Is everything also its opposite?

I have been thinking about what happens to a task when it gets taken over by professionals. You might be able to tell that I read a lot. I read a lot of books, I read a lot of newspapers and I read a lot of blogs. To some extent I feel that I missed out on a lot in college because I didn't take any hard science and didn't take much in the way of classics and humanities. Not that there is anything wrong with social science, but it can't give you a rounded education or full view of the world or of human nature by itself. What can I say, I was young and foolish. I didn't discover the fine joys of intellectual calisthenics until law school. So I have been spending much of my adulthood trying to catch up.

I also spend a lot of time trying to keep up. There is a never-ending tsunami of information crashing in waves over my head every day, and there is no way I can possibly assimilate all of it. Part of the reason I feel so unable to keep up is that I simply don't trust any one source. If I want to know what is going on in the world I need to read at least three sources for any one story, because each one will tell the tale a bit differently, depending on what particular axe the author is grinding. Then I have to think about whether my own predispositions are coloring how I read the stories. Somewhere at the end of that process is something that I feel is close enough to truth that I feel comfortable saying I know that particular piece of information. It's a lot of work staying informed and trying to get an accurate picture of what is going on in the world.

Part of the reason it's so much work is that the news generally is reported by journalists. Journalists work in the milieu of the news business, which means that they pick up habits, conventions and modes of thought from others in the news business whom they work with. The newsrooms where they work are filled with other journalists. The editors they report to are journalists. The publishers of the newspapers and producers of the evening news shows are journalists. The concentration of journalists in the news business, and the idea of a journalism profession, means that the journalists acquire from their compatriots habits of mind and ways of thinking about events that make their way into what they report, what they think they should report, and how it should be reported. So what I end up reading in the newspapers is in many ways a homogenized product, sifted through a filter that makes all sorts of decisions about what is and is not worth putting in front of the public, and how to put in front of them what makes it through the filter.

I recognize the phenomenon because I'm in a profession, too. Lawyers get a bad rap for not being truthful. They get that rap because the concept of "truth" has been chopped, sliced and diced in litigation for so long that the idea of something being "true" has taken on a very specific meaning. Typically, when someone has a conversation and is asked a question, what s/he does is interpret the question to figure out what the questioner wants to know, and then provides the information. "Was there anyone in the room when you got there?" Answer: "Karen and Eugene were in the room."

But a lawyer will tell you that the correct answer to that question is "yes." If the questioner wants to know who else was there, the questioner should ask a followup question. The question didn't ask about Karen and Eugene, it just wanted to know if other people were in the room. So talking about Karen and Eugene is like answering "the violins are out of tune this evening." Legal truth is focussed, direct and very, very narrow. Questions that make assumptions will result in misleading answers that are not false. And so on.

I'm used to this somewhat odd notion of truth because I have been practicing law for over twenty years, and I move seamlessly between the real world, where people talk about Karen and Eugene, and the legal world, where Karen and Eugene become subjects of conversation only if someone asks about them.

But I still puzzle over the concept of "newsworthiness" as journalists understand it. There was a contretemps last year in the blogosphere about the US military's discovery of a torture manual and torture chambers used by al-Qaeda in Iraq. It was pretty gruesome stuff: gouging eyes, hacking limbs, burning flesh -- totally revolting, absolutely evil and graphically demonstrative of precisely what al-Qaeda is. Bloggers on the right complained that the media gave the matter very little coverage, in contrast to the nonstop coverage for weeks of the excesses at Abu-Ghraib (example here) ; many on the left explained the relative lack of emphasis by pointing out that, well, of course al-Qaeda tortures people -- they are a collection of terrorists and murderers, after all. Since when is it news that they torture people? For examplae, as Glenn Greenwald said last year:

The reason that it is news that the U.S. tortures, but not news that Al Qaeda does, is because Al Qaeda is a barbaric and savage terrorist group which operates with no limits, whereas the U.S. is supposed to be something different than that. Isn't it amazing that one even needs to point that out?

It's not my purpose here to debate what is or is not torture, whether Abu Ghraib involved torture, or whether torture is ever justified. Andrew Sullivan, Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Greenwald and heaven knows who else have turned this issue over and over, examining it minutely and remonstrating about it endlessly. That's a debate for people who spend more time with the news than I do and have familiarized themselves with the details in a way that I just haven't been able to.

No, what I'm interested in is what this illustrates about "newsworthiness." Presumably it's not newsworthy that the sun rose in the east this morning, nor is it newsworthy that on the average weekday about four million people enter Manhattan to work and leave it in the evening. Traffic on the Harbor Freeway in LA isn't news, and neither are the hundreds of flights that go in and out of O'Hare Airport every day. Why? Because these things are routine. It's what people expect to happen. Routine breeds complacency. Things people are complacent about aren't newsworthy.

What's usually viewed as newsworthy is the proverbial "man bites dog" story. Something unusual. So a subway train that makes twelve round trips a day from the Bronx, through Manhattan and into Brooklyn is not newsworthy. But if the train is derailed? Newsworthy. Millions of mothers feeding their children breakfast before putting them on the school bus in the morning is not newsworthy. But a mother who suffocates her baby then kills herself? Newsworthy.

Viewed this way, Greenwald has a point. Of course al-Qaeda tortures people. That's al-Qaeda for you. It's who they are, it's what they do. It's not unusual, it's to be expected. So of course, page 37 of the newspaper is where the torture chambers and torture manual belong, with the streaks of blood on the walls and the depictions of how precisely to aim the electric drill to cause the maximum pain when making holes in an enemy's head. On the other hand, if some American intelligence agents or soldiers mistreat some prisoners or use rough tactics (I'm choosing my words carefully here because I do'nt want to get into the whole business about how to define torture), then that certainly is newsworthy.

I understand the argument and it makes some sense if you don't think that torture by anyone is the sort of thing that should be newsworthy. That bad people do bad things isn't news, but that good people occasionally do bad things, is. But this whole imbroglio got me thinking about the nature of news and what sort of picture of the world it gives us.

If we form our mental view of the world based on what we see in the newspapers, television and radio, then we live in a truly frightening place: life is a succession of wars, murders, car accidents, floods, psychopaths, terrorists, disasters and criminals. How can we possibly live our lives if we are told by the news outlets, day in and day out, that the world' s events that they consider worth telling us -- what is "newsworthy" -- is death, doom, destruction, decay and dysfunction? How do we know it's ok to leave the house, cross the street or enter a store and not get swept away by a hurricane, gunned down by a thug or run over by a drunk driver? Obviously we factor into our daily lives the humdrum of the routine, otherwise we couldn't function -- but isn't there reason to think that most of the world - or the country, or the city, or the neighborhood -- is a horrible, dangerous place? And if that is the case, then aren't the people whose job it is to tell us what is going on in the world actually doing the opposite: telling us not what the world is really like, but instead focussing on the sores and scabs and diseased parts of it. The professionalization of news has brought us the opposite of news: not an accurate picture of life but its opposite.

It's almost like what I see going on in my professional life. In theory litigation is a search for truth. But, crushed under the pressure of inventive, intelligent and aggressive attorneys, the idea of truth has become so specialized, so sharpened into defined categories, so overanalyzed, that what comes out is something bearing perhaps a family resemblance to the facts as a normal person would see them, but that's about it. The professionalization of the legal process has brought us not truth, but a ritual that pretends it is truth.

I'm not suggesting there is anything to be done about this. Media need eyeballs, otherwise they can't survive, and eyeballs are drawn to the freak shows. Drivers rubberneck at accidents, not at other drivers motoring safely. If people need perspective -- and they do -- they have to supply it on their own, from their own common sense and everyday experience. It's just a shame that perspective sometimes seems to be in such short supply.