Customer Reviews

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

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...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

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.

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.

A fine book about what's wrong the news media; all of it, not just TV. The book examines only one aspect of what's wrong, the need for daily news to fill up pages and airtime, but that alone is a big service. Now, if someone would just write a book about how the news media has become the most powerful branch of government ....

POSTSCRIPT: Six years old now, Sommerville's book was a prophecy - bold, and more accurate than perhaps he knew. Watch how the implosion of the conventional news media transforms our politics and culture. Americans are now like the proles of late communism, waking up to the fact of being manipulated and misled by media elite spoonfeeding, starting with the no-longer-newspaper-of-record and ending with the latest Michael Jackson newsflash. Only they don't know yet the extent and nature of the brainwashing - the media unraveling has only just started.

Once unraveled, the media will lose the usurped powers that never belonged to them - journalism isn't a profession, journalists are rarely knowledgable about the stories and issues they cover, the media are not a fourth branch of government, libel laws should apply to everyone, restrictions on political speech should apply to the media or to no one - and so on. Journalism is not a priesthood. How did we let them grab so much clout, to the point of intimidating politicians and decisively shaping how we select them and how they govern us?

The discrediting of liberal institutions is the larger epic, and the universities are next. They stand now where the news media stood 5 or 10 years ago. The delegimitization there will be driven by the absurd cost of hollow, politically-correct-monocultural, and no-longer-funny undergraduate education. You won't have long to wait.

I and others who have lawsuits which gain notariety have often wondered how the press so consistently gets it wrong. We thought we had figured why TV always did, but the newspapers', even with the good ones, erroneous reporting baffled us. This book explains why. I wish he had come up with some way of fixing the news; but as Prof. Sommerville notes, it's inherent in the beast. News, by virtue of its "dailyness," will miss the point, and always miss the significance. What we could never understand--until now--is how the news would be biased in favor of my clients in one case and against them in the next, even when dealing with the same issues. Nor could we understand how the press could get the case facts wrong and, even more importantly, get the case's significance wrong, irrespective of the bias. No one will read the news in the same way again. I note that a few of my fellow amateur reviewers didn't like the book for reasons which frankly defy reason. I invite you to read the book and decide. It is said that one test of a new idea is how well it explains previously unexplained phenomena. Under that test, Sommerville's thesis is inescapably valid.

John C. Sommerville manages to pinpoint many of the problems with daily media, and what to do about it. After reading this book I found new reasons to reread classic works, and to start reading more about history and culture. The book is an eye-opener to the sad fact that daily media have monopolized an ever increasing timeslice of our daily life, and questions if that time might not be spent doing more constructive things. I hope the author can forgive me when I call the book one of the most newsworthy I've read.

This book isn't comprehensive on the topic, but it's a well-thought-out essay on one particular aspect of modern day society.

My guess is that the folks that disagree or are insulted by this book are somewhat confused because they don't identify with the mindset the author is talking about. It's definitely worth reading the book and then listening to those countless hundreds of people you walk by every day. Get out more and listen to what other people talk about day to day. More often than not, it's disturbing.

Our news media are broken, and they can't be fixed, says Sommerville. The news, especially, trivilaises everything of import, because it decontextualises. Ever since news companies have had to make a profit like any other corporation, they have inevitably been driven to make today's (very jaundiced) view of reality seem all-important. How do they select what to report, and how to frame it? The predigested snippets are packaged in sensatonalism, with all the authority of the (pseudo-) experts, to make sure you come back tomorrow for more. News has become MacNews. It would be marvellous if every student could develop the critical sense that Sommerville outlines in this rather chattily-written book. An easy read, with a devastating critique of the news media. Read it, today!

Wow! What a book!! Whether you are into the "news" or not, you need to read this eye opener book.

Fast read. A book so well written that you absorb his insight quickly.

He lays out why many people try to be well informed but continue to make poor decisions. He says, Consuming too much of the industrial product, "NEWS" affects our mind. In very brief chapters he explains how and why. The news pretends to hold us together. After we consume too much news we think less clearly. Events that do not make it to the papers and TV will never be in the news, however they might become part of the history of our time. That is more important than most of the news in the long run. What is important is removed, what is left over gets into the newscast. News that is selected cannot tax our patience or our intelligence. The news is the, "-flotsam and the foam on the surface of history"

"The product of the news business is change, not wisdom. Wisdom is elsewhere. Wisdom sees things in their larger context, news is structured to destroy the larger context".

"Come back tomorrow for more "important" news, but tomorrow you can forget today's important news, it won't be important. Journalistic credibility is gone, never to return, it can't be fixed."

"News people have gotten smarter about the news business, and we get dumber."

"In our past, news was a small bit of what we took in. We were balanced by a rich culture, books and conversation. News concentrates the mind, but we thought it was to broaden our mind." "Too much news creates confused and scatter-brained students."

"Just about anytime they report something on which we have personal knowledge, we catch distortions, but we still come back for more,".

Books give you wisdom. Wisdom and reflection are far more important than news. I read 10% of any book before I put it down. A good book I will be finish that day. If the first 8-10% is not good it DOES NOT GET BETTER, just like bad TV. This is a very good book, I rate it in my top 1% of all books I have read. Also read; Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment: Rediscovering Passion and Wonder by Richard Winter, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business]] by Niel Postman, and Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word