Djelloul Marbrook: Why Do We Limit Journalism To 19th Century Conventions?
As developments tumble over on each other, it’s difficult to achieve and hold perspective. But it is my hope that in the 21st Century a journalism will evolve that makes a more concerted effort to provide context and to connect dots, because disconnected incident reports tend to polarize society.
For example, a story from the Huffington Post reports that ISIS fanatics killed 770 captured soldiers. That, of course, is horrific and criminal. The inevitable response of readers is to shudder and deplore. But recently in history the United States carpet-bombed Vietnam, killing civilians the bombers couldn’t even see. And, perhaps even worse, the United States is the world’s major arms merchant, the world’s Doctor Death, if you will. Why aren’t these facts part of the context? Why should journalism limit itself to the moment? What dictum demands such a limitation? It’s merely an artifact from the 19th Century.
More recently, how many civilians did we kill in Iraq? Do we even know? And even more recently, how many civilians did the Israelis, using our weapons and with our sanction, kill in Gaza. Why aren’t these facts part of the essential context? Why isn’t the story about wanton killing? Why should it be limited to ISIS killing surrendered soldiers? Why are we saddled with journalistic conventions that narrow our perspective?
The media industry claims that news analyses and op-ed think-pieces mop up these facts and tie them together. But that’s disingenuous, first because the story has already made its irreversible first impression, and second, because opinion creeps into these mop-ups and analyses, and thirdly, because intellectual sloth is involved in this failure to link one thing to another, to give the reader more to think about, more wherewithal to comprehend the significance of a story. Intellectual sloth and a refusal to spend more money on reportage. This kind of disjunctive journalism, this telegraphic dispatch demeanor, serves to mislead.
The media industry fails to get a message evident on Facebook and other social media—the striving of people to make comparisons, the striving of people to frame events in such a way that they learn from them. In a way, the situation is comparable to the morbid No Child Left Behind statute. It seeks to cram facts into a child’s head and then test how well the child can regurgitate them. What has the child learned, really? The far better way to educate a child, surely, is to teach the child how to learn. And that’s just what journalism is failing to do. Journalism operates like No Child Left Behind, piling up one thing on another.
It’s time to wet our feet in the 21st Century.
— by Djelloul Marbrook writing for Vox Populi
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Djelloul Marbrook: Why Do We Limit Journalism To 19th Century Conventions?
As developments tumble over on each other, it’s difficult to achieve and hold perspective. But it is my hope that in the 21st Century a journalism will evolve that makes a more concerted effort to provide context and to connect dots, because disconnected incident reports tend to polarize society.
For example, a story from the Huffington Post reports that ISIS fanatics killed 770 captured soldiers. That, of course, is horrific and criminal. The inevitable response of readers is to shudder and deplore. But recently in history the United States carpet-bombed Vietnam, killing civilians the bombers couldn’t even see. And, perhaps even worse, the United States is the world’s major arms merchant, the world’s Doctor Death, if you will. Why aren’t these facts part of the context? Why should journalism limit itself to the moment? What dictum demands such a limitation? It’s merely an artifact from the 19th Century.
More recently, how many civilians did we kill in Iraq? Do we even know? And even more recently, how many civilians did the Israelis, using our weapons and with our sanction, kill in Gaza. Why aren’t these facts part of the essential context? Why isn’t the story about wanton killing? Why should it be limited to ISIS killing surrendered soldiers? Why are we saddled with journalistic conventions that narrow our perspective?
The media industry claims that news analyses and op-ed think-pieces mop up these facts and tie them together. But that’s disingenuous, first because the story has already made its irreversible first impression, and second, because opinion creeps into these mop-ups and analyses, and thirdly, because intellectual sloth is involved in this failure to link one thing to another, to give the reader more to think about, more wherewithal to comprehend the significance of a story. Intellectual sloth and a refusal to spend more money on reportage. This kind of disjunctive journalism, this telegraphic dispatch demeanor, serves to mislead.
The media industry fails to get a message evident on Facebook and other social media—the striving of people to make comparisons, the striving of people to frame events in such a way that they learn from them. In a way, the situation is comparable to the morbid No Child Left Behind statute. It seeks to cram facts into a child’s head and then test how well the child can regurgitate them. What has the child learned, really? The far better way to educate a child, surely, is to teach the child how to learn. And that’s just what journalism is failing to do. Journalism operates like No Child Left Behind, piling up one thing on another.
It’s time to wet our feet in the 21st Century.
— by Djelloul Marbrook writing for Vox Populi
Discover more from Vox Populi
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
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