| Growing Fur and Flippers |
|
|
Tag it:
| Written by John Berthelsen | |
| Friday, 06 November 2009 | |
 The crisis isn't in journalism. The crisis is in literacy and bad education
Journalism has lately been accused of using words that are too big for the American population, at least, to comprehend, and that those pretensions have led to the demise of the reading (and newspaper buying) population. I am trying to figure out just how this happened. I grew up on a dairy farm in Siskiyou County, abutting the Oregon border, an area that still could be called California's Appalachia, and for good reason. The isolated, mountainous area, populated by go-it-alone conservatives, remains one of the poorest places in the United States despite its glamorous but tenuous attachment to the golden state. My father, a Danish immigrant, got to the fourth grade before he was sentenced by the death of his father to milking the cows, and later took the voyage to the United States to seek his fortune. He famously learned English from a Sears & Roebuck catalog and a book of poems by Rudyard Kipling. My mother, born in 1903, made it through the eighth grade. But on my parents' bookshelves when I was growing up were books by H L Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, all of the O'Connors – particularly Flannery and Edwin – and some version of the famed Five-Foot Shelf, a 51-volume anthology of classics from world literature. My brother took piano lessons from a workbook by the Austrian pianist and composer Carl Czerny. A woman named Minna Horn taught Latin. In high school, we were expected by our English teacher Rita Campbell to read, understand and deliver intelligent commentary on several plays by Shakespeare. When I was in the 10th grade, I read Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace and novels by Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and many more. I was not a particularly good student. I loved baseball more than English lit, although eventually – maybe because of my lack of batting and fielding skills – I ended up an English lit major. But in 1955 in one of the poorest and most backward regions of California, there were things we were expected to know. Not just us hopeless English majors, but everybody. Football and baseball players in the class of Mrs Ada Stroud were expected to understand, explicate and write about Ivanhoe, admittedly a dreadful Walter Scott novel. We were expected to enter essay contests. I picked one sponsored by the American Legion, a patriotic organization, on the meaning of the addition of the words "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America (Which, to my embarrassment as an atheist, I won. I recall my aggrieved brother, who finished down the list, saying ‘You don't believe in any of that stuff.") The Scott Valley where I grew up was so isolated, ringed by mountains, that there was no television. There would be a couple hundred people in the movie theatre on a Sunday night, and dozens just on the streets. The tiny lending library was packed. I went away to college, and I recall vividly coming home for Christmas in, I believe, 1956. An entrepreneur named Maginnis had installed an antenna on one of the nearby mountaintops and had run wires down to the homes, and ultimately made himself very rich. Desi and Lucy had made Etna, the town where I grew up, into a ghost town. This comes up because of a recent blog in the American magazine Vanity Fair, which drew an outraged reader who said he had given up reading journalism because reporters use big words like schadenfreude (n. Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. [German : Schaden , damage (from Middle High German schade, from Old High German). I cannot believe that readers are giving up reading newspapers because of the journalistic use of words like schadenfreude – which even I as an editor would use with trepidation. If my father, a fourth-grader who was sentenced to work in Denmark in a dairy at the age of 12, was reading the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer on atheistic pessimism at 60, and my mother, who quit school at 14 to work, was reading Edwin O'Connor and Mencken and Sinclair Lewis and a wide variety of other novelists at the age of 50, big words and big ideas were not responsible for the death of newspapers. It is not newspapers that have failed. The English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, contains 157,000 combinations and derivatives, and 169,000 phrases and combinations, making a total of 616,500 word-forms. The average American's working vocabulary is thought to be about 10,000 words (not including *F**k you and *F**k that and shove it up you're a**). That is down from the average American 14-year old's 1950 vocabulary of 25,000 – a fall in 60 years of two-thirds. Newspapers today use a few hundred commonly used words, as few as possible more than two syllables. As journalists we can always shrink to fit if necessary. But maybe it might be wiser to expand vocabularies, and not seek to allow them to contract further. These things have consequences. The lack of critical newspaper comment and analysis contributed to letting George Bush and the neocons push the United States into a truly tragic war, and for Alan Greenspan to let the economy swing so out of balance that it brought on the biggest economic crisis in 70 years. President Barack Obama, who took office in the bright glare of hope, appears to be doing much the same. The Americans are being sucked into a quagmire in South Asia that will doubtless end in tragedy. Annual gross domestic product, we are told, increased by 3.5 percent in the third quarter, with the markets soaring. Things are good and getting better – for everybody but the soldiers being shot and the workers losing their jobs, that is, and we are told the government needs to get out of the economy and cut the deficit. It is the government and the deficits that are responsible for the improvement and for whatever diminution in job losses has taken place. Nobody seems to have noticed, including much of the serious press. The late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, in his not-so-comic novel Gallapagos, imagines a nuclear war in which only a handful of humans on the remote Gallapagos Islands off Peru are left in the wake of a disastrous nuclear war. Gradually they grow flippers and furry skins to cope with their environment, and in a kind of reverse evolution of the species, their intelligence dims because they don't need it to catch fish and survive. How long before they get to "me eat" and "me f**k" and, in the case of Wall Street, "Me make money?" John Berthelsen is the editor of the Asia Sentinel
Set as favorite
Bookmark
Email This
Comments
(6)
Cogs
written by Mamakthir , November 12, 2009
The education system is being built up as a cog keep the big wheel of Capitalism rolling. As a result, students are constantly forced to tailor their studies to follow the whimsical trends in capitalism rather to lead capitalism away from the avarice and self-interests of a few fat cat elites.
Votes: +0
report abuse
vote down
vote up
Big problem!
written by old croc , November 07, 2009
Nowadays students(and the general public) read very little. The only materials they read are the "compulsory" type. Just enough to satisfy the requirements. Most of their time is spent looking(and reading) work mateial. Then it is home to listen(not read) to the T.V. Students read only material given as homework. There is literally no effort spent on reading for enjoyment, "broadening the mind", and reading to satisfy curiosity(about something or someone or whatever). When I was small, I was a voracious reader. I read everything that could be read. I ended up reading my father's books from University. When I was 9, I was reading the classics(e.g. Nathienal Hawthorne, R.L Stevenson, etc) and reading them regularly. After each book has been read, I had to write a precis in 2 exercise book pages. This exercise sharpened my critical and analytical thinking processes and I still use them today. Potential politicians should practise this form of "intellectual" development, and rely less on their ego and other negative attributes. Reading widely broadens the mind almost without limit and one realises how little we humans are compared to the vast universe of knowledge out there. Many people(including politicians) somehow lack this attribute. Those who have it have become different type of politician. Looking at despots around the world, most if not all of them are not "widely read". In fact, they don't read. They depend on their inborn ego, greed and lust for power. I would suggest that all politicians must, early in their career, be made to read widely and write a precis for each book read. Hopefully this will make them for humble and kind to the people they govern. Can you imagine a new world where leaders are broad minded, charitable, peace loving, honest and kind? Certainly the world needs leader with these characteristics. Certainly, the people of S.E.A needs leaders with these characteristics.
Votes: +1
report abuse
vote down
vote up
The crisis is in journalism. The crisis isn't in literacy and bad education
written by John Francis Lee , November 07, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/bovard11062009.html
Votes: -1
How the Media Enables Government Lies ' Deceit has become ritualized in U.S. foreign policy. From 2002 onwards, the White House Iraq Group spewed out false information that the New York Times and other prominent media outlets routinely accepted without criticism or verification. After many of the assertions were later discovered to be false, the White House and much of the media treated the falsehoods as irrelevant to the legitimacy of the U.S. invasion. The lack of attention paid to political lies is itself symptomatic of the bias in favor of submitting to rulers regardless of how much people are defrauded. ' Journalism is no longer the province of MSM institutions but of individual efforts. Those of us interested have no trouble finding the truth, and we rarely if ever find a a word of it in the MSM. A useful rule of thumb is to assume the opposite of whatever the MSM has printed is more nearly the truth. report abuse
vote down
vote up
You are losing the buffer between the public and big business and politicians
written by Susan Ramsay , November 07, 2009
I have no doubt that American media have their own "agenda'. This has become more obvious as newspapers struggling to keep afloat are not employing the best journalists they can find, but rather the cheapest. Managers believe people no longer need to be specialists in their beats so often you will get journalists who are not political reporters filing copy of a government press conference. The internet and the misguided campaign to "save trees by not using paper" have all played a part in bringing journalism giants to their knees. The pursuit of advertising has become paramount in the minds of newspaper managers who have little or no actual editorial experience. If anyone with such experience makes a stand, they are given their marching papers.
Votes: +0
These papers take advice from "consultants" who know business but nothing about the business of journalism. They make recommendations that are completely unsuitable for the newspaper to run efficiently and the journalists who naturally want to do the best job they can, are demoralised. There is little wonder then, that these writers turn to the web where they are no longer subject to this madness and are able to find their niche, write better copy and attract readers. Is that sustainable for them, though? How long will they continue to write if they are not being paid for their efforts. People need to make money to live and it would appear that those experts will soon be drawn away to more lucrative careers. report abuse
vote down
vote up
"You don't believe in any of that stuff."
written by John Francis Lee , November 06, 2009
"You don't believe in any of that stuff."
Votes: -1
And that's what "journalists" give each other prizes for writing. Of course we don't believe in any of that stuff either, and so dismiss "journalists' as liars and fools and hold their product in deserved disdain. report abuse
vote down
vote up
I certainly don't waste my time reading the propaganda in the Washington Post or NYTimes
written by John Francis Lee , November 06, 2009
'The lack of critical newspaper comment and analysis contributed to letting George Bush and the neocons push the United States into a truly tragic war, and for Alan Greenspan to let the economy swing so out of balance that it brought on the biggest economic crisis in 70 years.'
Votes: -1
That had nothing to do with English or any language. The "journalists" are pitchmen for the regime. The NYTimes printed Cheney's leaks so he could quote them from the NYTimes... as authoritative. It is treachery, not illiteracy that it the problem. I can read well and do, but I certainly don't waste my time reading the propaganda in the Washington Post or NYTimes. Or any of the MSM in America or elsewhere. report abuse
vote down
vote up
|
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
Alice Poon
| Freedom of Expression Too Precious to Throw AwayThursday, 04 February 2010 | Alice Poon
In a free society, there will always be more than one single opinion. In a free society, it is accepted that everyone should have an equal right to express his/her opinion without fearing... Full Story |
| Previous posts: |
John Elliott: Riding the Elephant
| From vultures in Delhi, to coups in Pakistan, a journalist's un-edited take on current events |
Donate to Asia Sentinel
