THE FORUM; Philip Meyer holds the
Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill. He is also a consultant for USA TODAY and member of the newspaper's
board of contributors.
Neil Postman was right. We are amusing
ourselves to death.
The latest evidence to support the
professor's dour prophecy comes from the great state of Minnesota. Gov.
Jesse Ventura has called Walker Lundy, editor of the state's second-largest
newspaper, "despicable."
Readers of the St. Paul Pioneer Press
have chimed in with epithets of their own, including "greed and sensationalism,"
"toilet-sniffing journalism" and "cancel my subscription."
Postman's thesis seemed bizarre when
Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985. He warned that the death
of our culture would come not from brutal, force-wielding tyranny, but
from our quiet acquiescence in the substitution of entertainment for rational
public discourse.
The theory explains a wide variety
of phenomena: the corruption of education, politicians as actors, cheating
in sports and public outrage when media try to take matters seriously.
Now we have Minnesota.
Lundy's offense was to publish a
report on systematic academic cheating in the University of Minnesota's
basketball program and to do it on the eve of the NCAA tournament. The
university promptly suspended four players. Without their presence, the
seventh-seeded Gophers lost to lower-ranked Gonzaga in the first round.
Gonzaga made it to the West Regional Final before finally losing to Connecticut
on Saturday. All because of journalistic enterprise.
"It couldn't have waited until after?"
demanded Ventura. He said Lundy meant to "take the pleasure of these young
people who have worked so hard to get to that tournament and somehow try
to spoil it for them."
Hundreds of letters and phone calls
to the newspaper echoed his view. Few thought about the moral implications
for the university if it had played and eliminated other teams through
wins based on rule breaking.
Before higher education got mixed
up with entertainment, sports was an educational enterprise. Rule-based
athletic competition taught the values of honesty, loyalty, perseverance,
discipline, cooperation and fairness.
But as the Knight Foundation Commission
on Intercollegiate Athletics pointed out six years ago, universities have
built their sports programs into independent profit centers whose loyalties
are to the entertainment marketplace. It is a market that Ventura, the
former professional wrestler, understands.
When the Knight Commission was gathering
its data, Jack Lengyel, director of athletics at the U.S. Naval Academy,
put his finger on the flaw.
"This is not an athletics problem,"
he testified. "This is a mission problem where the institution has not
accepted the athletics program as part and parcel of the educational objectives
of the university."
The die-hard, win-at-any-cost Minnesota
fans don't care about the educational objectives. They want their amusement.
Even Lundy, himself a basketball
fan, confesses that he did not realize that the university could move quickly
enough to suspend the players in the hours remaining before the tournament.
But even so, he would follow the
first law of journalism, which is to get the facts out as quickly as you
can. Gene Miller of The Miami Herald has articulated it best: "Publish,
publish, always publish."
The timing was driven by attainment
of the critical mass of evidence needed to back up the story. After more
than 20 interviews with a former university employee who admitted writing
term papers and book reports for basketball players, the editors still
needed physical evidence.
They finally got it in the form of
computer disks containing more than 100 themes and reports, plus some paper
copies with instructors' grades and comments. Then they waited for comment
from the ghostwriter's former supervisor, who had been out of the country.
The last step was to seek comments
from the players and university officials. When all of that was done, it
was March 9, two days before the tournament. Sportswriter George Dohrmann's
stories (Web site www.pioneerplanet.com/uofm/) were on the front page the
next day.
Journalists generally agree with
Immanuel Kant, the 18th century German philosopher, that following a rule
is more important than worrying about its consequences. This is the basis
of the Miller rule.
But a consequence-based decision
would likely have led to the same outcome. Delaying the story would amount
to participating in the university's corruption. Experienced editors know
that protecting individuals or institutions from the consequences of their
wrongful actions only leads to worse consequences later on.
Some Minnesotans agree. Lundy reports
that after the first few days of outrage, the reaction has settled down
to where about a third of his incoming calls, letters and e-mail messages
are supportive.
But the substitution of entertainment
for educational values continues to afflict us.
As the Naval Academy's Lengyel puts
it, we need to be more interested in "character development, not developing
characters."
Speaking of which, how is Gov. Ventura
doing?
According to Rob Daves, director
of polling and news research for the Star Tribune newspaper in Minneapolis,
Ventura's approval ratings are the highest given any Minnesota governor
for his first few months in office since the Minnesota Poll began in 1947.
Do Minnesotans really love their
governor just because he is entertaining? Lundy is more generous. He thinks
voters find Ventura's directness refreshing.
"I don't think he says anything that
he doesn't believe," says Lundy.
Newspapers are expected to be entertaining,
too. The Pioneer Press is being punished for getting serious. Cultural
death by entertainment is too much fun to make us want to stop, and, sadly,
it never inspires a stirring call to arms by a postmodern Thomas Paine
or Patrick Henry.
"Who," asked Neil Postman in 1985,
"is to take arms against a sea of amusements?"
[Illustration]
PHOTO, B/W, Ric
Feld, AP; Caption: Gov. Jesse Ventura: Takes on media.
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