Being Informed

For a long time America was unique in that we were a democracy, a system where power was not derived by divine mandate or lucky genetics but by the will of the governed. Afterall, who had more at stake in the chosen method of government than those who were living under the decisions of that government?

But one of the key components for any thriving democracy is an informed electorate.

If the people wield the power, then they must be sufficiently educated to responsibly and effectively use that power.

The founding fathers were well aware of the importance of an informed public in a working democracy, as Thomas Jefferson said “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never has and never will be.”

And because of the critical role that our public plays in the operation of our government, our nation has adopted the quality of “being informed” as a national virtue.

Students are taught in their government classes to begin paying attention to the news, form their own opinions, seek to understand their ideological opponents, remain vigilant against biases or flaws in their own thinking, and ultimately to vote in accordance with their beliefs.

But the practice of “informing one’s self” changed with the advent of the internet.

While the internet made it much easier to access and consume information, it also made the quantity of that information overwhelming and the quality of that information inferior.

Prior to the internet, newspapers were great businesses.

They were virtually local monopolies, that consistently produced healthy profits, and remained largely impervious to upstart rivals. They commanded great loyalty from their reader base and often posed attractive investment opportunities. In fact, one of Warren Buffett’s greatest investments of all time was the one he made in The Washington Post in 1973.

The lack of competition in the newspaper industry prior to the internet meant that news organizations could focus on reporting the news, not maximizing view counts or site visits.

No journalist tracked the success of their reporting with digital metrics because they couldn’t!

They tracked the success of their metrics with “real-life” social metrics like how many people wrote letters complimenting their reporting for the quality of its research or the novelty of the perspective it presented.

Newspapers did not have to write the most sensationalized headlines or produce hyper-partisan/rage baiting articles to maintain their audience. They could simply focus on reporting the news in a way that left their readers smarter, better informed, and more aptly equipped to cast their votes.

But the internet destroyed the geographic barriers to entry in the media industry. No longer was the Dallas Morning News solely competing against the Dallas Times Herald. Every newspaper in America was now competing with one another.

And as these geographic barriers eroded, so too did the previously stellar margins for these newspaper businesses.

Buffett saw this phenomenon play out in real time as he observed at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Conference in 2006, “If you go back 50 or 60 years and think about how people got informed or entertained then, the choices were far fewer… And as the years have gone by what technology has done is opened up a huge variety of ways of being informed, faster certainly, and whether it is better depends on who you ask… Any time you get more and more people competing in any given area, generally the economics deteriorate.”

The previous business model for newspapers was no longer sustainable.

Content was increasingly digital native and the resources required to support a strong newsroom no longer made financial sense in a world where readers could consume any type of media they desired, often for free, on the internet.

While in many industries, the presence of increased competition benefits the consumer in the form of lower prices or improved product quality, in the case of the news industry, the product became worse for consumers. The degradation of the local newspaper spelled the doom of high quality news and the rise of sensationalism.

Ask someone how they “stay informed” today and they will likely say that they get their news on social media or from a hyper partisan website. These sources of media are great at capturing your attention but not at rewarding your attention with good information.

The news industry, which should be focused on equipping our electorate with the proper information to convey power in a democracy, is instead forced to focus on invoking rage in their viewers because rage is addictive and rage sells. Unfortunately, rage is good for the bottom-line in today’s media landscape.

Voters are not better equipped to cast votes from watching CNN or Fox News. They are simply more angry. And this new definition of “informing one’s self” is a net negative for society.

“I sometimes think that what you read in the paper is like the shadow to the substance.” - Robert Caro

Even before the internet, the news was not great at reporting stories with total accuracy.

During a conversation with Richard Heffner, Robert Caro was asked if he believes that money plays as large a role in politics today as it did during the years of Lyndon Johnson when Johnson served as a conduit for the flow of Texas oil money into Washington, greasing the gears of the American political engine.

Caro responded, “I don’t know, because one of the things I learned doing these books is that you don’t really know from what you read in the papers… you have to really wait until you can go behind that.”

In other words, the truth takes time and time is not a luxury that news reporters have ever been afforded. The constant need to churn out articles quickly, often racing against competitors, is a dynamic that runs antithetical to the discovery of truth, a trend that has only been strengthened since the dawn of the internet. So naturally, reporting is often far from the truth or at least fails to capture the entirety of the truth.

An accurate understanding of historical events likely can’t be uncovered for years, until official papers are declassified and enough time has passed for the decision makers and first-hand observers to speak openly about the matter without fear of consequence.

As a historian who writes books about people and events that occurred decades ago, Caro has the luxury of being able to study the declassified original documents and speak to those who have a first hand account of the events of his interest, without a pressing timeline.

Caro can also compare these source documents and first hand accounts with the news that was reported at the time. Often he is shocked by just how far the news’ understanding of events are from the reality of what occurred.

The prime example of this was an event that occurred during Johnson’s time in the United States Senate.

Before 1957, pro Civil Rights legislation had not peen passed since the reconstruction period in America (~100 years). And despite overwhelming national sentiment in favor of a new civil rights bill, the likelihood of an effective bill getting passed through the Senate seemed unlikely.

This was largely due to the Southern Bloc, a group of Senators from the 11 Southern states who held great power in the Senate.

Lyndon Johnson was allied with the Southern Bloc as a freshman Senator eager to advance. But as his goal of ascending to the presidency seemed within sight, he knew that he would need to garner appeal with Northern liberal voters. And the perfect way to do so was by passing a civil rights bill.

So Johnson examined the landscape of the Senate, searching for votes in favor of civil rights that had historically been impossible to find.

What he soon realized was that Senators from the Western states desperately wanted a dam built in Hell’s Canyon, in between Idaho and Oregon. Johnson came to believe that if he could ensure the Westerners receive their dam, they would support civil rights, an issue that traditionally they did not care to intervene in given that it was not a hot issue in their home states.

Not only did Johnson negotiate a quid pro quo with these senators (the dam for the civil rights bill), he also invoked their sense of duty by saying to Idaho Senator Frank Church, “You are not a Senator just from Idaho, you are a Senator of the United States!”

Johnson even told Church and his wife stories “about how he was a school teacher when he was in Cataula, down in this Mexican town near the border, the kids didn’t have textbooks and what it meant not to have textbooks.” Witnesses to these conversations told Caro “Those were some of the most passionate evenings I ever spent in my life and at the end of them, Frank was for civil rights.”

So the two greatest contributing factors to the passage of the first civil rights legislation since reconstruction, the Hell’s Canyon dam and LBJ’s strong emotional appeals to individual Senators, were entirely invisible to the eyes of reporters. As a result they were never reported to Americans and the public was left ignorant to what actually caused the most righteous yet difficult of bills to be passed in the Senate.

Newspaper men were aware of the Hell’s Canyon dam and civil rights bill in isolation and that’s how they were reported. But no one in the media understood that these two legislative goals were, in fact, the lynch pins for one another.

As Caro was to say, “Now you don’t really see reading in the papers… the papers are treating the Hell’s Canyon dam as one story and the Civil Rights Bill as another story.”

But thanks to the passage of time, declassification of documents, and diligent research by Caro, we now know the truth of the matter.

The mainstream news today has been stripped of much of its informational nutrition. The once righteous role that it played in our political system does not seem to be performed as virtuously as it once had.

I’m not sure what the solution to this degradation of the news is.

But I do think we have reasons to be optimistic.

There’s citizen journalism.

There’s subsidized local journalism.

There’s independent, reader supported journalists.

These are some creative solutions to what I think is a large and crucial problem.

As Franklin Roosevelt once said, “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”