Wise Attention Choices

Society implies that it is your civic and moral duty to keep abreast of every tidbit of news and current events. Yet, in this era more, information is generated on earth in one second than you can take in the rest of your life.

The notion that you can watch the news, read the paper, or scan the Web to catch up on events is erroneous. You can only keep abreast of a small amount of information. So make wise choices about where you want to offer your time and attention.

Too Much Information

* More than 1,000 new magazines were launched in the U.S. in the last two years, and within two years most of them will fail.
* There are more than ten times the number of radio stations today than when televison was first introduced.
* All told, more books and articles are published in ONE day than you could comfortably read in the rest of your life.

Good News You Can Use

What kind of information do you regularly receive from your favorite media sources? What type of picture do they paint about American society? Chris Michaud in a New York Post feature writes, "A surprising 94 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with their lives -- although far fewer in New York and other Eastern states think they're better off than they were five years ago, according to a new survey."

"The Harris Poll of more than 1,000 people reported the overall 'satisfaction' level, defined as people who said they were either very or somewhat satisfied with their lot, was up 4 percentage points, from 90 percent two years ago. But only 42 percent of people in the Eastern U.S. said things had improved since 2002. By contrast, 60 percent of Southerners and 62 percent of Westerners said their lives had improved."

Why is this poll surprising? Perhaps certain media powers are pushing an agenda. So, perhaps, ignore the New York Times and the other eastern media elite, and you have a better chance of grasping current reality

The Peek-a-Boo World

Professor Neil Postman in his 1985 landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death offers a brilliant portrait of how television consistently offers us a false view of reality. Here is an excerpt from the start of Chapter 5, "The Peek-a-Boo World":

"Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange."

"There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane."

"It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms."

"Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago."

NY Times: Serial Malpractice

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” - Benjamin Disraeli, cited by Mark Twain.

Peter J. Smith, writing for LifeSiteNews.com, explains how The New York Times, with a rich tradition of misconstruing data “has once again published another 'hit piece' on the institution of marriage, alleging that for ‘the first time more American women are living without a husband than with one.’ However, US census data for 2005 shows that the January 16th front-page story in the New York Times is just another disturbing showcase of the Times’ tolerance for ‘journalistic malpractice’.”

First, a look at the offense: “For what experts say is probably the first time,” writes New York Times writer Sam Roberts, on the front page, “more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.” …“In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000,” Roberts writes. He then states that married couples now represent a minority of all American households and “the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.”

Smith counters emphatically: “The plain truth is that Roberts’ findings are at variance with U.S. census reports for 2005, which demonstrate a far different picture from the profiles selected by Roberts of single women ‘delighting in their new found freedom.’”

“According to the 2005 report ‘Marital Status of the Population by Sex and Age’, the United States is not yet a culture that has discarded the institution of marriage, where 60.4% of men and 56.9% of women over 18 years old are married.

Smith points out how Roberts created his own “analysis” by using the Census Bureau’s “Living Arrangements of Persons 15 Years Old and Over by Selected Characteristics”, by including in his 51% figure of women living without a spouse: unmarried teenage and college girls still living with their parents, women whose husbands work out of town, are institutionalized, or are separated from husbands serving in Afghanistan and Iraq!

Smith offers the facts: “Among marriageable women over 18 years old, 56.9% of women are married, with 53% having a spouse present, 1.4% with a spouse absent, 9.9% widowed, and 11.5% divorced. Yet, 67.3% of women 30-34, and 70.5% of women 35-39 are married, a far cry from the profiles of women offered by the Times of women finding fulfillment outside marriage.”

“It’s one of a series of articles the New York Times has run… playing games with numbers in a misleading and dishonest way, each one of them having the same point: marriage is over, marriage is finished, nobody wants to get married anymore, people are happier not getting married,” talk show host Michael Medved told his radio audience, accusing the Times of committing “journalistic malpractice”

“…97% of women between the ages of 15 and 19 are never married!” observes Medved. “What does it tell you when he’s including girls living home with their parents as single women and then uses that to create this lie that the majority of women are unmarried?”

My take on all this? Managing information and communication is tough enough these days without purported trusted news sources like the New York Times publishing erroneous reports.

Small Transgressions Exposed

Jennifer Saranow, writing in the Wall Street Journal, discusses how “bad parking, loud talking -- no transgression is too trivial to document online.” In some respects this can be socially beneficial, but too quickly, I fear, such postings represent the kind of over-information in which too many people are immersed.

Sexy Images and Decision-making

Valerie Iancovich, writing for the DiscoveryChannel in Canada says “It's not shocking news that a bikini-clad woman will affect many men's judgment. But now, a recent study suggests that a man with high testosterone levels is more easily-influenced by a scantly-clad lady than guys with lower levels of the hormone.”

“Once the men with high testosterone were exposed to the photos of the women, they were more willing to settle for a poorer deal. As a matter of fact, just touching a bra prior to playing the game seemed to squander the resolve of the testosterone-heavy men.”

So, macho guys, be careful what type of information (photos, graphics) you’re exposed to. It might render your contort your decision-making capacity.

Info that Shouldn't Be Revealed

Katharine Herrup, writing in the New York Sun says, “Exhibitionism in America has always existed. But it has been particularly evident in the newer media. The degradations of Reality TV were pretty bad — before then, no one could imagine so many minutes of tears on television. But newer media are allowing people to further degrade themselves. MySpace and Friendster are the examples of sites that can be fun and useful, but can also be sorely abused and depressing. When 13- year-old girls promote their body measurements, as they do on such sites, something is wrong….”

Way Too Many TVs

NEW YORK (AP) -- The average American home now has more television sets than people. That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.

Half of American homes have three or more TVs, and only 19 percent have just one, Nielsen said. In 1975, 57 percent of homes had only a single set and 11 percent had three or more, the company said.

Magazines Come and Go

Watsonville, CA - “Hundreds of new magazines are launched every year in the United States and Canada but most cover the same topics as what's already available on the newsstand,” according to a study by Wooden Horse Publishing reveals.
"Magazine publishers seem content to follow each other like lemmings," remarked Meg Weaver, owner of the Wooden Horse Magazines Database, an online magazine resource for publicists, writers and researchers with information on over 2,000 US and Canadian consumer and trade publications. "And over the proverbial cliff most of them go as 60% of all new magazines fail in the first year."

Ads Now Saturate TV Shows

Here’s a telling report from WaynesThisandThat.com on “How Much TV Commercial Length has Grown over the Years:

“We all accept commercials as a necessary evil because they pay for the shows we love to watch. But, how much is reasonable to accept? This question was answered for me while watching a 2004 episode of Star Trek Enterprise. The commercials came so often and lasted so long that is was almost impossible to maintain a sense of continuity with the show.

This situation got me wondering how much the percentage of time given to a show is lost to commercials has increased over the years. Thanks to the availability of video recordings of past shows, this was easy to determine. Scouring my video library I found shows ranging from 1964 to the present, 2004. Here's what I discovered:

* 1964 - 17.8 percent of the time devoted to commercials

* 1977 - 17.8 percent

* 1994 - 24.5 percent

* 2004 - 30.0 percent

These were all for main line shows aired during prime time hours. So, how did the show that kicked this little study off do? Would you believe that a full 35 percent of the air time given to Star Trek Enterprise in 2004 was sacrificed to commercials? It was. To make matters worse the end credits were pushed into the far right margin to make room for a side bar ad, the station logo was continually displayed in the lower right hand corner of the screen, and twice an annoying pop up ad appeared in the left hand corner of the screen during the show. Taking these into account the total effective commercial time was crowding 38 percent.

Gap Between Press and Public

Survey Finds Huge Gap Between Press and Public on Many Issues
By Joe Strupp, a senior editor at Editor & Publisher, May 15, 2005

A survey released last May reveals a wide gap on many media issues between a group of journalists and the general public. In one finding, 43% of the public say they believe the press has too much freedom, while only 3% of journalists agree. Just 14% of the public can name "freedom of the press" as a guarantee in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in the major poll conducted by the University of Connecticut Department of Public Policy.

Six in ten among the public feel the media show bias in reporting the news, and 22% say the government should be allowed to censor the press. More than 7 in 10 journalists believe the media does a good or excellent job on accuracy--but only 4 in 10 among the public feel that way. And a solid 53% of the public think stories with unnamed sources should not be published at all.

Perhaps the widest gap of all: 8 in 10 journalists said they read blogs, while less than 1 in 10 others do so. Still, a majority of the news pros do not believe bloggers deserve to be called journalists.

Asked who they voted for in the past election, the journalists reported picking Kerry over Bush by 68% to 25%. In this sample of 300 journalists, from both newspapers and TV, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 3 to 1 -– but about half claim to be Independent. As in previous polls, a majority (53%) called their political orientation "moderate," versus 28% liberal and 10% conservative.

The new poll was carried out in March and April. For the public opinion part, 1000 adults were interviewed.