People buy perceptions. Malcolm Gladwell did a great job of illustrating this in his book Tipping Point when he described the role of graffiti cleaning action in combating the crime wave in New York back in the 1980s. It was, by all accounts, a matter of focusing on perceptions that the NYC chose as the way of creating a feeling of more security and crime-rate reduction in what was becoming an unlivable city, full of fearful residents.
More importantly, the strategy was successful. By choosing a few variables to focus on, and creating the perception that things were improving (among other things, graffiti were disappearing from public places and metro carriages as fast as they were appearing indicating that the city was winning the 'war'), things really improved.
If this sounds like a bit of new-age mambo-jumbo, think again. The role of perceptions in collective human psychology is a powerful one. Public relations practitioners understand this well. As do companies, organisations and individuals that use them to support whatever ends they want.
You may wonder why I am writing about perceptions. In fact, I was inspired by two things.
First, the Innovation Attitudes in Australia Survey results, which we've published on the site this week, revealed a very interesting sentiment -- quite a few survey respondents made a number of scathing remarks about the role of negative media reporting in creating a community less willing to co-operate, innovate and progress.
And then, I read a piece on reporting suicide, published in this week's issue of The Economist (page 62). It talks about the role of media reporting in increasing the number of youth suicides in South Wales. In it, the South Wales police and Oxford University's Centre for Research were quoted as saying that by keeping the subject of youth suicide, with a great deal of detail attached, in the public eye over time contributed to the number of subsequent deaths. It also contributed to the number of copycat suicide cases. The media, the article argued, 'tipped' the already vulnerable youngsters over the edge. The reporting of these issues, over and over again, and in great detail created what Malcolm Gladwell would call the 'tipping point' for a social trend to take shape.
As a "fresh" migrant in Australia, I remember spending the first few years here passionately arguing with everyone that some level of media censorship was not a bad thing. (For the record, as a young journalist, I was suspended for oposing censorship on a story of great social relevance, and I would like to stress that I am not arguing that censorship is something that should be practiced as a matter of course.) At the time, most of my debate-partners thought of me as a slightly derranged product of a socialist society, and the one that didn't quite get the noble idea that is the freedom of speech. Yet, I maintained then, as I do now, that freedom of speech is not the same as the imperative to tell only the bad news. What this means is keeping bad news in perspective.
This is not to say that bad news should not be reported. But understanding how over-reporting of bad news can create undesirable social trends is a very interesting and important task for all of us.
Socially, this is a delicate game. Being able to report corrupt behaviour in order to tackle it is something any society should cherish. But creating panic when panic is best kept at bay is also something a society should be able to do. Recent stock-market fluctuations are a case in point.
The media, of course, is also the fourth pillar of democracy. It is meant to be there to 'keep the bastards honest'. Yet, its social influence is so pervasive these days it would be foollish not to criticise their overwhealming bias towards negative stories. Because the continous barrage of negative impressions must have some effect on the society, its values and its behaviour by creating a number of 'tipping points'. This is not to say that we should settle for telling lots of sweet, white lies to the world and ourselves (even though the media are rather guilty of that as well, but that's a different story). Yet, the question of how much of bad news is too much is certainly worth our collective consideration.
As I said at the beginning of this blog, people buy perceptions. And the perception that there are only bad news to be reported is certainly not a benign one. Not for any society.
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If it bleeds, it leads.
The 'broken windows' idea of crime prevention originated in that form in an article in the Atlantic in 1982 by James Wilson and George Kelling. Kelling was hired by the New York Transit Authority in the mid eighties and set about cleaning the graffiti off the trains faster than the vandals could spray it on. This was so successful the head of the Transit Police adopted it by trying to stamp out petty crime on the subway in an effort to improve the social climate and so deter serious crime. This was then famously taken on by Mayor Rudy Gulliani whose "Zero Tolerance" approached turned a city which had been called ungovernable in the 1970s into one where the murder rate plummetted.
Others have argued that a booming economy was the real driver of a change which every single sociologist had completely failed to predict or that the legalisation of abortion in the early seventies had much to do with a fall in the number of criminals twenty years later. Others hold that simply locking up more criminals is the most successful policy of all.
Tamara's points are as intelligent and incisive as ever but I think she overstates the importance of the old mass media. In this age of the internet the power of any one network or newspaper to influence the debate or moral climate is waning as fast as their classified advertising revenues. More fundamentally, people just like bad news. Drivers slow down to 'rubber neck' an accident, kids run across a playground to cheer on any two kids squaring up for a fight and a lot more films get made about bank robbers than librarians. Who wants to hear gossip about someone's wonderfully happy marriage? You might as well try to pass a law against human nature.
The crop of suicides around Bridgend is tragic, though those who've been to south wales might wonder why the suicide rate is as low as it is, but one might argue that a tougher line in regarding suicide as a brutal, heartless act designed to ruin the lives of everyone who loved you for the rest of time, rather than a 'cry for help' might be more effective than a partial media blackout. The social stigma against suicide was undeniably cruel in the past, with people denied burial in consecrated ground, but indulging it as just another way to achieve the modern holy grail of victimhood is to encourage it and there's no point in pretending otherwise.
Bad news is always going to be the stock in trade of a free media. Of course the TV news will make a big deal of the stock market 'plunging' two percentage points, as if we're all going to be queueing up at soup kitchens tommorow, and completely ignore its subsequent recovery but somehow capitalism survives. Tractor production was always booming in the Soviet Union according to Pravda and we all know what happened there. We're living at a time of unmatched peace and prosperity but instead of actually enjoying the bounty of science and capitalism we have to invent doom laden scenarios (yes, I'm looking at you Global Warming) because we've run out of real ones. The safer our lives become, the more obsessed with safety we are. The French really do always have if not a word, than a phrase for it - The happier our lives, the more we yearn to drown in a glass of water.
In the end, you have to take the rough with the smooth. A free press is going to be sensationalist, irresponsible and often downright wrong. Anyone with any expertise in anything can only scoff when reading an article touching on their subject in the press, but like democracy, a free press is the least worst option. Sunshine really is the best disinfectant and if the scare stories are often little more than hot air (yes, Global Warming, stop shifting about in the back there) then at least they keep the powers that be on their toes and give us something to complain about around the water cooler in the morning.
Twas ever thus I'm afraid. Goethe wrote 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' at the age of twenty four in 1774. It catapulted him to literary fame yet he disowned the book in later life, not least because it was blamed for the suicide of perhaps two thousand romantically obsessed young men around Europe. Should some state appointed censor have read that book upon its completion, somehow guessed it would have that effect (if indeed it actually did), banned its publication and suggested one of the great literary geniuses stick to his legal studies? There are always costs to free speech, and a free society, but the costs of not having those things is always infinitely greater. The press is indeed stupid, venal and sensationalistic, and long may it remain so.