Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).--- Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (1912 – 1989), author of The Guns of August, A Distant Mirror, and The First Salute, among others.
Reposted from 2012 after finishing a reread of A Distant Mirror. Note to self: best chapters for future rereads are Chapter 3 (summary of 14th century), 5 (Black Death), 20 (Second Norman Conquest) and 27 final paragraphs.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
ReplyDeleteWhen I moved from Ireland to Germany in 1978 the first question I was often asked was 'How can Catholics and Protestants be killing each other in the 20th century?'. This was when the 'troubles' in northern Ireland were at their height. It always sounded so f@*#ing condescending. Sometimes I would bring up the Holocaust which would kill the conversation pretty quickly. Then I understood this Tuchman's Law a little better: The media never reported 'Today no one was killed or injured in Northern Ireland'. Only the bad new was reported. That is what made headlines. As a journalist or editor I probably would have done the same thing.
ReplyDeleteSince 2006 I work in the middle east and friends in Europe ask me if it is not too dangerous here. My friends here wonder why it is so difficult to get a visa to visit European countries.
Same 'bad-news' media. Nothing changes.
Hmmm...I wonder about this. There is a thought among anti-war types that if we actually saw pictures of our military service members coming home in caskets (which both Bush and Obama did not allow), or if our 24-hour news cycle actually spent at all proportional amounts of time on the horrors in Iraq and Afghanistan, then maybe there would be much stronger opposition to further military action. Perhaps that isn't contradictory to Tuchman's Law, but it seems to have the opposite implication: she's saying disaster reporting is overdone and we assign it too much importance. But isn't lack of reporting more dangerous?
ReplyDeleteI just sum it up as "Good news doesn't sell papers." Or for the modern age "Good news doesn't bring pageviews."
ReplyDeleteI was brow beaten into "volunteering" to cleanup after the Rodney King riots in 1992. The riots started on a Wednesday and burned themselves out over the next couple of days. We went out, car full of white folks, looking for something to cleanup that weekend. We couldn't find anything.
ReplyDeleteif it bleeds it leads ... all media is prapaganda
ReplyDeleteIt's the job of the media to tell you what changed, what's different, not what stayed the same.
ReplyDeletexoxoxoBruce
Or, as S.G. Collins puts it: "We notice the noticeable". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0piXOpm5Js
ReplyDeleteI read a newsletter called Future Crunch that actively tries to report good news: expansion of clean energy and the death of fossil fuels, protection and reclamation of wild lands and the environment overall, improvements in human rights and women’s rights around the world, medical advances, and more. There is a surprising amount of actually good news that doesn’t make it to the newspaper front page or the nightly news. Here is a TED talk by the editor that I really like.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5mAqRx62rk