Letters to the Editor
casual_observer
Published Letters: 1253 Editor's Choice: 1
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Perception and Change in Media
[Read the article: Do national journalists agree with Gary Kamiya?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The following is from Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. While Kuhn's subject is how science changes, I believe his model may be appropriate for other realms as well, including political change, and/or change in journalism. GG's post centers on what professional journalists are actually perceiving these days, and I believe the following is relevant to understanding them, the conservative right, and even conservative trolls on this site:
"In a psychological experiement that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify, on short and controlled exposure, a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g. a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Each experimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to a single subject in a series of gradually increased exposures. After each exposure the subject was asked what he had seen, and the run was terminated by two successive correct identifications.
Even on the shortest exposures, many subject identified most of the cards, and after a small increase all the subjects identified them all. For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades or hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience. One would not even like to say that the subjects had seen something different from what they identified. With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say: That's the six of spades, but there's something wrong with it--the black has a red border. Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others. A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories. Even at fourty times the average exposure required to recognize normal cards for what they were, more than 10 per cent of the anomalous cards were not correctly identified. And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: "I can't make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn't even look like a card that time. I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or a heart. I'm not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!"
Either as a metaphor or because it reflects the nature of the mind, that psychological experiment provides a wonderfully simple an cogent schema for the process of scientific discovery...In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation."
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The Fix
[Read the article: Do national journalists agree with Gary Kamiya?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We have dissected the corpse--time to write up the cause of death.
The corpse ain't dead. It is still living and breathing, creating uncritical stories, harming the republic. Operating within a flawed paradigm.
In my view, one of the central questions is what strategy is likely to bring healthy journalism the fastest? For example, should people like Greenwald continue to hammer away at the corporate media in order to provoke change (not suggesting this is GG's goal)? Or conversely, should there be an effort to simply write them off, and produce new venues that will simply replace existing media as we know it.
My own belief is that good, healthy journalism will be produced faster and with least effort by bypassing the corporate media machine, which is too deeply entrenched and--as GG opines here--largely unable to perceive that a problem exists.
Instead, create new venues, and new journalism 'critters' if you will. For a number of reasons--social, technological, political--it appears that now is a propitious time to do this.