How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society [Paperback]

C. John Sommerville (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 1999

We who live at the end of the twentieth century are better informed--and more quickly informed--than any people in history. So why do we also seem more confused, divided and foolish than ever before? Some pundits criticize the news media for political bias. Other analysts worry that up-to-the-minute news reports on radio and television oversimplify complex realities. Still more critics point out that today's reporters can't possibly be experts on the wide variety of subjects they cover. Historian C. John Sommerville thinks the problem with news is more basic. Focusing his critique on the news at its best, he concludes that even at its best it is beyond repair. Sommerville argues that news began to make us dumber when we insisted on having it daily. Now millions of column inches and airtime hours must be filled with information--every day, every hour, every minute. The news, Sommerville says, becomes the driving force for much of our public culture. News schedules turn politics into a perpetual campaign. News packaging influences the timing, content and perception of government initiatives. News frenzies make a superstition out of scientific and medical research. News polls and statistics create opinion as much as they gauge it. Lost in the tidal wave of information is our ability to discern truly significant news--and our ability to recognize and participate in true community. This eye-opening book is for everyone dissatisfied with the state of the news media, but especially for those who think the news really informs them about and connects them with the real world. Read it and you may never again know the tyranny of the daily newspaper or the nightly news broadcast.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Sommerville’s book . . . helps us to put the news in perspective. And if we aren’t caught up in all of the media babble, we might discover the beginning of wisdom." (Chuck Colson )

"One of the most winsomely wise pieces we have." (Richard John Neuhaus )

Product Details

• Paperback: 155 pages
• Publisher: IVP Books (February 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0830822038
• ISBN-13: 978-0830822034
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #805,468 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful, informative, eye-opening reading!, May 8, 2000

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society (Paperback)

...How The News Makes Us Dumb is a brilliant diagnoses of the modern news industry, the sound-bitten wasteland of the daily and nightly news, and how we have allowed this utter nonsense to dominate and numb our lives. Filled with deep insights and plain common sense, the book not only carves up this sacred cow, but explains how our personal lives, and our neighborhoods, could be revitalized if we substantially reduced the amount of time we spend reading and watching the news.

The onslaught of news has not made everyone happy. More than 150 years ago, Henry David Thoreau advised: "Read not the Times, Read the Eternities." More recent information critics include Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves To Death, 1986), James Fallow (Breaking The News, 1996) and Barry Sanders (The Private Death Of Public Discourse, 1998). And of course the unforgettable 1976 film Network, where a television anchorman played by Peter Finch (who died of a heart attack during the promotional campaign of the film) inspires thousands of people to throw open their windows and shout: "I can't stand it anymore!"

Other writers have blasted the news from many angles: it is biased; it frightens us into passiveness; it is controlled by corporations with the one sublime goal of selling us things we don't need. Sommerville's critique is thoroughly unique. He argues that the news -- from newspapers and televisions -- the news makes us dumb because it comes to us daily. News has become a product, a commodity. To keep us reading, to feed our addiction, the newspapers and television stations need to fill their spaces every day and make this filler seem as if it's crucially important. Because there is rarely a story of true urgency, in a balanced culture, the news would not be daily. Sommerville writes: "The only reason for making news daily is to create an information industry."

When we watch tv news, Sommerville argues, we get sound bites that average 20-seconds in length or less. We watch the news and we mistakenly believe we are informed. But to truly understand things we need not news but wisdom, which is the ability to see events in a larger context. Sommerville says that the news as it is served to us, by its very nature, destroys these larger contexts. His acid test for value is the question: Is this worth reading again? And he says that, one month later, to re-read a newspaper will reveal it to be worthless, but to re-read a classic book gives us a much deeper understanding of things.

The book contains dozens of contradictory headlines taken from major newspapers, such as this headline from the New York Times (June 8, 1995): "Greenspan Sees Chance of Recession," and this headline, on the same day, from the Washington Post: "Recession Is Unlikely, Greenspan Concludes." And Sommerville provides other amusing tidbits: he tells us about the Bedouin Shepherds in Palestine who, when they need some cash, simply find ancient documents, tear them into little pieces, then sell them to archaeologists.

For many years in America, it was insurance companies -- not doctors and patients -- who dictated how long a patient could remain in the hospital. Likewise, the news has assumed a too-important role in American society. Sommerville writes:

"News never asked to replace culture. Its proper function is to raise questions about dominant ideas, not to become the dominant discourse, silencing or undermining all others."

The news drives and unduly influences our government; it turns science into superstition; and it flatters our vanity by deceiving us into believing that opinions are the same as thoughts. With all the news we read and hear, and all the events we give our opinions about, shouldn't our society be intelligent and well-informed? Yet -- as a recent article by Michael Schudson (Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2000) points out -- Americans are vastly ignorant about even the most basic facts of political life.

Obviously, this book will upset many readers, and be ignored by many newspaper book reviewers, simply because it is an honest book. Despite the bad news about the news industry -- and our own folly for buying into it --Sommerville concludes with a vision of hope. The last chapter of the book is titled "Virtual Society or Real Community?" Sommerville does not believe that the news product can be improved. He wants us to give it up. We should cut down our news infusion, he advises. Instead of daily, read the news weekly, or better yet, only once a month. The result might be that instead of paying lip service to issues far from us, we will learn something deeper about the issues that really matter to us. And then, ultimately, we will take action to improve the community around us. "Think locally and act locally," might be the motto here.

Thomas Jefferson, as quoted by Sommerville, was not a fan of newspapers. Jefferson wrote: "Nothing can be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. ...I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing the world of their time. ... The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors."

Jefferson here, is echoing the famous idea of Socrates and the Zen masters, that to know you know nothing is better than to falsely believe that you know. Sommerville shrewdly elucidates this Jeffersonian notion. In this wise book he thoroughly explores a newsworthy problem and offers a workable solution, a solution that is in our power to enact. We have become an ignorant and passive society, while the new Millennium -- more than any other time in history -- calls for informed and active women and men. We can change the world by individual action: by thinking more, by talking more, by improving our own neighborhoods, by reading more significant books. One of these significant books is How The News Makes Us Dumb, and reading it will help to make us smart.

Michael Pastore Reviewer

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Be a News Junky - Kick the Habit Now, May 15, 2000

By 

Bernard M. Patten "Book worm" (Seabrook, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society (Paperback)

How can you know for sure that they are not telling you the truth? That is the question answered by this little gem of a book. We have all known that if you watch TV you are wasting your time for TV is junk food for the mind - mental material of no intellectual or lasting value. In fact, studies have shown that while watching TV all the great powers of the human mind are quiescent. The sadder part about this is that TV prevents us from using that time for better purposes such as sleeping or reading or, should I even mention it in this hyped up era, for thinking. Lost opportunities to learn and think eventually take their toll and make us dumb. The same holds true for reading the newspapers. The paucity of wit and wisdom in the news is no accident, as Professor Sommerville so well knows. It is by design. And the design is to sell more newspapers and their glitz bag counterparts, magazines. The design is to make us information junkies and overdose us on trivia. Fortunately, the solution to this gigantic problem might be close at hand. Read his book and discover for yourself what that solution is.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Newsflash!! Information does not make one wise!!, October 18, 1999

By 

David H. (Smalltown, Iowa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society (Paperback)

C.John Sommerville has produced an excellent quick read detailing the reason daily news MUST fail to bring wisdom to its consumers. This is a timely thesis for our news obsessed and saturated society and since completing the book some months ago my life has changed for the better. During my recent daily news "diet-restriction" I have become better informed and more active in the topics that truely have a bearing upon myself, my family, and my community.

He points out the obvious fact that news corporations are businesses, and the end business of business is to make money. How does that happen with regard to the news? By creating consuming, returning customers. Therefore, the driving purpose of the daily news is not to inform, but rather to SELL. The detail C. John Sommerville provides to support this point is sufficient and the style is appropriate.

I would commend this book to anyone with a mind open enough to consider questioning the importance of the daily drivel.