…most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-colored candies for the mind.

Fighting off the urge to rant and rave yet again about the breadth of Wisconsin corporate/Republican idiocy, I’m declaring a truce to get the tape off the walls and air out the stench left by Scott Walker and the Fitzgerald brothers. Yes, I know that Scotty Walker and the Fitzgerald Brothers sounds like the name of some wannabe motown white-boys seventies garage band from Mequon, and–in fact–it is. But that’s not what I’m on about here this morning.

This morning I’ll skip all that about teacher lay-offs, and school budgets capped by property tax limits, and why it’s good for corporations to turn the US into a third world economy; and, rather, I’ll simply share this information. I’ve lifted it from Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed. Paul abstracted the list from a great paper titled Avoid News, Towards a Healthy News Diet by Rolf Dobelli:

Fifteen reasons why news is bad for you:

1. News misleads systematically
2. News is irrelevant
3. News limits understanding
4. News is toxic to your body
5. News massively increases cognitive errors
6. News inhibits thinking
7. News changes the structure of your brain
8. News is costly
9. News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
10. News is produced by journalists
11. Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always
12. News is manipulative
13. News makes us passive
14. News gives us the illusion of caring
15. News kills creativity

It had kind of a Woodstock vibe… except the music, well the music was good, but… well, okay. It didn’t have that kind of Woodstock vibe. But it was meaningful as all get out.

A better metaphor for group dynamics, a less contentious, more inclusive, and yes, sexier model is evoked by the phrase “into the pudding.” You see, we can all be in the pudding together, and if you should choose not to join us in the pudding, well then, that’s your trip. Rumors abound that the reflecting pool on the National Mall will be filled with chocolate pudding for the Rally to Restore Sanity. It’s likely that Olivia Munn herself will be on-hand to take the first leap into the pudding. I’ll be there, reporting live!

(A hat tip to Colin Pringle for his deep background research on being either in the pudding or on the bus.)

The activists organized anti-war rallies. The rallies were choreographed to meet production schedules for the nightly television news. The cameras and reporters appeared right on time. They shot enough video and recorded enough voice over to prepare a thirty second spot and then the news producer presented that brief piece between the latest criminal mayhem and whatever legislative scandal had appeared. Cut to commercial and on to the weather and sports.

Meaningful engagement on the part of the activists was limited by their desire to finesse the news cycle, and the meaning of that engagement as reported was narrowed, any detail sacrificed to editorial guidelines and production constraints. And so with clockwork regularity another evening news cycle would contain another march for world peace, a fireman rescuing a cat from a tree, cut to commercial and on to weather and sports. If the peace activists sought to inform people, to rally them to oppose war, and to capture political influence, they failed. Part of their failure can be blamed on the Procrustean nature of the news cycle and their inability to break out of that mold.

The activists failed and so did the journalists. Their inability to break out of the editorial control of businesses with vested interests in the success of what we now can see as failed foreign and economic policies wreaked havoc on our culture, twisted the values of many to align with the values espoused by mad men and narcissists, destroyed the faith in our democracy of many more, and prised professional broadcast journalists from their chairs to be replaced by rank propagandists.

All of this is obvious, redundant at best. I share it here as a prologue, an introduction to a couple of posts I’m writing. Last week in Orlando, I had the great good fortune to use press credentials to get close to a couple of people who have important roles in the continuously unfolding drama of American politics: Newt Gingrich, James Carville, and Rob Reiner among others. Sharing the messages they presented at the AARP convention without background and without a lens that focuses on their interests would be to do them a disservice. So rather than hack together some posts that parroted their words from the stage, I decided to take some time and add a little background, to break out of the Procrustean news cycles and hopefully to underscore the meaning behind their appearances in Orlando.

Around 1950, C.M. Kornbluth published a story called “The Silly Season.” The story was premised on an old journalism tradition. In the hot summer months nobody believes what they read in the newspapers because the reporters are stretching for stories to write while everything is slowed down, governments are in recess, and everyone’s on vacation. What better time for the aliens to invade? Who believes those flying saucer stories anyway?

This year the season included the catholic pope speaking before parliament in the United Kingdom, admirably introduced at Westminster by Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow (whose wife, tweeting as @SallyBercow used the papal visit to underscore some of her own work for gay rights). Thomas More, dead since 1536, was present for the meeting of the octogenarian cleric with the octogenarian queen. We mortals will never know exactly what Saint Thomas made of the occasion.

Other special moments of the just passed silly season included the twin teabag victories of Carl Paladino (characterized by New York Magazine as a fan of bestiality porn) and Christine O’Donnell, dabbler in witchcraft and opponent of “sexual socialists” everywhere. Jason Linkins calls Paladino and O’Donnell the “newly-minted Tea Party Prom King and Queen.”

In local silliness, the Whooga ugg boots arrived and I did an unboxing video. The voice over is embarrassingly unscripted and bespeaks a singular lack of talented ad libbery. Currently, I’m spraying them with a leather conditioner to extend their life in the barnyard mud, and the slush and snow of the Wisconsin winter. I don’t intend to wear them to Orlando, because–stylish as they are–they’ll be too warm for Florida. Between now and the 30th, when the AARP convention is due to start in Orlando, I’ve booked cyber-journalism lessons with one of my generation’s most famous correspondents. I’m hoping he can give me a few hints for interviews with James Carville and Mary Matalin and Kathleen Sibelius.

Silliness on the national scene continued last week with Fox News filing a lawsuit against Robin Carnahan for telling the truth.

Finally, in an encore act of silliness guaranteed to keep you giggling until you collapse from lack of breath, Newt (yes, that NEWT) Gingrich reprises his role of power-mad propagandist for the religious right at a gathering called the “Values Voter Summit” sponsored by a group called the FRC, or Family Research Council. Here’s a taste:

Kulcha Round-up

Betsy Blair, comsymp

Federal government muffs another one

Whining Joe Klein

Invisible Inkling

Prison Health and Our Community: A Public Health Investigation

Pew, that decade STANK

Steve Outing, Welcome to Elba

Jim Long on the Verge of Something New

John Siracusa, the Ars in Arstechnica

Community Supported Journalism

Public Knowledge

Progressive Change Campaign

Can you believe those murderous swine were acquitted in federal court?

How dreary is local news then?

The young Pol Pot… such a nice looking boy…

Herrera

I’d find it handy if web narratives contained both publication dates and a history of editorial changes. How can we make that happen?

I’ve long been a slow news advocate. Partly this is because I can’t keep up. I’ll admit it. The Amazon (it’s a river–look it up) of information that comes my way every day threatens to drown me.

Some examples:

1. I have on my desk several books that I’ve promised to review, and by the time I get to them they may well be in their publisher’s remainder pile. When will I find time?
2. President Obama walks the tight-rope of integrity swayed by the winds of public approval. Who has a catalog of the promises he made in 2024? Who has the list of achievements and failures regarding those promises? How are the stories of successes and failures presented?
3. What really happened at Fort Hood? Did some of the dead and wounded fall to “friendly” fire? Was the perpetrator a jihadist or just another nutbar with a gun?
4. The list goes on…

News from the 24 hour “news cycle” largely comprises publicity, propaganda, and/or entertainment. It is the fast food of journalism. It’s not good for us. It’s not healthy. It doesn’t even taste very good. Fast food journaists have abandoned the delivery of real information to people. They no longer share an obligation to INFORM. Today the obligation to increase share value for the shareholders of media properties trumps any frame of objectivity, truth-seeking, or public good.

The news cycle is an unforgiving Moloch incinerating information and always demanding more. We feed the fires every day and keep ourselves occupied gathering fresh fuel. In the USA, mass market news fills a grab bag of excitement and titillation. The race to be first with the news, or to nail down exclusive coverage is a perversity.

Marketing and public relations firms capitalize on the media’s hunger for content. Propagandists capitalize on the owners’ hunger for market share, and readers/viewers/listeners keep the market for “infotainment” alive. They find it easy to digest.

I’m reading David Swanson’s “Daybreak–Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.” I received the book a few months ago. The author and the publisher would have appreciated a review on or at least near the publication date. In fact, they were kind enough to include a news release about the book so, strictly speaking, I wouldn’t actually have to READ it. I could copy-type from the release. I could have had a scoop!

Day after day broadcasters, bloggers, and print journalist editorial staff spin propaganda aimed at influencing their audience. The boundaries between editorial opinion and objective information gathering and distribution have long since fallen to the exigencies of the infotainment market. I wrote yesterday about the EFF’s release of thousands of pages of documents they received from the government in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. All that informastion is grist for the mill of slow journalism. The challenge will be to make the slow news EFF story interesting enough to trump quotidian half-baked bullshit like the recent balloon boy ballyhoo.

Each of us has limited bandwidth for information. I think we should use it to prepare stories and/or to consume content more nutritious than the stuff Rupert Murdoch is trying to feed us.

What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times… and you were there.
– Walter Cronkite, narrating

He informed my youth with You Are There (1953 — 1957). I saw every show.

He informed my adulthood, reporting on six US Presidents from Kennedy to Reagan.

Where were you when John F. Kennedy was assassinated? I was in the Wisconsin Student Union watching Walter Cronkite report the sad news.

From John Glenn’s first flight in 1962 to the first lunar landing in 1969, Walter Cronkite narrated history as it unfolded.

In 2024, he played drums with Mickey Hart on Earth Day in New York…

It has been five years since this was created. We seem to be pretty much on target.