The "town square" as boxing ring
Former TV producer Steph Jacobs has a few things to say about the babble of voices
Retired CBS News producer Stephanie Jacobs produced election night coverage at CBS for years, culminating in the hotly contested 2000 Bush v. Gore election. In the Babblery’s most recent episode, she’s got a few things to say about what journalism got wrong in those years.
“I think journalism’s major fault is that for all its attempts to explain, it’s better at talking than listening,” she explains.
Jacobs saw this blind spot throughout her years at CBS, from coverage of civil rights to feminism. “Certainly in the 80s and 90s, mainstream journalism did a lousy job covering the feminist revolution. I think the largely white male executive leadership is guilty of missing large social trends, large economic trends, and doing an adequate job of explaining them.”
Now that “the media” is more dispersed, are we listening?
No longer comprised of the big three networks and the major newspapers, now featuring an unruly bunch of networks and individuals, you’d think we’d see a wider perspective and more thoughtful coverage in our media. Instead, it seems like we have gravitated toward supporting more polarized media just as we’ve become more polarized.
We didn’t talk about this during the interview, but it occurs to me that this polarization happened after a period when marketing honed its effectiveness with scientific precision. Just as companies selling products realized they could succeed by targeting specific messages to specific markets, news outlets curated what they presented based on what they learned that their audience wanted to hear. Again, instead of listening, the large media companies focused more on what they thought we wanted to hear.
Can we cut through the babble?
According to Jacobs, our current media atmosphere, in which any person can create their own media empire, has confused the situation further.
“Unlike the democratic ideal of John Stuart Mill and the other philosophers of enlightenment, that the truth will rise from a babble of voices, social media has increased the dichotomy among Americans and led to a great increase of tribalism.”
She points out that adding the babble of social media on top of the “illiberal and illogical” Fox News has led to something quite different from a utopia in which all opinions and experiences are considered.
“I think what has happened is those twin forces [cable news and social media] are forces that divide rather than unite,” Jacobs explains. “So the town square is no longer a place where you find the middle ground. The town square is where you move into opposite corners.”
Can we come together again?
Here at the Babblery, we like to end with a message that contains at least a glimmer of a way forward. Jacobs points out that traditional civics promotes the larger community over tribalism, and that we can start with trying to get civics back into education.
But she also points out that although the specifics are new, the swing in our political culture is not unusual in our culture. Eventually, she says, we’ll swing back.
“I don’t mean to be Candide-ish, but I do believe in the long run the good guys will win,” she says.
“However severe the next four years may be, however vertiginous and rocky they may be, however dangerous they may be, there will be a time in which the pendulum of politics will swing back to the center, that the essential character of Americans will turn out to be not misogynistic, not racist, not anti-trans.”
And there you have it, a message of hope. We all need to hope in order to move forward.
So what’s your hope for the coming year?
Mine is that we get back to acknowledging that although we’ll never agree about policy, Americans need to agree on the fundamentals that got us this far:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
menpeople are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”