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Good news and bad news

Good news and bad news

Last updated on: December 15, 2010 at 8:40 pm by Fred Clark

Good news and bad news 2010-12-15T20:40:10-05:00 Fred Clark

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First, some good news: "Parks' residents buy out owner for $31 million."

Residents of Country Lakes Villages (Palmetto, Fla.), a two-park manufactured home community, have completed their bid to buy their parks for $31 million.

The homeowners bought the Palmetto property from [a Calif.] company that had owned it for 12 years. The California company paid $14.1 million for the park in August 1998.

The deal that just closed included 444 lots. … The sale price translates into $69,820 per lot.

The deal was financed with a $25.76 million loan from Bank of America.

The community's homeowners association converted the traditional manufactured housing community into a resident-owned cooperative, called a "ROC."

Residents now own their land and can control lot rents and decisions about maintenance and management.

So the homeowners are now on solid ground financially, with stability and security for the future, building equity instead of facing the prospect of financially disastrous eviction. The former landowner turns a nifty profit on the property. And Bank of America adds to its books a stable, profitable and low-risk long-term loan (collateralized by land, owed by people with a history of making equivalent monthly payments on time, year after year). Win-win-win.

That's good news.

Newspapers like to pretend they don't differentiate between good news and bad news. That sort of judgment, they say, would be editorializing — characterizing the news rather than simply reporting it disinterestedly and objectively.

This claim is silly, pretentious and impossible. Every day, on every page, newspapers report good news and bad news, almost always characterizing it as such. Good news is celebrated. Bad news is lamented and regretted. Every day on every page. And that is how it should be.

The newspapers' identity myth cannot be believed by anyone who has actually read a newspaper, yet the myth and the pretense continues. "It's not our job to say whether the news is good or bad," the newspapers claim. "It's only our job to report the truth."

This claim is both incoherent and disingenuous.

It is incoherent because it is impossible to be committed to the truth without also being committed to the good (and to the beautiful). These things are inseparable. We settled that point way back before Socrates and it has never been unsettled.

The claim is disingenuous because, again, newspapers are constantly reporting on the days' news as being either good or bad. This is not — as the pretense pretends — a matter of "taking sides," but of acknowledging them. It is an inseparable and unavoidable aspect of the newspapers' commitment to accuracy.

The pretense that journalism requires — or even allows — neutrality or indifference to good and bad is just that, a pretense. A lie. A vain lie in at least two senses of the word. It is a lie told out of vanity and arrogant self-flattery, and it is a futile lie due to its nonstop refutation by the newspapers themselves.

There's a killer on the loose. This is always and accurately reported as bad news. The killer has struck again — bad news. The killer is caught — good news. Miners are trapped — bad news. The miners are rescued — good news. House fires, car crashes, crimes, earthquakes, floods and factory closings are unfailingly reported as what they are: Bad news of bad things. To report on them otherwise would be to violate the commitment to accuracy. Truth-telling requires that good news is presented as good and bad news is presented as bad.

And that is what newspapers in fact, actually do day after day after day, notwithstanding the silly pretense of disinterest.

To understand the survival of this daily-refuted pretense, we have to look beyond it to the pretense behind the pretense. This underlying pretense is the claim that we cannot know what is good. Goodness, this claim says, is too diverse, variable and contentious a thing for us to be able to identify or agree upon it. The goodness of good news, it says, cannot be affirmed due to our religious, political, ethnic and economic pluralism. Any notion of goodness is, according to this claim, unavoidably sectarian, partisan and chauvinistic — a subject of constant dispute among factions competing for power and nothing more than that.

Again, this underlying pretense cannot survive even a single reading of a single page of a daily newspaper. The goodness or badness of the news in the majority of stories is reported as such without dispute, contention or controversy. It could not be otherwise.

And again the pretense behind the pretense is incoherent. If we are to assert that goodness is unknowable and that all we have are competing claims to power masquerading as claims of goodness then we have no choice but to conclude the same thing about truth, at which point newspapers would be obliged to pack it in and go out of business.

Sadly, this seems to be where much of American journalism has arrived. The pretense that we cannot know or say what is good or bad has led inexorably to the corollary pretense that we cannot know or say what is true or false. Unwilling to tell truth from falsehood, we become unable to tell the truth and thus retreat to the shoddy substitute of transcribing competing truth-claims while refusing to investigate which of them correspond to reality — refusing even to accept that such an investigation is possible.

We arrive, in other words, at the sorry "he-said, she-said" stenography now commonly published and broadcast in lieu of actual journalism. This approach abandons journalism's purported commitment to truth-telling — surrendering even the hope that truth-telling is an option.

The miserable flaccidity of this refusal to discern or report the actual facts of the matter is, in my opinion, the only truly terminal disease facing the newspaper industry. The graying of the newspaper-reading population and the increased competition from online and cable TV news sources are not fatal afflictions — merely challenges that should compel newspapers to become better and more valuable competitors. Both of those things could be survived if newspapers hadn't abandoned their willingness to offer the main value they were created to provide: sorting out truth and falsehood. A transcription of true claims alongside false ones, with no indication of which is which, is not a product that anyone is going to waste their time or money on.

Which is one more reason I'm encouraged by this: Get Involved: A partnership between The News Journal/Delawareonline, United Way of Delaware and Delaware nonprofits.

It's pretty cool. Anyone looking to support local charities or nonprofits can search through the database and links to find opportunities for volunteering or donating to 160 organizations (so far).

What's most encouraging to me is that this is an alliance — "a partnership" — between the newspaper and other do-gooders. It acknowledges that do-gooders do good and it unambiguously sides with that good. Bravo.

The pretense (and the pretense behind the pretense) says that newspapers ought never to do this. By siding with the do-gooders, the paper is proclaiming a bias toward good — a preference for good over bad.

This is as it should be. (A preference for good over bad is what "should be" means.) Newspapers are designed and intended to be biased toward the truth, preferring truth to falsehood. That corresponds with a bias toward the good. A newspaper that refuses to distinguish between what is true and what is false is of no use. A newspaper that refuses to prefer what is true to what is false is worse than of no use. And that preference for the truth is, again, inseparable from a preference for the good.

Newspaper culture is so steeped in the dishonest pretense of indifference to the good that it likely makes a lot of newspaper people uncomfortable to read all this stated so explicitly. The pretense requires them to say that they're championing volunteerism not because it's good, but because it's not "controversial." That's obviously not true — a lack of controversy is, at best, a reason not to not act, but it can never in itself be a compelling motive to "Get Involved." This discomfort with explicitly championing the good sheds some light on the problem at the root of the execrable "he-said/she-said" phenomenon. One cannot side with the good or the true when one's primary preoccupation is avoiding any "controversy."

The goodness of good news is every bit as verifiable and supportable as any other attempt at accuracy in journalism. But whether we are discussing the good or the true, journalists seem all too willing and eager to surrender their purported commitment to accuracy whenever that commitment would require a vigorous defense — whenever there is even a hint of "controversy." If a significant number of powerful and/or vocal people want to pick a fight, claiming that falsehoods are true or that goodness is bad, then far too many journalists will simply surrender and retreat rather than defend either one.

You've seen this happen. No matter how true something can be proven to be, once it is disputed journalists will cease to treat it as something that has already been verified as true and verified. They will begin treating it, instead, as something "controversial." And that which is deemed controversial is no longer reported as true — regardless of the facts and the evidence proving it to be so or the utter lack of facts or evidence suggesting otherwise.

All it takes to move any established fact out of the category of fact and into the quagmire of "controversy" is a sufficiently strident assertion. Those making the assertion declare themselves to be a faction and denounce the journalists for supposed bias against their faction. Even the hint of such a denunciation tends to produce equivocation, retreat and surrender.

The same thing occurs with the good. If volunteerism were asserted to be "controversial," you would never see a partnership like the one described above. It would become yet another subject of he-said, she-said equivocation. The imperative "get involved" would be replaced by "Advocates of volunteerism urge others to get involved, while opponents say such involvement is wrong-headed and constitutes CommuniNaziIslamoFascism."

Fifteen years ago the crime of torture was not a matter of controversy. When torture occurred it was unfailingly reported as bad news. Anyone admitting to ordering or executing torture was understood to be confessing to a crime. But the subject was politicized, factionalized and rendered into a "controversy." Now the word itself is rarely used, replaced by obfuscatory euphemisms that sidestep the unambiguous legal definitions, and incidents of torture are reported as neither good nor bad. They aren't really reported at all, only hinted at between the lines of competing contradictory statements from those ever-present, never evaluated "advocates" and "opponents."

A similar transformation is under way regarding waste and pollution. The waste of energy and resources was once clearly understood and reported on as bad news. The elimination of waste was reported on as good news. Journalists invariably took sides on the matter — siding with those who understood the meaning of the word "waste" and against those who did not.

But the wastefulness of waste is now increasingly regarded as a matter of controversy, and thus efforts to reduce waste are no longer reported on as good news. Increasingly, they are not reported on at all — if by "reported on" we mean truth-telling as opposed to more feckless equivocation in which something like "Advocates say energy-efficient light bulbs can save a family $30 per bulb, while opponents say that 'squiggly pig-tailed' bulbs are un-American and note that Al Gore is fat" is substituted for any responsibility to verify, investigate or otherwise do one's damn job as a reporter.

The inability to report waste as wasteful falls into the same category as the inability to report that a killer on the loose is bad news or the inability to report that the atomic number of beryllium is 4. Don't laugh at that last one. If a sufficiently vocal or powerful lunatic began condemning the use of atomic numbers then journalists would quickly adapt to the manufactured controversy: "Advocates of traditional chemistry say that the atomic number of beryllium is 4, while opponents of the old system say atomic numbers are a socialist device and instead assign each element a corresponding Bible verse. The atomic verse for beryllium is 2 Kings 6:29."

It's disturbing to watch this untethering from reality unfolding before us — to watch this timid appeasement of the vicious, the mendacious and the confused all in the name of avoiding controversy as though "accurate" and "uncontroversial" were synonyms, as though "undisputed" and "true" were the same thing.

So I'm heartened by "Get Involved." A commitment to goodness corresponds to a commitment to truth. If we're still capable of the one, maybe we're still capable of the other.

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