Jack Fuller
What is happening to news?
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In 1929, when he published A Preface to man nature we are still largely dependent
Morals, Walter Lippmann was well on . . . upon introspection, general observa-
his way to becoming the most influen- tion, and intuition. There has been no rev-
tial journalist of his era. He had been olutionary advance here since the Hellenic
editor of the editorial page of the New philosophers.1
York World since 1922. Two of his books
Today, professional journalism is in
–Liberty and the News and Public Opin-
a crisis Lippmann could not have imag-
ion–had outlined most of the key ele-
ined. The late-twentieth-century revolu-
ments of the twentieth century’s con-
tion in information technology and data
cept of journalistic professionalism.
transmission has threatened the viabili-
Public Opinion had also suggested some
ty of the businesses–primarily newspa-
of the concept’s limitations, foreshad-
pers–that gathered, sorted, veri½ed, and
owing the philosophical skepticism
prioritized information about the impor-
that much later in the century helped
tant events of the day. While it perfected
to undermine it. In fact, by 1929 deep
people’s ability to communicate what-
doubt darkened Lippmann’s thought;
ever they pleased, the revolution made
he was losing his belief in the capacity
it very dif½cult for anyone to get atten-
of the democratic public to guide policy.
tion. It brought liberty and plenty to the
He yearned for a better way but could
system of free expression, and yet at the
not quite ½nd it. A Preface to Morals re-
same time it subverted journalistic dis-
corded his intellectual struggle with
cipline and the fragile sense of order of-
how to live in a world without the hope
fered by the mosaic of the newspaper
of certainty. Though he believed in the
page.
power of science to repair some of the
Meanwhile, the news audience has
weaknesses of democracy, it was in res-
changed its habits in fundamental ways.
ignation that he wrote:
This transformation is not just a matter
Scienti½c method and historical scholar- of switching from print to the Internet.
ship have enormously increased our com- The audience has been shrinking for de-
petence in the whole ½eld of physics and cades, but today, even among the heavi-
history. But for an understanding of hu- est news consumers–such as those who
watch cable news–an increasing pro-
© 2010 by Jack Fuller portion is drawn to the latest and most
110 Dædalus Spring 2010
lurid rather than the most signi½cant. At when tradition becomes only a dead What is
least as disturbing to serious journalists deposit of the past.”2 happening
to news?
and others who still believe in the tradi- For journalists the situation is ex-
tional news values, more and more peo- tremely disconcerting. They believe
ple are turning to shrill commentators, deeply that what they do serves the pub-
bloggers with no particular concern for lic interest, but they know that the way
accuracy, even comedians, all at the ex- they are doing it doesn’t seem to be work-
pense of those who try to adhere to the ing the way it used to. Worst, they do not
disinterestedness, neutrality, and strict know what to do about it. I am reminded
epistemology espoused by Lippmann of the Matthew Arnold poem of a pilgrim
and other founders of journalism’s pro- stripped by science of religious faith,
fessional ideals. “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,”
These trends have signi½cant implica- written as the Industrial Revolution took
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tions for the way communities inform hold. Journalists ½nd themselves “Wan-
themselves about important matters. dering between two worlds, one dead, /
The news that people take in affects the The other powerless to be born.”3
way they exercise their sovereign choice At the moment most attention in
through elections and exert their contin- journalistic circles has gone to ½nding
uous influence on policy through every- an economic model that can sustain
thing from opinion polls to protest dem- the institutions that do the basic work
onstrations. Many people inside and out- of discovering and verifying what hap-
side of journalism are worried what will pened. (For the most part these institu-
become of the political system under an tions are newspapers and news agencies
onslaught of instantaneous, often unver- like the Associated Press.) This focus
i½ed flashes of information. How will we is natural since the precipitous decline
be able to put events in historical con- of newspapers’ ½nancial fortunes has
text? Where will we ½nd adequate expla- forced them to reduce their output dra-
nation of complex and often technical is- matically. Some have gone out of busi-
sues of great public importance (wheth- ness already, and others will follow. But
er they be matters of international mone- the problem is bigger than the future
tary policy or the best ways world health of newspapers; it is the future of news
institutions can respond to a new infec- itself. This is what matters to the com-
tious disease)? monweal. And to get a grip on this di-
Though it is tempting to try to ½nd mension of the crisis, attention needs
a way back to a news environment and to be paid to the deep change in the way
the journalistic values that worked pass- people are taking in news, through what-
ably well throughout the second half of ever medium. This is not just econom-
the twentieth century, this is an exercise ics. It is about the increasing dif½culty
in nostalgia. Nor is there reason to be- of getting important things through
lieve the grandiose claims of digital vi- to people. In other words, even if we
sionaries that unmediated democracy could come up with the money to save
of expression will produce good soci- news organizations, journalism would
etal results as if by an invisible hand. still be in crisis.
Paul Ricoeur could have been describ- The social mission of journalism is
ing our current situation when he wrote, intensely practical: to educate people
“The present is wholly a crisis when ex- about matters that are important to the
pectation takes refuge in utopia and community’s well-being. It cannot com-
Dædalus Spring 2010 111
Jack plete this mission unless people actually yond observing that news and entertain-
Fuller assimilate the information. Journalists ment have gotten mixed together or that
on the
future are teachers without the power to give advertising has moved to the Internet
of news their students grades. In fact, the class and that Internet aggregators for the
is in charge; the teacher is the one who most part have not been paying for the
has to pass the test. news they distribute. We must not only
In considering the challenge of reach- look askance at what some news organi-
ing people, it simpli½es things to think zations are doing to get attention, but
of the audience as being divided into also ½gure out why it is working so well.
two segments. One is served by a few There is a reason that “why” is one of
very sophisticated news organizations, the traditional ½ve Ws of journalistic re-
which are national in scope. This audi- porting (along with “who, what, when,
ence comprises only a very small frac- and where”). It is almost impossible to
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tion of the population, but it is a very know what to do about a fact or situa-
influential part. The other segment in- tion unless you understand why it is the
cludes everyone else. It has been served way it is.
by metropolitan and smaller-city daily To get to the why, we have to reach be-
newspapers, along with cable, network, yond traditional ways of thinking about
and local broadcast news, though it has journalism. Simply asking people what
been using these sources less and going they want–through opinion research,
to digital interactive media more. The no matter how sophisticated–does not
average individual in this audience is get down to the fundamental sources of
considerably less influential than the change in the audience’s relationship to
average reader of one of the great na- news. Most people, quite simply, do not
tional newspapers. But in the aggre- know the most basic reasons they are
gate, the larger audience is very pow- responding to news the way they are,
erful. The elite may set the agenda, though the enormous capacity of the
but it doesn’t have the votes. human mind for rationalization leads
Whether The New York Times or The them to give a reason, and probably
Wall Street Journal or The Washington even believe it.
Post prospers matters a lot to the qual- Fortunately, the revolutionary advance
ity of the national debate. And it prob- in thinking about human nature scien-
ably matters personally to a lot of the ti½cally that Lippmann could not ½nd
readers of Dædalus. But if journalism in 1929 is now well under way. The rap-
is to ful½ll its social mission, it must id growth in knowledge assembled in
reach beyond the small, highly educat- the past several decades by the sciences
ed, usually well-to-do audience of po- of the mind has had a signi½cant impact
litical and social elites. It must engage on many ½elds–including political sci-
large numbers of people. Today that ence, political theory, and moral philos-
means winning a battle for attention ophy, upon which discussion of profes-
more ½ercely competitive than any sional standards in journalism has com-
that our species has ever known. monly been based. But so far neurosci-
To ½gure out how to win the attention ence has not played any important role
of the larger audience, we are going to in the debate about what is happening
have to understand rather precisely what to news and how journalists should re-
has happened to news during the past spond. This is shocking, given how
decade. We are going to have to get be- much it has to offer.4
112 Dædalus Spring 2010
T he contemporary sciences of the mind functions have not changed much in the What is
–from research at the most basic, cellu- past ten thousand years. But the informa- happening
to news?
lar level to the increasingly important tion environment has changed radically.
and more global study of the brain’s af- For most humans in the developed world
fective functions–shed light on the way at least, the principal prehistoric threats
we are reacting to our unprecedented, to survival–predators, starvation, and
message-immersed environment. Evo- so forth–have given way to new ones:
lutionary psychology suggests how the vehicular accidents, obesity, a seden-
early development of the human brain tary lifestyle, social isolation. The oral
shapes its contemporary behavior. The culture of early humans yielded to writ-
study of cognitive heuristics and biases ing, printing, broadcasting, and now
offers a way of thinking about the sys- digital interactive media. This last de-
tematic ways in which the minds of velopment poses particular challenges
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both journalists and their audience can to the information processor we carry
err. Modern philosophers of the mind within our skulls because today we are
can also contribute to journalists’ under- immersed in messages, many of them
standing. The work of Maurice Merleau- calling us by name. We can hardly get
Ponty, for example, helped lead the way away from them. They pursue us wher-
to breakthroughs in psychological theo- ever we go via our cellular devices. Just
ry; his work reminds us that there is as one message gets through to us, an-
more to the human mind than electro- other cries out for attention. We live,
chemistry (more, for that matter, than in the words of one computer compa-
the brain and central nervous system). ny executive, in an era of “continuous,
Daniel Dennett and researchers in arti- partial attention.”6
½cial intelligence have offered creative The problem of attention did not
models of how our information proces- begin with digital media. In fact, it
sors of flesh and blood make decisions did not even begin with humans. Our
and even become conscious of them- brains inherited from vertebrate ances-
selves. A number of influential philoso- tors the basic mechanisms for muster-
phers have concluded that the brain’s ing information processing resources
affective systems play a central func- in the direction of matters of great
tion in the moral life of human beings. and immediate importance. Of course,
As Martha Nussbaum has written, giv- natural selection shaped these mecha-
en what we know today about how the nisms to ½t the particular circumstances
brain works, we “have to consider emo- of the human species. But most of this
tions as part and parcel of the system happened a very long time ago, and the
of ethical reasoning.”5 ancient mechanisms still operate with-
A great deal of what is happening to in us. As competition for our attention
the news audience reflects the way natu- explodes, they become increasingly im-
ral selection structured human brains to portant. Neuroscience can help explain
deal with the challenge of survival and how these mechanisms drive such audi-
procreation in prehistoric environments ence behavior as attraction to the latest
such as the African savannah and Ice Age at the expense of the most important
Europe. Though the human brain has an and the apparent appetite for emotion-
enormous capacity to learn–plasticity ally hot presentation of information–
is the somewhat unpleasant word often through infotainment and shrill com-
applied to this–its basic structure and mentary, for example.
Dædalus Spring 2010 113
Jack Evolutionary psychology even offers had a lasting, salutary effect on public
Fuller insight into the appeal and function of discourse. The examination of heuris-
on the
future gossip and celebrity. For example, take tics and biases is as important today as
of news the work of Robin Dunbar. He argues the examination of hoaxes was in the
that gossip evolved to meet our ances- 1940s; they are the hoaxes our brains
tors’ need to live in larger and larger so- play on themselves.
cial groups in order to survive. Groom-
ing–picking nits from one another–
was our primate ancestors’ way of form-
There are numerous reasons why jour-
nalism has been immune to the power
ing and sustaining social bonds. But the of the sciences and philosophy of the
number of individuals who could groom mind. For one, these are arcane ½elds.
one another was quite limited. With the Simply trying to understand the basics
development of language, humans were of brain anatomy can take a journalist
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able to live in larger groups, with great- into an alien geography full of bewil-
er success at survival and procreation, dering place names like the corpus cal-
because they held themselves together losum, the aquaduct of Sylvius, the hip-
through gossip. Celebrity, a much more pocampus, and the anterior cingulate
modern phenomenon, probably devel- gyrus where substances like gaba
oped to provide the much larger and and glucocorticoids ebb and flow
less intimate social groups in increas- like weather.
ingly urban settings something in com- The very rate of discovery in neuro-
mon to gossip about. science has also made it daunting as a
In a quite different vein, the study of source of practical journalistic insight.
cognitive heuristics and biases is enor- In rapidly developing ½elds it is often
mously important for journalists. The dif½cult to separate out what is durable
Nobel Prize-winning work of Daniel from the theory of the moment. The
Kahneman (with Amos Tversky) dem- emergence of popularized accounts,
onstrated the way humans systematical- such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink or
ly err in assessing the probability of un- Maggie Jackson’s Distraction, can make
certain events. This happens through it all seem like a fad.
mental heuristics (automatically applied, In some ways it is. Week after week
shortcut rules of thumb) that evolved we read breathless accounts of research
over millennia. These mental shortcuts that seems to show that some character
survive in us because they have worked trait (cheerfulness, addiction, in½delity)
most of the time, but in a contemporary has been located in a speci½c place in
environment they can lead to disastrous the brain, or that medicine manipulat-
mistakes. ing some neurochemical or another will
It is very important that journalists make us smarter or happier or allow us
and journalism scholars work through to remember the value of pi to twenty
the implications of how these heuris- decimal places. More than three decades
tics operate within the news audience– ago William Barrett warned about this
and within journalists themselves. In sort of thing:
1941 journalism professor Curtis Mac-
The light of a new scienti½c theory blinds
Dougall published an important book
us for a while, and sometimes a long while,
on how the press had been gulled time
toward other things in our world. The
and again by hoaxes and how it could
greater and more spectacular the theory,
in the future avoid being taken in. It
114 Dædalus Spring 2010
the more likely it is to foster our indolent judgments about what is important and What is
disposition to oversimplify, to twist all what is misleading and to put discover- happening
to news?
the ordinary matters of experience to ½t ies in a larger context that gives them
into the new framework, and if they do real meaning. Yet there are still two cul-
not, to lop them off.7 tures: science is in one, and journalism
is ½rmly rooted in the other.
At one time it was Freudian categories
The impact of technology on jour-
that seized the popular imagination,
nalists’ work, once simply an annoying
giving rise to silly pseudo-explanations
source of change in journalistic routines
of nearly everything human. Today the
and now a threat to survival, has surely
rule of Oedipal complex and the super-
increased journalists’ reluctance to look
ego has given way to the rule of the amyg-
to science for solutions to their problems.
dala and the dopamine reward system.
Moreover, quantitative disciplines have
Our brains are capable of being just as
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often been used in news organizations
silly about those.
in foolish and often threatening ways.
It is no wonder, then, that some years
I remember one day when I was editor
ago when I told a friend of mine who
of the Chicago Tribune, a bright, young
edited a signi½cant American newspa-
man from corporate ½nance came down
per that I was reading neuroscience to
to my of½ce from the tower to seek my
try to understand what has been hap-
help in creating a system for measuring
pening to journalism, he suggested
the productivity of our reporters by the
that when my book came out it might
numbers–number of stories, number
make a good subject for his science page.
of words, that sort of thing. Later he be-
I do not believe the thought crossed his
came a truly great publisher and now
mind that it would help him guide his
remembers the episode with more than
newspaper, and I can’t say that I blame
a twinge of embarrassment.
him. Nobody had showed him how.
Marketing, with its techniques for
Despite Lippmann’s early hope that
measuring audience attitudes and re-
journalism itself–along with the forma-
sponses, was often seen as hostile to
tion of public policy–could become as
journalism’s social mission. After all,
rigorous as physics, scienti½c discovery
wasn’t the journalist’s job to tell the
has never been very important in shap-
audience what it needed to know, not
ing journalism’s thinking about itself.
what it wanted to know? Now, in the
Even Lippmann did not look to the con-
midst of crisis, more and more journal-
tent of science but to its method as a
ists are looking to marketing to show
model for journalism.
the way to survival. Unfortunately, tra-
Of course, for a long time every seri-
ditional marketing techniques are in-
ous journalist understood that one could
adequate to the task.
not adequately reflect the contemporary
The intense, almost religious conflict
world without reporting on the scienti½c
between traditional news institutions
discoveries that are constantly altering
and the interactive legions who hissing-
it–hence the fact that my friend’s paper
ly sneer at “mainsssstream media” also
had a science page. And the more reflec-
makes journalists less open to looking
tive reporters and editors recognized that
to the sciences of the mind. Traditional
it was not enough simply to put the lat-
journalism believes in the importance
est research papers in laymen’s terms; a
of professional standards, training, and
serious journalist had to be able to make
expertise. The digital interactive world
Dædalus Spring 2010 115
Jack leans heavily toward anti-elitism, rejec- cess of many types of decision-mak-
Fuller tion of expertise, and the “wisdom of ing. For example, experimental subjects
on the
future the hive,” as embodied in wildly creative with intact emotional systems who play
of news and successful inventions such as Wiki- a game of cards involving several sepa-
pedia. Each has an implicit view of hu- rate decks are able to detect which decks
man nature. The traditionalists’ sense are advantageous to winning. Subjects
is that people need instruction in order with severe impairment of the emotion-
to make sound decisions. The digitalists’ al systems are not. The successful play-
belief is that out of the hum of multi- ers do not know why they are successful.
tudes something like truth and perhaps They cannot describe their strategy in
even wisdom will inevitably emerge. rational terms. But scientists can docu-
Neuroscience’s vision of human nature ment that their emotional systems have
does not entirely support either position. had the hot hand.
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To the digitalists it points out the sys- Working with people with brain dam-
tematic flaws in human reasoning that age that makes it impossible for them
continuous summation through the new to feel emotion, Damasio has observed
technology actually magni½es. And to how dif½cult they ½nd making decisions
the traditionalists it undermines one of that are quite easy and ordinary for oth-
the central tenets of professional think- er people. People who cannot feel emo-
ing since Lippmann: the primacy in ef- tion may not show general cognitive im-
fective human decision-making of the pairment. They may perform well on
rational and disinterested over the emo- standardized intelligence tests. But give
tional and engaged. them a problem with a lot of uncertainty
Journalism inherited from ages of or one that requires them to understand
Western thought a model of the mind other people, and they become para-
in which reason and emotion are neatly lyzed. Though a surfeit of emotion can,
separated, with reason needing to dom- of course, lead to irrationality, Damasio
inate emotion in pursuit of truth and wrote, “reduction in emotion may con-
wise judgments. The pedigree of this stitute an equally important source of
model could not be better. It dates back irrational behavior.”9
at least to Plato, Aristotle, and the Sto- While this assessment conflicts with
ics, and continues fairly directly right the professional journalistic ideal of
down to Freud. There have been only disinterestedness and its inherent dis-
a few dissenters, David Hume notable trust of emotion, if journalists can get
among them. past the resistance that this dissonance
We now know that this model is wrong. provokes, they will ½nd that the neuro-
Neuroscientists such as Antonio Dama- science of emotion offers powerful in-
sio have demonstrated that the parts of sights into what is happening to news
the brain generally thought of as emo- today. There is a crisis in getting atten-
tional and those thought of as rational tion for important news, and emotions
are so thoroughly interconnected and in- are attention’s gatekeepers.
teractive that thinking of them as sepa- Journalists have good reason, of course,
rate produces more confusion than clari- for being wary of making pointedly emo-
ty. Emotions are, in fact, themselves cog- tional appeals. Playing on emotion has
nitive. As Nussbaum puts it, they bring been part of the arsenal of hucksters and
us “news of the world.”8 More impor- propagandists from time immemorial.
tantly, emotions are essential to the suc- Whipping up fear has been a favorite of
116 Dædalus Spring 2010
warmongers. Sexual messages and im- cess has never been more important to What is
ages did not begin nor will they end with journalism than it is today. happening
to news?
the “page three girls” of the British tab-
loids. American journalism in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries had
Journalism is not scholarship. It is not
art. It is relentlessly practical. Reporting
a phrase for women reporters who spe- that penetrates an important subject but
cialized in heart-wrenchingly sad sto- does not penetrate the minds of the au-
ries: “sob sisters.” dience may be noble, but it is a journalis-
In reaction to the danger of falling tic failure. The barriers to success have
into manipulativeness, journalists in never been higher, even as the barriers
the second half of the twentieth cen- to distributing information quickly and
tury increasingly drew back from emo- broadly have fallen. Here are some of the
tional presentation of news. They never challenges:
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completely abandoned touching the au-
dience’s heart, of course. But they wor- • Today and for the foreseeable future,
ried about it constantly and consequent- individual reports–news stories, for
ly inhibited themselves. As competition want of a better term–increasingly
in the information environment inten- compete one-on-one with all other re-
si½ed, they left the ½eld to those who ports. The days are over for compre-
had no such reservations. And now hensive packages of reports that used
they are losing the audience. to be able to tempt people to learn a
There is reason to believe that in our little about something they hadn’t
message-immersed environment emo- thought might interest them. We can-
tional appeals are more successful with not count on serendipity as an educa-
more people more of the time. There is tional strategy anymore.
also reason to believe that this tendency • Brevity confers an enormous advan-
in the news audience is durable and in tage in the competition for attention
fact will only increase. Thus, a reluctance today. Nonetheless, many important
to think about how journalists might use messages cannot be communicated
emotion in an ethical manner can make in thirty words or a six-second sound
it impossible over time for journalists to bite–let alone in the 140 characters
ful½ll their social mission. of a Twitter post (“tweet”).
We should be wary about emotion-
al presentation of information, but not • Technological change continues to
afraid of it. After all, hucksters and pro- bring down the wall between the writ-
pagandists have not been the only ones ten, the visual, and the audible; effec-
who have regularly played upon the emo- tive communications increasingly will
tions of the audience. Great artists and require the use of all three, seamlessly
great leaders also have. The challenge to integrated.
effective large-public journalism today is • Attention spans will not spontaneous-
how to distinguish between communica- ly lengthen. Moreover, there appear
tion in the interest of public enlighten- to be severe limits on how much infor-
ment on the one hand and manipulation mation a person can process in a given
for socially useless or even deleterious period of time, limits that are only sus-
purposes on the other. Using the knowl- ceptible to slight expansion through
edge unlocked by neuroscientists and practice. People may get used to multi-
other students of the mind in this pro- tasking, but they aren’t likely to get
Dædalus Spring 2010 117
Jack dramatically better at it. Nor will the the ethical dimensions of journalists’
Fuller brain evolve quickly to adapt to the response to them. In the end, it should
on the
future new demands. Even under severe se- be part of the intellectual arsenal that
of news lection pressures, complex organs of creative journalists committed to serv-
complex organisms do not change in ing the public interest use to create the
a generation. bold new ways of telling stories that
will get the job done in our distracted,
Understanding how the brain works
message-immersed world.
helps us think through all of these chal-
lenges. It also provides guidance about
ENDNOTES
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1 Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: MacMillan, 1929), 157.
2 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 235.
3 Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” in The Poems of Matthew Arnold,
1849–1867 (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 272.
4 A full discussion of the implications of neuroscience for journalism can be found in Jack
Fuller, What Has Happened to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), from which much of this essay is drawn.
5 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001), 1.
6 Linda Stone, quoted in “A Survey of New Media,” The Economist, April 22, 2006, 24.
7 William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday,
1979), 149.
8 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 109.
9 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York:
Avon Books, 1998), 52–53.
118 Dædalus Spring 2010
