All the NEWS that's fit to print

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Any discussion of News, whether it be the fake kind or the main stream or true kind should probably begin with a look at the body of TV, radio, print and internet reporting we now subsume under the heading, NEWS.

(At the core is the word new, of course. New is an adjective in it’s general sense, and adjectives don’t normally have plural forms so the “S” at the end already makes news feel gimmicky. But let that be. It’s just the grammar obsession in me talking.)

Casual conversation gropes for topics sometimes. When cousins get together for an afternoon, the topics of conversation are only marginally predictable. Cousin Jake may safely be predicted to bring up the foibles of current government because that’s his obsession. His hatred of authority is a given. But what is predictable is that whatever is new will be the most welcome of topics. We are hungry for variety, and news offers food.

The conversations whenever cousins or friends sit down together over coffee have one important characteristic, the significance of which is generally overlooked. The NEWS is made up of stories; reporters even call it “going after a story.” There’s nothing wrong with that, except that being limited by time and space, every story necessarily has to be abbreviated, pruned for length. 

What’s more, the venue reporting the news chooses what will be reported and what will be discarded given the space that’s available. It’s called the Gatekeeper function; whoever acts as boss of a news outlet decides what to let in and what to ignore or discard. When we hear, see, or read a story, therefor, we’re required to make a judgment: does this story have enough background information, enough detail to do it justice? Is this story important enough to justify crowding out any number of stories that just didn’t make the cut?

The fact of the gatekeeper’s selecting, pruning role alone should make us suspicious of the venue of reportage we call THE NEWS. As I write this, many a gatekeeper is letting in a brief clip on Putin’s bragging about Russia’s possessing nuclear weapons that are undetectable. Many a coffee row conversation will treat that tidbit as an entire fact, oblivious to all the other statements Putin made in his state of the union address, to arms-race history, to existing nuclear arms treaties, etc., etc. 

Meanwhile, a myriad of books that do provide background and detail on how weapons and political conflict make our world unsafe sit unread on library shelves.

The gatekeeper’s role and how it works out on the ground was made evident recently . . . again. CBC, the national, publicly-funded radio and TV service, carried reams of commentary and interviews on the selection process for a new leader for the opposition party in Ontario. At the same time, the selection of new leaders by opposition parties in BC and Saskatchewan was ignored. 

Gatekeepers are driven by ratings and the environment from which they’re operating; they can’t live in every province, city, territory at the same time. Added to this, the personal bias of a reporter and/or an editor can’t be ignored: Fox News’ gatekeeper eulogizes Trump, CNN’s gatekeeper works to undermine his credibility. Neither actually reports more than selected, gatekeeper-preferred facts, and in comparison to what they promise, they are equally, “fake news” for that reason alone.

Additionally, scandalous always seems to trump everything that isn’t; it gets through the gate because we watchers, readers, listeners consume it voraciously. Shame on us!

None of this really matters in a society where the role and limitations of the press are understood, but that’s not the case in our world today. We seem to pick the news channel or publication whose gatekeeper’s views most closely match our own. But if understanding is what we want, and not just NEWS, you’d think we’d read more books, take more courses, become informed about media operations. We, too, are gatekeepers—of our minds and mouths—and we need to begin to do information more justice by being both skeptical of flash reporting and more knowledgeable about backgrounds and details we’re never going to get via JUST THE NEWS.

See you at the local library! I’ll be returning Ernie Regehr’s Disarming Conflict.