How the News Makes Us Dumb

Author: C. John Sommerville
ISBN: 0-8308-2203-8
Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Review
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This book is an argument against the news media as we currently understand it including its dailiness, its productization, and its deconstruction of context. He does not offer constructive criticism as it is his diagnosis that the media cannot be fixed, only removed like some sort of disease.

Even though the author has recommended against reviewing his book, i.e. one cannot reduce a prolonged argument to a few short phrases, I will offer my opinion of his argument.

First, the author seems to weigh very heavily towards the opinion that journalism in any state is ill-conceived and essentially flawed and although he offers a few conciliatory sops, he is obviously contemptuous of it. I believe that investigative journalism is a privilege of a free society and perhaps even a necessity. So I don't fully agree with him that we need to completely trash the news. He does offer investigative reporting in book form as a beneficial activity which I certainly agree with, but sometimes a book may not be the proper venue.

Having said that, I fully agree with the main thrust of his thesis that daily news is essentially irrelevant and most likely harmful. I especially liked the quote from Thomas Jefferson, "..the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed that he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." I equate partaking of news media with eating junk food. After you have eaten you are full, but you are still empty nutritionally. From political pandering to scientific superstition-mongering to historical irrelevancy the news offers us nothing but vanity. And what about those polls and statistics, well to paraphrase Mark Twain there are "lies, damnable lies, and statistics." I also liked the various examples that Sommerville gives of the incredible variation in interpretation of the "facts" by newspapers on the same day. Truly our reflection, our gathering of wisdom, even our understanding of our generation is horribly skewed if our sole information source is the news.

I just wonder what the author thinks of the Internet, and even of blogging. He doesn't mention the WWW, yet it appears that he has dedicated his book to it. Very odd.