Cognitive Conga: a blog

Jon Stewart's public dissection of Jim Cramer reminded me of an activity pattern I try to exercise whenever there's an appropriate opportunity. It's a pattern I think of as moving attention upstream. It's something that I feel driven to do on a slightly subconscious level, but I'll try to explain it nonetheless.

The basic principle is to encourage people not to simply take information at face value, but to also consider the source(s) of the information and the motives and competencies of those sources. A more advanced approach is to also direct attention further upstream still, beyond the immediate information sources to the historical, social or other factors that have put the sources in a position to expostulate.

Stewart, for instance, not only called Cramer's motives and competence into question; he also called into question TV network CNBC's interests in hosting Cramer's shows. The audience was forced - and rightly - to examine the part TV networks have played in stoking fear and confusion about the current bear market: fear and confusion which may in fact have contributed to that bear market, and which - if the networks had been less obvious in their exploitation of the situation - might have kept American investors indefinitely psychologically dependent on the media for advice about what to do in such frightening and confusing times. The insinuation was that CNBC was willing to cynically risk the economy for the sake of keeping its viewers hooked. Or, as Fox rather charitably put it, CNBC's dilemma is to make a recession seem entertaining. Worse still, this was being done by people who, like Cramer, and like the bankers he dealt with on his show, were in a position to play games - games they evidently found entertaining - with other people's money. So not only were the networks inconsistent in the seriousness of their portrayals of the country's financial situation, they were glorifying the very activities that were aggravating that situation.

But let's move further upstream now ourselves, further than Stewart or Fox went, and consider why CNBC would act this way. Surely, turning a crisis into a drama - and thereby a worse crisis - isn't a mandatory requirement for a news channel. Couldn't CNBC have simply sobered with the times? Why, in fact, was CNBC so unsober to begin with? Here's a comment from social technology consultant Gordon Rae that is perceptive and relevant:

What if newspapers had done any real reporting in last 8 yrs? I say: more subscriptions, lower ad revenues[.] (Source.)

Is Rae correct? I'm not sure; I can't prove his claim. I can provide an illustration of it, though, from the British media. The Sun and News of the World are the country's most popular newspapers. They are rarely analytical - let alone critical - of consumer culture, or indeed anything at all, and each enjoy a readership of almost 8m.^[1][2] Of these two, let's focus on The Sun. Its website today has four top headlines, of which three are about Z-list celebrities either dying young or looking a million dollars; the other is about an unremarkable football result. The Guardian newspaper has a readership roughly a sixth this size,^[3] and is frequently analytical and even critical of consumer culture. The Guardian's readers are, on average, better off than The Sun's readers, but not only are they not six times better off (which would yield a pot as great as that of The Sun's readers), they are also more likely to question advertisements directed at them. The Sun, therefore, appears to be the more attractive place to advertise, and I would be surprised indeed if it were not the more financially profitable paper. The Guardian, on the other hand, has found itself able to recycle much of its content into a weekly international subscription-only paper, the Guardian Weekly. So perhaps Rae is right to assert that the result of real reporting is more subscriptions and lower ad revenues.

Although The Guardian has been able to generate subscribers where The Sun has been able to generate advertisers, if The Sun is still the more profitable paper, why doesn't The Guardian try to emulate it, by increasing its readership and softening-up that readership's critical faculties so that it is more susceptible to advertisements? Before answering that question, it's worth asking whether the two acts must go together, because if they must, then The Guardian is duty-bound not to carry them out. Unlike The Sun, which has increasing the profits of its parent company, News International, as its primary objective, The Guardian operates under a pledge to be run for public benefit, not private gain.^[4] So let us now consider whether increasing readership must correlate with a weakening of cultural criticism.

A common perception is that a sophisticated media outlet must dumb down its output if it wants to appeal to a broader audience. If that perception is true, perhaps its truth lies in the bell-curve distribution of characteristics like reading ability: if The Guardian is to appeal to a larger audience, the only one available to it lies towards the centre of the curve. (As I write this, I am reminded of something once said to me by a former employer, the manager of a bank branch, who was a Sun reader: I tried reading the Guardian once, but I didn't understand all the long words, so I gave up.) So perhaps if the Guardian does want to grow its readership substantially, it must dumb down somewhat. But would this necessarily entail writing in a manner that prevented informed critiques of consumer culture? In principle, I don't think so; but in practice, I think it might. The reason for the latter is that a body of writers that is selected for its appeal to the mass market probably appeals to that market precisely because it is familiar with it, sympathetic to it, and uncritical of it. It is willing to be, editorially, less than sober - especially if that increases the readership. The Sun's body of writers fits this description pretty well. If The Guardian could find a writing team that retained its critical bite, analytical insight, and editorial sobriety, but that could also express those properties via the common tongue, it would be on to an absolute winner; but this is a tall order.

Returning our attention to the US, we can see that it's an order Jon Stewart often fills rather well.

We can also observe that Commercial US TV networks, like commercial US newspapers, obtain revenue from both subscribers and from advertisers. In the case of CNBC, subscribers become CNBC Plus customers and get to watch CNBC channels ad-free.* However, individual advertisers, who are typically businesses, generally have far more money than individual subscribers, who are typically private citizens. So even though private citizens outnumber businesses, it is still more financially profitable for a network like CNBC to prioritise advertiser income over subscriber income.

Here are some figures, which are a little out of date, but which should give you an idea of the strength of the incentive. In 2000, the total number of US businesses was 25m, and between them these had total revenues of $21 trillion.^[5] In 1999, which was not massively different from 2000 economically, the US population was 273m^[6] with a mean income of $21,587,^[7] which means a total income of only $6 trillion.

(Let me point out that I am not an economist, and even though I expected to see a disparity between business and personal income in the US, I did not expect it to be quite so enormous. $21 trillion vs $6 trillion seems like a huge gap: 3½ times the amount! If you, dear reader, are an economist, and you feel my numbers are wrong, please get in touch.)

CNBC, which is ultimately controlled by General Electric (an arms manufacturer and financial services company, among other things), is, like The Sun, obligated to help its parent company make a financial profit. Unlike The Guardian, it is not under a requirement to be first and foremost a benefit to society. This, then, is why CNBC was so unsober: it wasn't obliged to behave soberly, and it was in its financial interests - its short term ones, anyway - not to.

We have now turned our attention quite far upstream, but not quite far enough. A question Stewart did not pose in his interview with Cramer - although he came close - was, Why is our society tolerating this? I wish he had asked that question. It's one I want Westerners to be asking themselves. Why is it that maximising private profit is allowed to be prioritised over social benefit, when clearly in at least some cases the two are mutually exclusive? Why isn't corporate social responsibility mandatory, substantive, and enforced?

The historical answers may be found among various branches of economic, social and psychological theory. But these Why? questions are practical too: they ask, Why must the situation continue, now it's been shown to be detrimental?

At this point, perhaps, we have moved far enough upstream that we have reached a point where the causal flow is gentle enough that comparatively minor legislation might be able to divert it. Such legislation might, I think, be welcome. The causal flow would have to be investigated in much more detail than I have given in this informal essay - and causality is notoriously hard to establish! - but at least we now have a sense of what sort of action it might be useful to take, and why.

If we permit ourselves a little inductive reasoning here, we can conclude that in general there is a need for moving attention upstream, if we are to identify problems and if we are to identify possible solutions. Happily, this can take place pretty much anywhere: it doesn't have to be on a TV talk show. Next time you're making dinner with some friends, don't just talk about the recipe or the ingredients: talk about the agricultural society that makes your meal possible; discuss the threats it faces; discuss the proposals you think might alleviate them; consider the impact of your meal on your culture as well as on your individual health. If you're flagging, remind yourself that that knowing how to cook a potato could be useless if society doesn't act on potato blight!**

Fundamentally, it is our responsibility to ourselves, as citizens who must share the world's resources if we are to survive (not necessarily to survive as TV hosts or bankers, but as human beings), to raise awareness in our societies of things that threaten that survival. Such things include compulsory eviction, pension loss and many of the other results of dangerous financial speculation. Only by raising awareness can informed consensus for improvements be reached. And one of the best tools we have for raising awareness, is moving attention upstream.

* Incidentally, at time of writing, when Jim Cramer's credibility is at an all-time low, the CNBC Plus website is - apparently without irony - promoting Cramer's show Mad Money as its primary attraction (see above).

** Society is working on this, and there are two rival solutions proposed: selectively bred potato varieties that are naturally blight resistant, and genetically-modified potatoes from BASF that might be, or might not be, and might damage other crops whether or not they turn out to be blight resistant. So there's a pretty rich vein of conversation to be mined herein!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 6:37 am and is filed under Ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.