Book Review: News that Matters

The exhaustive experiments and surveying conducted by Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder in the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s conclude that television news certainly impacts public opinion - not telling people what to think, but telling them what to think about. Inyengar and Kinder mention the work of Walter Lippman, who in the 1920s concluded that mass media such as newspapers had the power to set agendas. In News that Matters, the newspaper has been replaced as the most trusted source of news by something much more captivating and convincing: television. As Inyengar and Kinder explain, television sets the order of priorities for the American public comfortably seated in front of the tube every night. In effect, it tells Americans what to care about. News that Matters introduces the concept of "priming", the notion that television news dictates to its viewers the standards by which to judge government policies and political leaders. Overall, it's not a pretty picture. But it's a clear one. Television news takes advantage of the fact that humans are inherently weak when it comes to knowing what is going on in the world at all times. To be able to do so, as the book explains, would be "paralysis". However, our reliance on television news has made us paralytic in another way: we are unable to think outside the boundaries the news sets for us. The lead story on the unemployment crisis, for example, makes us believe unemployment is what matters the most. In this regard, television news decides the news that matters. The problem is, it often doesn't matter. And this couldn't be more true today. Despite the emergence of blogs and YouTube, television still influences what Americans concern themselves with, whether it's Paris Hilton or Bin Laden. Cable news channels recycle the same twenty minutes of news for 24 hours a day. The major networks, now combined with various other media sources into giant corporations, still have the authoritarian control over what we talk about it. I believe they actually go further than that and actually pick our political candidates for us as well. Using certain polls, conducted by their own corporations, corporate news sources rule out certain candidates and prop up others. As Inyengar and Kinder conclude, "the health and vitality of any democratic government depends in part on the wisdom of ordinary citizens". News that Matters does a great service by highlighting the enormous influence of authoritarian television news on American society. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? I believe there is. The increased and dynamic use of the internet is slowly breaking us free from the parameters set for us. The ordinary citizen is beginning to realize he or she is not just, as Lippman says, a "deaf spectator", but an important, functional component of democracy whose consciousness, not the news, is what matters. I hope so. If we allow it to become another version of television, the consequences could be fatal to our already fragile democracy. News that Matters leaves us with this warning:

Television is now an authority virtually without peer. Near the close of the twentieth century, in the shadow of Orwell's 1984, it would be both naive and irresponsible to pretend that such an authority could ever be neutral

Yikes. If you look at the state of television news today, it seems this warning must have gone unheard. I guess it didn't make the news.

---