Our American Agenda

...an essay about understanding what America wants from the news.

By Roy D. Follendore III

December 23, 2002

There is no doubt that the news that we Americans obtain affects our agenda. Our news reporting acts as a kind of mirror for us and the World. But those representations are not who we are. Americans are made up of too many different cultures to classify that easily. Our minority populations are powerful influences.

I have now been writing my Issues Essays fairly regularly for the past two years now. I started out just trying to say a few things that did not fit as poetry or short stories. Many of the ideas were stimulated as a side effect of reading the news.

By competing the news stories inside news organizations as well as between organizations, the most important stories do not rise to the top. The "front page" stories force editors to assign reporters to go after more of the same. These stories then become the next most important stories. Soon everyone everywhere are reporting the same things. This is how news become waves. There are people who know this and make these waves their objective. They find ways to connect their agendas and their client's agenda into the news. Celebrity begin to come in and take over. The news reporters and their cameras are replaced by the paparazzi. Audiences like familiar faces and names in the news. The "characters" are easier to remember. After the celebrities come in, the news we Americans see is not just tainted by this lack of objective reporting, it is managed by it. The news has becomes concentrated, idealized, static, sucked dry. Yesterdays news becomes like a dry powder in the desert and that big machine moves on to the next thing.

The Internet was supposed to somehow make things different. There would be millions of unencumbered naive reporters out there with computers hooked into the World Wide Web. Each of these distinct and individual people would be writing about their own "story" from their own personal view. Somehow the best of these writers would begin to acquire a following. This of course would be noticed by the local news organizations, which would pass it up to the big boys. In this way the Internet would provide a way for news to be percolated. The idea of news would be transformed by the Internet.

It never happened.

The reasons are simple to understand.

First of all there was no infrastructure for it to happen. The infrastructure that was required was not the wiring which enabled connectivity. It was the organizational connectivity. The fact is that news organizations are by their nature elitists. The news organizations are not really after news ideas as much as they are after the privileged ownership of words. If a news article is published on the Internet then it is not a news that can be owned. There is no means of news ownership because the Internet does not operate like a warehouse, it operates like a trash dump. Sure, there is lot's of great and useful stuff in a trash dump. The trouble is finding it and getting to it before it is damaged beyond recognition. Most of the material is garbage. That is the way that the Internet is.

Second, the kinds of thinking that goes into news stories are not the same kinds of ideas that go into Internet essays. News organizations want the words that can be translated into the sound bites, not philosophies. Reporters can always take what they want from Internet published essays and change the words to make them their own. They have no obligation to acknowledge their leads. Unlike academic research that requires acknowledgement of where ideas come from, news reporting is a business of plagiarism. It is a business that fosters the theft of ideas.

This has always been the case in America. One of our founding father's Ben Franklin participated in this kind of business. He wrote under many pseudonyms and when there was space to fill in his newspapers, he would often fill it with news that he would simply take from others or make up.

The American agenda can be discovered from our news but it is not to be found in our news. The news we see is not reality. Where reality is continuous, the news is fragmented bits that do not fit together well. These fragments also do not translate very well across cultures. Instead of thinking about the news as being something that is representative of truth, we should be thinking of it as a search process. The news media is being directed, it does not direct itself. It is more like the light on a lighthouse than the lights on you car. It exists mainly to be seen, not to see. But this is definitely not how they wish to be represented.

The agenda that our American news organizations would want to present is rational. They would have the American agenda represented as a struggle in which they are not participants and have no influence. They would make the issue of neutrality of subject matter a natural quality. The fallacy is that the lighthouse of our American news does not revolve in a circle. The fallacy is that the news is not representative of our American desire to define our values rather than statements of truths or facts.

Trying to determine the American agenda from our news is like trying to define our ethics by the clothes we wear or the length of our hair. The news that is propagated by our press is not who or what we Americans are. Our news is a manifestation of social interaction which are beyond any of our individual citizens. It does not reflect our personal ideals. It may be entertaining but it doe not reflect our true wants and needs. It simply reflects the American news organization search for their agenda that sells soap. The philosophy of journalism is dying. Like the ripples that circle a stone dropped in water, they search out the boundaries of each celebrity stone's new existence. We individual Americans want to find the best path among those things that make us comfortable in the midst of a universe of most uncomfortable things.

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