Connections: The Blindness of Cultural Arrogance

CONNECTIONS What connects these disparate pieces of information?

Here are the stories up for today’s Connections. See what you think links them.

BAD JOURNOS First up, The Atlantic’s columnist, Michael Kinsley complains that newspaper articles, as opposed to Internet news, are too long and a big part of the reason readers are jumping the paper-journalism ship.

DON’T LET FACTS INTERFERE WITH MY THEORY Second, The New Yorker travels to a remote tribe in the Amazon, the Pirahã, to report on their confounding language, a tongue so confounding — and sung as much as spoken — that it has called into question Noam Chomsky’s prevailing theory about how human language evolved.

WHITE PEOPLE ARE UNIQUELY TUNED TO BE SAVIORS Finally, New York Times columnist David Brooks jumps on the anti-Avatar bandwagon to bewail the Great White Messiah myth that drives the story so many popular films. Popular with white people, that is.

First a quick précis of each.

Cut This Story!

In “Cut This Story!“ Kinsley argues that technology is not the only reason people prefer their news from the Web over newspapers. Newspaper articles are too long, while Internet news gets right to the point. Newspaper writers themselves are not to blame, though. Crusty old news writing conventions add verbiage with little more understanding.

Kinsley points to a typical New York Times story, “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House,” (1,456 words long!) as an example. Here’s the lead:

Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

Fewer than half these 36 words explain what actually happened; the rest, Kinsley notes, are what journalists call “context”:

Once upon a time, this unnecessary stuff was considered an advance over dry news reporting: don’t just tell the story; tell the reader what it means. But providing “context” … has become an invitation to hype. In this case, it’s the lowest form of hype—it’s horse-race hype—which actually diminishes a story rather than enhancing it.

Readers who care about health reform already have the context, Kinsley argues. He also cites newspapers for a reliance on experts whose quotes “magically turn an opinionated story into an objective one.”

The New York Times, Kinsley asserts, should rely on its own trustworthiness to tell the news rather than relying on a middleman (A.K.A, expert) to make its case.

Whoa! Really, Mr. Kinsley? That’s a pretty ludicrous — and dangerous — assertion, but we’ll get back to that.

Next: Why a confounding primitive tribe threatens the leading theory of human language »