Why Americans Don’t Read No More
You’re probably not reading this right now.
It’s a known fact that literacy is on the decline in America, and it’s feeding upon itself. There are many reasons for this, main among them is our First Amendment.
Here’s my thought on that.
In our country we are pretty much free to say whatever we want to whomever we want whenever and wherever we want. Couple that with the immediacy of electronic media and it eliminates the cognitive work processes of reading and thinking. It’s faster and easier, as we Americans tend to be kind of lazy with a penchant for gossip. Add money to this illiteracy cocktail and you get what we have today ...a well fed, entitled population with an insatiable appetite for entertainment.
Just look at our newly elected government administration. It’s a tribute to the electronic media in our entertainment based, knee-jerk reaction society.
I realize these are critical, broad stroke generalizations, so let’s take a closer look.
Our American literacy is such a massive and important subject to cover, I’ll focus and split the difference between recreational and informational reading.
Which would be newspapers.
Locally, your daily paper was once a hefty, substantial daily print publication. Now, maybe there's no Monday paper and the rest of the weekday offerings are pretty thin. The same can be said of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wall Street journal, and other mainstay American bastions of journalism.
USA Today, McPaper, changed the landscape somewhat. It was a TV format newspaper designed to keep up with the speed and immediacy of the American reader ..or nonreader. It was even sold on street corners in a kiosk that looked like a television set. Now we have wide screen TV’s and a deluge of electronic and social media enough to choke a William Randolph Hurst.
All these publications now have an online following that meets or exceeds their print product.
This all seems to be a logical and reasonable evolution regarding the electronic times in which we live.
There are writers and there are readers, and in some cases never the Twain shall meet. It must be something in ones’ DNA, something that your parents and their parents before them held as important toward a curiosity, advancement ..education.
My wife is a voracious reader, she has always been. She reads everything, and I mean everything, an eclectic literary diet. I don’t think she got it from her parents as much as she picked it up on her own. It was innate within her. A mutation. She earned a degree in Literature and is a wonderful writer. But she rarely writes. I, on other hand, didn’t start really reading until recently. My dad was a voracious reader, he worked in a coal mine. I earned a degree in Geology and still cannot believe they graduated me. And here I am trying to put sentences together to form thoughts and ideas. Go figure.
It must be a curiosity or a fascination to reach out, sort out, to connect ...to try and identify a truth in a world of chaos, deception and lies.
So, let’s look at content and context and who is writing the news, the editorials, the letters to the editor and opinion columns, one of which you are reading right here and now.
Journalism, media school. Fuhgeddaboudit. You get what you get. Except for the exception to the rule, of which there are always some, in my humble opinion you get homogenized, pasteurized, processed cheese. (The old saying of those who can’t do teach comes to mind). They graduate and you get youth and inexperience, which is expected to some degree. You gotta start somewhere. I guess that’s what small market media is for. But the Catch-22 is these are “journalism” students who were weaned on electronic and social media. They all want to be on-air talent, or be a political pundit on TV.
And, in many cases you have nepotism or scraping the bottom of the “talent” barrel ..or a seniority precedence bordering on Alzheimer’s which waters down the intellect level even more.
All public media, print and electronic alike have a public service mandate in their charter to serve the pubic, so letters to the editor and public service announcements are mandatory, but content and language restricted. Cable broadcasting seems to have no rules whatsoever. Aside from that, the newspaper’s editor chooses what you will read or not read in his publication whether it be news, editorial or opinion. He controls the information you initially receive and process. So, depending upon his own biases, and your literate or illiterate background and knowledge of history and life generally, you are subject to a smorgasbord of someone else’s choices regarding your diet of information.
And as Truth should be the common and ultimate denominator of any writer or reader, you can see how impossibly difficult a course this is to navigate, especially, in a world bombarded by every stray thought on every stray or main conduit frequency out there.
Ego and power.
It seems that many news writers and journalists today want to impress themselves and others with their own cleverness and power. They want “Pulitzer” recognition and will stand on their heads to get it. There is an inherent greed and envy among journalists that causes them to push the envelope and it often discredits them, their publications, and the craft art.
Don’t get me wrong, there are many great news writers and journalists out there ..and I’m not one of them. But I know one when I read one.
But many of them are looking to win a prize mores than to connect with the truth. They have placed a transparent barrier between themselves and their perceived readers which is turning readers away because the the truth is transparent. It always was, always will be. And the perception is that it can be found quicker with more alacrity on social media or on the television.
Everyone wants to be Woodward and Bernstein ...or a Wolf Blitzer, Megyn Kelley or Anderson Cooper.
And this is a shame, because “the newspaper” is the best way to teach young people how to read and think. It’s the best place to go for current events, the wisdom and talent of good in-depth writing, the controversy of editorial opinion, and the thoughts of other readers.
It should be the best place to go for the Truth.
John Kushma is a communication consultant and lives in Logan, Utah.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-george-kushma-379a5762
http://newsbout.com/a/John+Kushma
