Most of the news is worthless. They say we have to keep up with all the transient phenomena, but why? For most private citizens, the actions of those far away don’t matter; they do little to affect us, and we do little to affect them.
Even if you are among those praise-worthy few who aim to change things, you have probably realized you must specialize. Only fools spread their efforts over every fashionable cause, leaping from oppression to education to malnutrition, never pausing to offer deep and prolonged effort in any direction. So, the charities waste your money, awareness campaigns are forgotten and the stone rolls back down the hill. As a result, much of the news is irrelevant to even the most involved and active of us.
Still less necessary than letting the news steal our time and attention is letting the news steal our whole day; what does not affect us immediately need not be known immediately. As an example, for those who have no special connection there, it is vain curiosity to keep checking the news on Libya. Or if you lived in a monastery for a couple months and didn’t learn the outcome of a presidential election until six weeks afterwards, would it really matter?
Come to think of it, what did you learn from yesterday’s news?
After all the unreliable factoids, unimportant fillers, schmaltzy human interest stories, repetition of old events and those wretched, wretched commentators who divide their time between flattering their partisans and snarling at their enemies, how long did you spend for each snippet of real knowledge that you will remember and keep with you and act on?
We would know far more about what’s really going on if we would get a couple good weekly or monthly papers, and then in the time that we saved we could read books on economics and history in order to take hold of the background behind what’s going on.
As students, we shouldn’t be spending our time gazing on shallow particulars; it is ours to learn the universals, the principals behind all these shifting appearances. This vanishing time is given to us so we may gorge ourselves on wisdom, devouring the centuries of thought that alone can give order to the news. It is our duty as students to escape the dim cave, where dull, meaningless images wander past our eyes, and into the light of ideas, so our eyes may understand these fleeting things by first seeing the patterns they spring from.
If you can look upon the factions in the Middle East and cannot say what Kant and Mill and Aristotle would think about it – worse, if you don’t know what you think of it – maybe you should stop looking and read some books on political philosophy — which you will never learn despite how many newspapers and news channels you support.
Not to say news is totally worthless. Republics demand informed citizens, and it’s important to be able to have an intelligent conversation about current events, while for a very few, knowledge of all the swirling happenings is truly necessary and most of us just enjoy the news as a form of entertainment – I certainly do. Yet, remembering we really are amusing rather than educating ourselves, we should resolve to gain true knowledge of lasting things, instead of vague opinions on the pretty flowers that will wither tomorrow.
Journalists keep asking themselves why citizens are so misinformed. Maybe they should tell their customers to purchase less journalism.
— Gerard Keiser, linguistics and classical languages junior
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bruenig 1 year, 2 months ago
Good article.
evandefilippis 1 year, 2 months ago
I can never tell if your writing is satirical, and I hope this is-- but if it isn't, I'm quite disappointed at the quality of this column. There are obvious benefits to reading news stories that do not immediately affect us (you mentioned one; democracy).
I was most frustrated with this meaningless platitude "we should resolve to gain true knowledge of lasting things, instead of vague opinions on the pretty flowers that will wither tomorrow."
How exactly does one determine what does and does not count as "true knowledge" before we pick up the news? How exactly does one convincingly demonstrate that some forms of knowledge or more valuable than others?
Here are other reasons why reading the news is important:
1) Democracy relies on an informed citizenry. A citizen cannot form a reliable opinion as to what constitutes his or her best self-interest without learning domestic and international politics. Almost every failed intervention in recent history-- Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., were licensed through a docile and woefully ignorant public.
2) Stimulates global solidarity. Americans and the rest of the global community are connected now, more than ever, as a result of the globalization of politics and media. Americans, for example, have donated absurd amounts of money to reconstructing Haiti and Japan after their respective earthquake disasters. Japan donated enormous amounts of money to the United States after Hurricane Katrina. Egyptians donated money to Wisconsin protesters under the aegis of "One world, one pain." I can go on. None of these acts of global compassion could have happened in the absence of informed global citizens reading about international events.
3) Smarter people. Famous quote, "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know."- Michel de Montaigne. Ignorance breeds ideology and conflict. The more people read the news, the more their pre-existing beliefs are potentially challenged, and therefore the more they are likely to modify those beliefs to be congruent with reality. The reverse is happening now, as perniciously revealed through the Tea-Party movement, in which people refuse to read the news, bolster their pre-existing beliefs through communities of the like-minded, and develop belief systems that fly in the face of reality (see Glenn Beck).
4) You don't present an alternative to reading the news. What does this even mean: "it is ours to learn the universals, the principals behind all these shifting appearances." How can universals be established without reference to particulars? In other words, you can't develop underlying theoretical frameworks without a working understanding of the events that the frameworks try to map.
And the entire point of 'universals' is to predict particulars, but your own column suggests we shouldn't care about particulars that don't affect us.
sniferriple 1 year, 2 months ago
I was going to make a case here about knowledge of international issues being a necessary component of any informed citizen's worldview, and about how having a larger context for the events in one's own life and country creates a population more prepared to build a working society in an increasingly global system, and possibly even touch on the worthlessness of the news having more to do with what the corporate-owned American media deems news than any inherent uselessness in information about the wider world; but then I realized that this is just a daily paper, and that I am far too ill-informed and not nearly educated enough to care about it.
So I'll take your advice and ignore it. It's irrelevant to me, anyway.
Keiser 1 year, 2 months ago
Mr. De Filippis:
I deeply apologize for not making my points more clearly. I at times think some errors come from inattentive readers, but because you misunderstood, I am certain it must be my own fault.
I believe I exaggerated what I really meant, and spent too little time qualifying statements. The trouble is, people these days are over-emphasizing the importance of a superficial knowledge of current events, while ignoring the plain fact that the news cannot interpret itself; we must have a deep understanding of political science, philosophy, history, economics, religion, and piles of other things if we are to know what to take from the news. The newspaper, radio, and cable commentators cannot give us that understanding, for they are forced by space and market restrictions to remain on a very shallow level. Therefore we must read books, think long over them, and argue about them with each other, and those who spend hours watching the repetitious breaking news on CNN or checking the news on their iPhones between class, thinking they are educating themselves, have less time to do that groundwork.
Also, I did try to make it clear that we must still know what is going on; I just believe that is done much more efficiently - except for local news - by something like the Economist than by the New York Times. There is much fluff and repetition in a daily that can be removed from a weekly. I once read something about how a guy had a cow fall through a roof onto him. Entertaining, but not useful. And we should know what is going on in Libya, but we don't always need a daily update. As for the biggest things, you hear about them anyway; I heard about the earthquake in Japan twice on the morning after it happened. For local news, unfortunately, that doesn't work; I'm not sure there is much of a good solution. Also, I should have specified, when saying we should read history, that I also included in that books written on, say, the history of the Middle East over the last 10 years; we could learn 100 times more about the current issues from that than from 1000 hours of MSNBC.
As for your very first objection - that we cannot know what is important - that is a philosophical opinion I don't agree with, but would rather not get into here.
Anyway, I am sorry for wasting your time through poor writing.
kokojan 1 year, 2 months ago
Gerard, Great column/writing. Unique topic, fresh perspective & clearly written. I've thought that myself but you illustrated the concept insightfully. Keep up the good work! Wherever your writing takes you...we'll be fortunate to have access to your viewpoint. Look forward to future columns.
Steven Zoeller 1 year, 2 months ago
The first sentence of this column is wrong, and that sort of turned me off to the whole thing. Every piece of news means something to somebody. If Keiser means to say consumers of media should specialize, that's one thing, but this piece seems aimed towards the media itself, not consumers.
I'll take Keiser's two examples. First, why should Libya matter? Because its our tax dollars funding it and our sons and daughters in the army could potentially be needed overseas. Oil is also a huge part of the conflict. I'd like to know how things in Libya go for these reasons.
How about the monastery situation? Well, if I may speculate beyond the new president's tax plan and economic policies that affect EVERYONE, might this monk have some opinion on how the social policies accommodate religious doctrine?
I read the comment above and it corrects some of these issues, but I'm leaving this simply for commentary on the original column.
brettzke 1 year, 2 months ago
After reading Gerard Keiser's column and rebutal, all I can say is: Man, that guy can write! The Daily's lucky to have him.
kokojan 1 year, 2 months ago
Gerard, Great column/writing. Unique topic, fresh perspective & clearly written. I've thought that myself but you illustrated the concept insightfully. Keep up the good work! Wherever your writing takes you...we’ll be fortunate to have access to your viewpoint. Look forward to future columns.
evandefilippis 1 year, 2 months ago
@Keiser,
I completely agree with your rebuttal column, and I apologize if I misinterpreted your initial opinion.
Agreed: mainstream news outlets are pathetic and more people should read books, the Economist, and New York Times. I also agree that it's important to have a good theoretical framework with which to interpret various events, though I still disagree that theory should be prioritized over empiricism, given that the only way to falsify theories is through a comprehensive understanding of current events.
People can develop their own theories through correlating the content of the various news stories that they read, but they cannot KNOW about current events through simply reading theories.
Other than that minute commentary, your rebuttal cleared up every objection that I had. Glad to have you writing for the OUDaily.