Stop Staring at the Goddamn Sun!

Practical bits on consuming news and information...

My best school teacher was a guy named Bob Cook. He taught my high school civics class and he did more than go over the three branches of government and show us Schoolhouse Rock videos, which would have been pretty daffy considering we lived in a State Capitol and that the student body was made up of kids of lobbyists, legislators, and other politicos. Mr. Cook not only broke down things like bureaucracies and the filibuster, he taught us practical stuff that would make our personal politics clearer and our perceptions effective.

The most important of Mr. Cook’s lessons was how to read the daily paper, a skill few seem to have nowadays. We spent a month on dissecting the newspaper, and more time discussing news coverage, far more time than we did on how laws are made and the intricacies of elections. Mr. Cook believed – as I do – that the minutia of governance is trivia unless you know how to look and analyze what you are seeing, and that focus starts with being able to understand and process information.

This was back in the 1980s, before CNN and the 24-hour news cycle, way before the internet and what seems like an endless deluge of information, way way before social media and the explosion of mis- and disinformation. Still, Mr. Cook’s basic lessons are very helpful today.

Mr. Cook started with bias, institutional bias, regional bias, economic bias, and political bias. He gave us highlighters and had us go through newspapers and identify bias, including what we thought was a reporter’s personal prejudice. Mr. Cook took what we found and contextualized it, so that we understood what bias was inevitable and what was not, what was acceptable and what was not, what was manipulative and what was not.

Mr. Cook marked up the sports page, most of which he highlighted. The parts he didn’t were stats and scores, which meant that the box scores escaped his pen. Thus, he showed us how to identify fact and separate them from opinion, while not dismissing opinion just because it was biased. He gave us highlighters and had us attack the day’s front section, and then we compared our work. The lesson was not to a set of rules or good and bad, but part of developing tools to become better students, better thinkers, better citizens.

These lessons in bias practically applied to the newspaper gave us great critical thinking tools to consume news coverage and parse information, a good foundation for the next lesson, which was figuring out what news was worth consuming. Though we were dealing with only two local newspapers and a handful of other regional ones, and not the endless stream of stuff we muddle through today, Mr. Cook’s basic tools are still sound.

First, read news stories that personally impact you. Since we were students, Mr. Cook had us highlight stories on education, as well as anything dealing with youth. Then prioritize that pool of stories according to relevancy and interest. Battles over the state education budget are important, but, for students, not as important as proposed statewide student conduct code, something that would hit us personally. A story on education policy in France could back-burner, unless you were really interested in French education policy, were going to France as an exchange student, or were a Francophile.

Second, identify and dismiss non-stories disguised as stories. A contemporary example is Donald Trump’s odd obsession with imperialism. Last month, he made a half-serious play for making Canada our 51^st state. He also proposed buying Greenland – which is not for sale – and taking over the Panama Canal – a nonstarter. All of that is nonsense, non-stories. Same with Trump’s “Gulf of America” name game, which is annoying as a hairball but more of an absurd show of weakness and defeat (no Canada, no Greenland, no Panama) than something serious. Sure, I’ll still call it the “Gulf of Mexico,” but that is as much attention as I’ll give to those non-stories.

With a gang as chatty as Trump’s, we get a lot of words, most of them worthless, words for words sake or for distraction or to mislead us, whatever, unless the words dictate or result in action, they are just words. “Just words” also includes many of Trump’s official orders, such as demanding that someone do something about high prices. “Just words” also extends to Trump’s outbursts. A great example is his tit-for-twit with Kim Jong Un during Trump’s first time through. The “heated rhetoric” was frightening at the time, but it turned out to be a dance, not a fight, two corpulent men feeling each other up before they pig-piled.

Sticking with the the Trump/Un bromance: Following the name calling and saber rattling was super fucking stressful. It didn’t feel like foreplay to anyone watching, but a bumbling march towards war. And what made it even more stressful was that we were on the sidelines, watching powerless, waiting for the apocalypse to come. And though we were helpless to influence Kim or Trump, or to change the discourse, or mold the outcome, we still stared.

Our obsession got us nothing but grief. No change. No relief. No information we could use. Hell, no real information. No, what we got was the “pleasure” of watching to gross men symbolically make out. From a totally practical standpoint, that whole event was a series of non-stories, non-stories Mr. Cook told us to shitcan.

I know that, spelled out, this is very basic stuff. However, these are also lessons that we’ve forgotten, lessons which gave us skills that we’ve also forgotten or neglect to use. This is understandable considering how much shit has been thrown at us and how much information (and nonsense) gets generated daily. It is also understandable given that we are constantly told that to be a “good citizen” we have to be well informed, without being told that well informed does not mean consuming every bit of information, something that is as intellectually and spiritually dangerous as trying to eat everything at the all-you-can-eat buffet will damage you physically.

Faced with a flood, we freeze and forget that we have a say in how we consume this stuff. We get frustrated and depressed. We turn off all news coverage and retreat within ourselves and those closest to us. We become atomized and cynical. We go from the extreme of being far too immersed to another of dropping out. And the sad thing about this distancing is that it doesn’t have to happen.

We have the tools to stay engaged with our heads so far above water that we can surf on information. Develop these tools and we can take on Mavericks, Jaws, or Nazare. And, once we stop panicking over news and turn our gaze from the sun, our fight becomes much less messy and much more effective, and they waste their time churning out shit, a weapon that no longer has much power.