Removing The Rose-Colored News Glasses – How America is ACTUALLY Doing
This will be part one of a two-part series about progress in America. In this part, we'll discuss the biases we all share and why watching the Evening News might make it seem like progress has come to a grinding halt. Then in part two, we'll talk about better ways to measure progress other than the violence we see on CNN or Fox.
If you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This is such a simple and silly proverb that It hardly bears repeating. But when we look at how many big-name reporters have been caught lying about violence, this proverb might be the best way to describe journalism in America. And it’s not greed on their part, trying to sell more ads with violent headlines; it's just human nature, and people want to be respected in their field.
In 2003, Brian Williams was caught lying about being shot down in a helicopter in Iraq. Brian Williams is a respected journalist with 12 documentary awards, including an Emmy and a Walter Cronkite award and 6 honorary degrees. In 2011, Mike Tobin reporting for Fox News claimed he was punched during a union protest in Wisconsin. The protesters had caught sight of Tobin and the Fox News team and changed their chant to “Fox News lies.” That was when Tobin told the news station he was being assaulted. Later, when the video was leaked, assaulted got walked back to punched in the arm like a sibling, which then got downgraded again to tapped on the arm accidentally.
Laura Logan and Jonathan Karl, CBS and ABC respectively, both got caught inventing violent stories from Benghazi. Laura was a host of 60 Minutes, and Jonathan was the chief White House correspondent. Tucker Carlson of Fox News claimed that more children died in bathtubs than gun accidents, which is objectively untrue. Hannity used the people charged with graffiti in his tally of violent criminals during the Portland protest, which if you saw the footage of the protest, that's a lot of graffiti. Each incident of spray painting was not itself an assault.
Finally, there's Bob Woodward, the man that has been called a deity of journalism. Woodward, the Woodward who caught Nixon in the Watergate scandal, claimed back in 2013 that a White House adviser Gene Sperling threatened him with violence. Briefly, Gene Sperling told the most powerful journalist on the planet, “you'll regret making this claim," and Bob Woodward chose to interpret that as Sperling promising violent retribution. Conan O'Brien thought it was such a joke that he poked fun at Woodward and the feeling threatened instant during a White House correspondents’ dinner. Woodward has won every award in journalism, and of the 20 non-fiction books he's co-authored, 18 became national bestsellers.
Our point is if the only time you got a food pellet from the universe was when you hit a blinking red button that said “violent news," wouldn't you hit it? If journalists are trained to look for violence, they get rewarded when their violent stories are on the five o'clock news and receive literal lifetime awards for having experienced violence up close. Why would you ever report on anything else? In other words, if you feel like America's not making progress and if it doesn't seem like we're building something amazing, it might be because we're not asking the architects or engineers a damn thing. Instead, we’re asking the hammers how things are looking, and of course, the answer is always, “there’s sure are a lot of nails out here, guys.”
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The purpose of today's episode is not to discredit journalism as a nation. We need good journalism. The more working, paid investigative journalists we have, the more oversight we have in every corner of America - from politics to business to consumerism. Our front windshield into progress hinges on journalism, news, and media; it is our window of America as a whole.
However, if we see nothing but shootings in the news, we may start to think America is just a big old bucket of guns and bodies. If we only ever see lottery winners being interviewed and never losers, we will subconsciously think our chances of winning aren't that bad. And if the only footage that gets aired is burning buildings and violence, we will start prepping our doomsday bunkers. So, today we want a report on the real state of things in a very non-journalistic way, and we're going to start with a few myths.
Myth 1: The news is just a small piece of America's progress pie. So why focus on journalism in an episode about progress?
Todd: Let's go back to the Colonial period in America, and that was 1607 to 1776. The news was spread very differently back then. Guess how news was spread.
Joe: I'm guessing somebody would feed a note to a trout, send it downstream, and then somebody would catch that trout and read it.
Todd: That's pretty close. It was mouth to mouth and letter to letter. For example, you would write a letter to somebody, and then they would go to the Town Center and tell everybody.
I thought it was a newspaper, but the newspaper would have been two months old at that time. As for families during this time, they would all sit around the fire, lamps lit up, and they would read as a family. Now, the literacy rate was very low then. Only 30% of the people could actually read. So, I'm guessing that whoever was the most educated or who had the best voice-over would be the entertainment [for the evening.
Joe: I almost got excited until I realized what they were reading. I've read books from that period, and they're kind of tame.
Todd: Fast forward a bit, the radio is invented. So, after dinner (they have electricity now), the family would be in the living room to listen to music. They also had sports narrations where they described every single play in detail. But one of the most popular things they had were shows, like The Lone Ranger. Now we get into television, and television, of course, was a monster hit. Early in the day, there were soap operas along with news channels. These news anchors were worldly celebrities. They were people everyone trusted.
Joe: Right, they were presented with this objective front. When they talked about the news, they tried to represent both sides and were super calm about everything. They didn't get flustered. There wasn't much politicizing because there was just a view. The first time we actually had two political views was the 1960 debate between Kennedy and Nixon. So, before that, it was them trying to be objective as far as I could tell.
Todd: It's very common nowadays for sitcoms to have a side. And finally, we fast forward to today – the internet age. Here, you can watch whatever you want right now, and you get news from anywhere in the world. We can all have our own opinion and not everyone is listening to the same propaganda.
Joe: Do you personally, before we get into all the science and all the history, do you think that's a better world?
Todd: No, I don't think it is. On the political front and what's happening in the world, you're just hearing what's going on from other people. You're not discovering what's happening on your own being out in the world. It's just fed to you.
Joe: How do you feel about the notion that often we're not watching an event happen. We're watching people's reactions to an event, or we're watching their reactions to reactions from an event?
Todd: That's not news; that's moral outrage. They take an opinion and run with it in either direction they want.
Joe: It’s a snowball of outrage.
If you go back and look at journalists from the golden era, you could actually tell what Walter Cronkite or journalists before him sided with politically, depending on the speed or rate they spoke at. Same as today, they are not just here for reporting; they also want to represent their side. I assume that if we're starting journalism school, we would have to represent things accurately.
Our data today (from DART), which is a project of Columbia Journalism School run by psychologists from the University of Tulsa, has a bunch of great statistics on what people report on versus what actually happens. Just as an example, in Los Angeles, 80% of local murders get reported by the LA Times, but only 2% of local physical/sexual assaults get reported. If I lived there, I would think that murder is how you greet your neighbor in the morning and physical/sexual assault never happened. Next, an analyst of 175 prime articles in Time Magazine showed that although 73% of the stories are about violent crimes, only about 10% of the crimes reported to police actually involve violence.
In short, people focus so much on this skewed information because it's entertaining and stirs emotion. It's much better for ratings to spend 60 seconds talking about murder than smaller things like a Walmart theft. It's all about ratings, strengthening political views, and feeding the public information using their own narrative to generate mass results in their favor.
Myth 2: Why don't we have a public access new station like what AP News is supposed to be? Why don’t news stations have to pick political sides and make America look like an apocalypse to be financially viable?
In the last couple of years, have you noticed that news organizations representing themselves as neutral started picking political sides? I used to not know what political side CNN was on. They were just reporting, and if they were caught picking political sides, it was a bad thing. Today, these platforms are publicly funded by people buying ad space who have a political side. Fox News said there was some political kerfuffle, meaning if they said something against their wing, it could hurt them.
This is very pertinent to us talking about how news gets funded. The NRA, which is a direct pipeline to many companies, has so much political support. There are actually a couple of advertisers that want to distance themselves from the NRA.
All in all, these platforms blow up something that's being advertised by the people who pay for the news. If you're not in the thick of it, that's how convoluted it looks from the outside. If you're not in that [direct chain of conversation, if you just zoom out politically and look at it as here's how the money swims in a circle, then it looks as complicated as that. Somebody who is non-political can see that the NRA doesn't support a thing that a company is advertising. What we're looking at is news organizations, and advertisers will follow what is financially viable. If something goes against their political base, it will make them lose money. If they just can't advertise because it's connected to something negative, they're not going to side with a political base; they're going to go with what keeps a company afloat.
Myth 3: How bad is the world, really? Has progress in America truly stalled, or are we just trying to interpret our progress through the outbreaks and tear gas that dominate the news?
Ultimately, this is not a show about just journalism. We want to look at how TV makes us think things are going bad and that America is blowing up. How bad is it? Really? I believe that GDP is used to measure progress so often is because it is easy to measure. However, I think that the model that companies have to expand every year is not a good model. We've had so many episodes about happiness and that the peak happiness is between $80,000 and $120,000 a year. That's my measure - how healthy, educated, and fulfilled the population is. If we live longer and find happiness in life, I feel like that is progress. Most news sources really seem to focus on crime being the best measure of progress. Is it a violent day? If not, then we're progressing. So, why do Americans measure progress by what the news shows them? If you and I are talking about the best measures being GDP or infant mortality, why are we so invested in the idea that progress is tied to violence? Where do you put the education? How educated are we for lowering the crime rate?
With that being said, there is a survivorship bias and availability bias. They're two different phenomena, but we're just going to talk about them a little bit. Both are mental shortcuts, and they come from evolution handing us an easy card. What they do is rely on examples or concepts to help us so that we don't need to listen to absolutely everything all the time. In colonial times, the news didn't spread more than about 30 miles unless somebody really put effort into it. Our brain is built to have a heavier bias toward things we hear and things we hear very regularly. The more often you hear somebody in the cave complaining about lions attacking, then then your number goes up; you’ll start to think you will see a lion soon. And that is a good thing. That is something evolution has given us to be like, okay. This is important so pay attention. But to remind everybody who's listening, if there are 310 thefts for every murder we hear about, you don't need to worry about murders nearly as much as you need to worry about bringing in your Amazon box from your front porch because there's been 310 of those stolen for everyone stabbing.
This is an article about biases, and it is by Indiana University. It boils down to people are extraordinarily affected by the emotional connotation of a headline, even if it's not an indicator of what's in the article. That's the big takeaway is we don't [need to hear all the details about where the lion was found. We don't need to know any details. All we hear is the word lion, and that is what hooks us. Even more, a Twitter study found out that hoax news spreads faster than truth.
They also found out that bad information was almost completely cut off from any fact or correction systems from this Twitter system. So, any machine, automated system, or group of people that check for facts don't reach the light of day. Fake news is self-promoting and then eventually, when it bursts, is what is getting shared to you on Facebook. So, when you get these wild headlines on Facebook, that is the bubble bursting and like the gas reaching you, and you probably shouldn't be making life decisions on that information.
So first off, we've got a PBS article and showcases crime looks like it was invented in 1960. Before that, the number was half than what it was then, so something happened after World War II when it comes to crime. There are many theories, and we're going to gloss over them briefly because we don't have time to make this into a crime podcast. There are theories that the exposure to that level of violence did it, theories that gun training did it, and theories that consumerism did it.
If you go to wiki about violence in the 90s and the 60s, there are yet more theories. They state that for whatever reason, crime exploded from the 50s to the 60s. In 1960, there were 1887 crimes per hundred thousand people. That doubled between 1960 and 1970. In 1974, for every hundred thousand people, there were 3980 crimes committed. It then exploded again in 1980, with up to 6,000 crimes committed per every hundred thousand. So, if we look at the big lens of the world, crime in the 1960s wasn’t invented. We always had it. But it goes nuts over the next couple of decades, with the 80-90s being the peak. After that, whether it was people stopped using leaded gas or we ended up making consumer goods more available, crime started dipping. In 2010, it dipped again and went down another thousand. So, in 2010 we had 3,300 crimes for every hundred thousand people. Funny enough, it dipped again in 2020. According to the Disaster Center statistics, there are 2500 crimes per hundred thousand people.
Todd: So, we are just as safe today as we were in the 60s.
Joe: Exactly. We are looking at 60s level crime right now in America, and according to our earlier study, most of it is theft. We are almost at that level of crime again, yet the news is constantly reporting on lions.
Todd: Something that I see that drives me crazy is when I see these kids at the bus stop with their parents freaking out about leaving their kids alone. There were bad guys in the olden days, especially the 90s, but now it's all in their heads.
Joe: If you look at macro-trends, crime has been going down, and life expectancy has been increasing steadily for everyone across the board since 1950. So, when we talk about progress, statistics say we're doing pretty damn good. Our crime is almost 1960s level, and our life expectancy has been steadily going up like a line. We're fine.
Todd: Not Joe and I, though. Our poor health is going to bring the average down.
Joe: Every time we come to do this show, it's like we sipped from the wrong grail. Every time we record, our hair turns gray and falls out.
Todd: We talk about our cardiologists even though we're young men.
Joe: We're like those old guys that sit and play chess. We're just feeding pigeons.