably linked. The current trend for immediate news, the quest for immediacy -24hours around the clock has undoubtedly affected how the media reports on history.
“It is apparent that there is less emphasis and effort devoted to foreign news and less genuine investigative reporting. It has been replaced with photographs of pop singers, sport-stars and celebrities” (Mullan B 1997). The tone of these newspapers has moved away from serious, in depth coverage of issues and towards froth, superficiality, and entertainment. “Newspapers that once ran foreign news now feature celebrity gossip, pictures of scantily dressed young ladies, and football; television has replaced high-quality drama with gardening, cookery, and other “lifestyle” programmes” (Bakhtin et al. 1982). This is the point that Sommerville and Wood eluded to earlier, that society as a whole is getting dumber. They maintain that the media are simply reacting to this perceived less intelligent society. Thus the pop history that permeates our media and culture is a direct result of our lifestyle.
Essentially, very little is known of the impact of effect of news bulletins on audiences, such impact depends on how much background knowledge the viewer already has, how much the item directly effects them or can be seen in personal terms. (Mullan B, 1997)
This statement is in direct relation to broadcast news, where most news stories are contained within ninety second segments. These timeframe restrictions affect news framing and information priority as it is in such a truncated time period. They can not give the depth of detail that newspapers can or as much background information surrounding a story. This is where knowledge of ‘history’ allows journalists to make judgements on news values and how to frame or handle current issues. This is also the reason why news values are slow to change and how modern society has evolved to continually devalue our history.
A common memory society and the media continually play on is that of the Olympics and Olympism for example. A collective memory has been created that the Ancient Games were noble and upholding the sport rhetoric of fair play. In reality this is completely an utterly false. Some of the events in the Ancient Games were highly physical and barbaric. The Wrestling and Pankration events were (all but) no-holds barred fights to the death. “Television coverage tends to present the Olympics in a way that has exploited the rhetoric of Olympism and has been intended primarily to serve the commercial interests of the network” (Edwards 1984). Thus, to many people the Olympics have not changed; they think this because the media tells us that the idealism and Olympism are still present in modern society. This however may be far from the truth, the overbearing presence of sponsors have unquestionably modified the original philosophy behind the Olympics. “By the 1990s it became axiomatic in Olympic circles that world media coverage could make or break an Olympics” (Gratton 1999). Thus we can see using the Olympics as an example the way in which history can be dumbed down and altered to appease society.
“Through the ages, humans have passed on their cultural histories, values and norms through narratives and short stories” (Johnson-Cartee 2005). This is the nature of our society, until now it has been our means of improvement, our means of evolution. We learn by our mistakes and from those who are older and wiser than us. The problem is with each generation the art of story telling has corrupted and altered our history to such a state that it really can’t be taken too seriously. Much in the same way ‘Chinese Whispers’ transforms the original message; our media has dumbed down our history. “We take advantage of not only our knowledge of past narratives constructions but also our audience’s knowledge of past narrative constructions” (Galtung et al 1981).
“No story can be told, no accounts or events given, without contextualisation around a set of assumptions, beliefs, and values. This is the nature of story-telling” (McNair 1998). McNair argues that the pop history that has been created is inevitable in society that the storyteller or news writer will always look for common values and beliefs to beef up interest and appeal of a story. “Journalists have in their reporting repertoire a set of previously determined narrative structures or, if you will, narrative frames on which they hang the facts of the story” (Goffman 1974). These predetermined structures are geared towards entertainment and as such, the ‘facts’ are secondary to how the story is framed. “A great proportion of popular culture, including much of the news, embodies the qualities of myth” (Windschuttle 1988).
Public history is written in a populist style for general audiences and is thusly dumbed down and simplified to appease the masses. The media play sharp and loose facts with this history to such an extent that it can not be taken seriously. Wood and Sommerville argue that this need for the media to entertain has essentially made our society more ignorant and less intelligent. Arendt argued that a market driven media was to blame for this ‘pop’ history permeating our culture, whilst Keen was of the view that user-generated content thanks to mediums such as the internet was having an adverse effect on our history. The one common theme that these scholars portray is that the media has created a pop history which can not and should not be taken seriously. Events such as the Olympic Games expose the pop history that permeates our media and our culture. It is a clear example of how a collective memory can be created and manipulated for the greater good of commercial interests. This is the nature of media, no matter how balanced they aim to be, one things remains constant; the need to be financially successful. A market driven media is always going to put entertainment first argues Mullan, thus we can have sport stars and celebrities on the font page of our newspapers. With excessive emphasis on narrative, drama and emotion - public history written in this populist style can not be taken seriously.
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Comment by Anonymous
Rather ironic really...
It is a great point - but how ironic the medium in which this is aired...
Here here,
-How Poigniant