Let’s start this chapter with another bizarre topic: ESPN.
Have you ever been sick and stuck at home for a day without anything to do and, as a result, turned on ESPN as background noise while you rest on the couch. If so, you know it is an odd experience. Ten or 15 years ago, ESPN largely played it’s flagship program Sportscenter on repeat for most of the day. It was mind-numbingly repetitive, but it felt like there was a measure of honesty in this programming lineup. Not that much happens in the world of sport in any given day, and little-to-nothing happens during the daytime hours (at least on weekdays) that requires breaking news coverage. Thus, recording a one hour-long highlight program and running it on repeat from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. makes sense.
Unfortunately, ESPN looks nothing like that now. Now, the network produces multiple versions of it’s Sportcenter program with different hosts broadcasting from different locales. However, different hosts and locations does not mean different topics. Again, only a limited amount of sports “news” took place the previous day, so these various hosts and guests discuss the same topics and show the same video highlights over and over.
Then, the daytime programming follows. This consists essentially of a series of talk shows with different “experts” and commentators discussing and debating different aspects of the day’s sports news, which again hasn’t changed. Among the shows are First Take, a debate show featuring Steven A. Smith and Will Cain (used to be Skip Bayless); Bomani and Pablo, also featuring two men, Bomani Jones and Pablo Torres, discussing sports topics; Sportsnation, a debate-talk show with a crowd-sourcing vibe; Highly Questionable, a debate-talk show featuring Dan LeBatard and a rotating collection of co-hosts; Pardon the Interruption, a debate-talk show with (stop me if you’ve heard this one) two men, Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser; and Around the Horn, which departs radically from the format by incorporating (wait for it) four people into their debates of the day’s (same) sports news.
In other words, ESPN has 5-6 hours of opinion shows all dissecting and debating the same topics. (The only ESPN program that seems to offer something truly unique is the long-running Outside The Lines, though this has also begun including a roundtable segment that looks remarkably similar to it’s other programming.) If you’ve ever watched long enough to notice this, it is absolutely maddening, and the craziest part is, somehow the economics of this works! (They must or ESPN would not be doing it!) Presumably, it is cheaper to record one episode of Sportcenter and run it on repeat for 4-6 hours until someone creates more news to talk about than it is to produce and pay talent for 6 separate shows all talking about the same 8-10 “news” topics. But, ESPN is doing the latter, which means they must be making money off of this format!
Now, there are quite a few implications to this shift in programming. First and foremost, it marks a significant shift away from news, in the sense of straightforward, objective reporting of events, to opinion. Because ESPN can’t make more news, the only way to fill 10 hours with live programming is to get people to talk about the same limited number of topics over and over, which necessitates an emphasis on debates, opinions, and perspectives.
Second, this format rewards and facilitates the ever-increasing polarization of opinions and perspectives. Simply put, if you are going to re-center a show from news to debate, if everyone agreed or had only nuanced differences of opinion, the show would fail. The central entertainment element of the show is no longer the news but the theater of competing perspectives, which means the individuals with the most extreme perspectives and the partnerships with the most divergent perspectives will be most successful.
Third, in a very surreal and circular way, increasingly the debates themselves (which were initially meant to be a commentary on the actual news) have become the “news.” For example, in recent years, NFL players taking a knee during the pre-game national anthem has become a source of great controversy. However, imagine with me that had happened 30 years ago when there were only 4 television networks and 2-3 hours of news programming a day, only a fraction of which would relate to sports. It likely would have been reported once or twice by the news. It would have made an impression on some. Others would have been mildly irritated. Still others would have barely noticed. Within a few days it would’ve likely been a footnote to the season, unless the players had made more sustained and substantive efforts to advance the movement.
In our current reality, however, because ESPN is actively in need of topics of discussion to fill 24 hours of programming, this “story” was discussed ad nauseum, with a repetitive and systematic emphasis on opinion and perspective. This not only kept the original story in the news but made people’s reactions to the story the news itself. And because it was good theater, the story became a feedback loop that couldn’t not be covered (because of its entertainment and thus economic value). Soon the President was tweeting, and people on both sides of the issue were threatening to boycott the NFL. (Side note: what a fascinating culture we live in when two opposing groups can boycott the same entity over the same issue.)
Now, here is the point of all this: What has happened to ESPN has happened to all news networks. I chose ESPN as the example because it is, at least theoretically, innocuous and apolitical and wouldn’t instantly alienate a partisan. But ESPN is clearly not unique. What has happened to ESPN has happened to our entire media landscape. News networks are first and foremost entertainment properties. (Actually, that isn’t true. They are first and foremost engines of economic profitability, and entertainment is the product they are selling.) Thus, in order to fill airtime and maximize profitability, they have shifted away from objective, unbiased news toward opinion.
Additionally, as the “news” media has shifted away from reporting to opinion, the net for what constitutes “news” has been cast increasingly wider. When I was a journalism student nearly two decades ago, one of the first things you learned in class was the concept of “news values.” In essence, an immeasurable number of events take place each and every day on Earth, all of which cannot be reported. Thus, as journalists we must have criteria for evaluating what constitutes “news” and merits reporting. (Traditional news values are impact, timeliness, novelty, proximity, prominence, currency, consequences, etc.).
The shift in the media landscape in the past 20-30 years has completely unraveled this system of discernment. In fact, it has inverted the entire equation. Whereas in the past media outlets needed to wisely filter the cacophony of daily events, determining what merited inclusion in the limited airtime available, now media outlets must actually seek out news to fill space. The result is that increasingly trivial events and statements are reported on and imbued with an air of significance they do not merit.
In other words, as far as the political dialogue in our country goes, the media is a problem! (Just not the way the talking heads lead us to believe!) We are led to believe that partisanship and bias are the insidious and destructive forces of the media, and of course bias and partisanship are a problem. But they aren’t the deepest, most dangerous problem. The deepest and most dangerous problem is that our media ecosystem is constructed to divide us. It creates and perpetuates the assumption that personal opinion and argumentation are the center of human life and society.
*******
In order to grasp the true significance of this, we need to shift gears and talk about the human brain again. One of the most significant concepts to come out of neuroscience in the last few decades is the idea of Neuroplasticity (or Brain Plasticity).
For most of the 20th century, still under the intoxicating influence of the Industrial Revolution, most people thought of the human brain as a machine (or eventually a computer), with a collection of specific systems dedicated to specific tasks. We used terms like “hardwired” to describe mental and behavioral phenomena. As a result, at least once people reached adulthood, we thought of the brain as fixed and immovable. During childhood, the machine was being built, but by adulthood, the machine was constructed and no longer changed. It was what it was. You were what you were! (In retrospect, this is a depressingly fatalistic way of viewing humanity.)
However, recent advancements in neuroscience have revealed those assumptions to be patently absurd. In reality, the human brain remains remarkably malleable for the entire lifetime. Our brains are always forming new connections and strengthening existing structures based on our habits, routines, and the tools we use. In his award-winning book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr says this:
“Plasticity,” says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a top neurology researcher at Harvard Medical School, is “the normal ongoing state of the nervous system throughout the lifespan.” Our brains are constantly changing in response to our experiences and our behavior, reworking their circuitry with “each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or [shift of] awareness”... The genius of our brain’s construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn’t.
Natural selection, writes the philosopher David Buller in Adapting Minds, his critique of evolutionary psychology, “has not designed a brain that consists of numerous prefabricated adaptations” but rather one that is able “to adapt to local environmental demands throughout the lifetime of an individual, and sometimes within a period of days, by forming specialized structures to deal with those demands.” Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its mind— over and over again.
Our ways of thinking, perceiving, and acting, we now know, are not entirely determined by our genes. Nor are they entirely determined by our childhood experiences. We change them through the way we live— and, as Nietzsche sensed, through the tools we use. Years before Edward Taub opened his rehabilitation clinic in Alabama, he conducted a famous experiment on a group of right-handed violinists. Using a machine that monitors neural activity, he measured the areas of their sensory cortex that processed signals from their left hands, the hands they used to finger the strings of their instruments.
He also measured the same cortical areas in a group of right-handed volunteers who had never played a musical instrument. He found that the brain areas of the violinists were significantly larger than those of the nonmusicians…. Playing a violin, a musical tool, had resulted in substantial physical changes in the brain. That was true even for the musicians who had first taken up their instruments as adults.
Similar studies in countless arenas have confirmed these results. In one particularly famous example, a group of researchers in England compared the brains of London taxi drivers, who are required to memorize and navigate a plethora of routes through the city, and London bus drivers, who drive consistent routes daily. When the researchers scanned their brains, they discovered that the part of the brain that handles navigation and spatial awareness, the hippocampus, was substantially larger in taxi drivers’ brains than the bus drivers’ brains. Their daily habits had literally made an area of their brain grow!
In other words, our habits, routines, patterns, rituals, and experiences are constantly reshaping the structures within our brains to make them better at those things!
Now, if you think about it, this is both incredible and utterly terrifying. It is incredible because it means that change is always possible. If there is something in your life, personality, disposition, etc. that you want to change, you can actually do that through the creation of new patterns, habits, and disciplines. However, it is terrifying because it means that if and when we have unhealthy patterns and dispositions, and we are not actively aware of and working to change them, our brains will continue to reinforce those patterns and neural pathways. For example, if you are judgmental, angry, or depressed, when you indulge in these things, your brain is deepening those neural connections, making you better at those things and more likely to continue in those patterns.
Now, what does this have to do with a discussion of media? Well, the media we consume form some of the central tools and patterns within our lives. Thus, if we are daily consuming media built around opinion and argument, then our brains are adapting to these stimuli and our neural pathways are re-wiring themselves around these principles. The more we consume media that marginalize facts, information, and deep thinking and privilege opinion, perspective, and argumentation, the more our brains build themselves in that image, increasing our desire for those things, and reducing our ability to do anything else.
The media is certainly a problem in our culture, but not simply because of partisanship and bias. The media is a problem because it is constantly and systematically shaping our brains to be opinionated, judgmental, and argumentative. It is programming us to not listen to the other side, to not engage in constructive conversation, to argue from previously determined conclusions rather than entering into discussions with humility.
In 1 Corinthians Paul gave us the famous Body of Christ image, in which he extols the church in Corinth to see themselves as a body with a wide variety of disparate and uniquely gifted parts that only together can be a fully functioning and healthy whole. We typically apply this to our need for community and serving within churches. We need people with different gifts and talents in order to reach our full potential as communities, which is without a doubt true. As Paul said, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?” (1 Corinthians 12:17). Diversity of skills, passions, and energies is central to being a whole, healthy community.
What if this is true with perspectives too? What if we need a wide variety of opinions, experiences, stories, and perspectives to be healthy as a body politic. If that is the case (which I believe it is), we need to be able to talk to one another in humility. To establish common facts and foundations upon which we can build discussion. To not assume we know all the answers, and to have a collaborative approach to politics.
To do that we are going to need to have a much higher level of media literacy and overcome a system designed to do the opposite.
Have you ever been sick and stuck at home for a day without anything to do and, as a result, turned on ESPN as background noise while you rest on the couch. If so, you know it is an odd experience. Ten or 15 years ago, ESPN largely played it’s flagship program Sportscenter on repeat for most of the day. It was mind-numbingly repetitive, but it felt like there was a measure of honesty in this programming lineup. Not that much happens in the world of sport in any given day, and little-to-nothing happens during the daytime hours (at least on weekdays) that requires breaking news coverage. Thus, recording a one hour-long highlight program and running it on repeat from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. makes sense.
Unfortunately, ESPN looks nothing like that now. Now, the network produces multiple versions of it’s Sportcenter program with different hosts broadcasting from different locales. However, different hosts and locations does not mean different topics. Again, only a limited amount of sports “news” took place the previous day, so these various hosts and guests discuss the same topics and show the same video highlights over and over.
Then, the daytime programming follows. This consists essentially of a series of talk shows with different “experts” and commentators discussing and debating different aspects of the day’s sports news, which again hasn’t changed. Among the shows are First Take, a debate show featuring Steven A. Smith and Will Cain (used to be Skip Bayless); Bomani and Pablo, also featuring two men, Bomani Jones and Pablo Torres, discussing sports topics; Sportsnation, a debate-talk show with a crowd-sourcing vibe; Highly Questionable, a debate-talk show featuring Dan LeBatard and a rotating collection of co-hosts; Pardon the Interruption, a debate-talk show with (stop me if you’ve heard this one) two men, Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser; and Around the Horn, which departs radically from the format by incorporating (wait for it) four people into their debates of the day’s (same) sports news.
In other words, ESPN has 5-6 hours of opinion shows all dissecting and debating the same topics. (The only ESPN program that seems to offer something truly unique is the long-running Outside The Lines, though this has also begun including a roundtable segment that looks remarkably similar to it’s other programming.) If you’ve ever watched long enough to notice this, it is absolutely maddening, and the craziest part is, somehow the economics of this works! (They must or ESPN would not be doing it!) Presumably, it is cheaper to record one episode of Sportcenter and run it on repeat for 4-6 hours until someone creates more news to talk about than it is to produce and pay talent for 6 separate shows all talking about the same 8-10 “news” topics. But, ESPN is doing the latter, which means they must be making money off of this format!
Now, there are quite a few implications to this shift in programming. First and foremost, it marks a significant shift away from news, in the sense of straightforward, objective reporting of events, to opinion. Because ESPN can’t make more news, the only way to fill 10 hours with live programming is to get people to talk about the same limited number of topics over and over, which necessitates an emphasis on debates, opinions, and perspectives.
Second, this format rewards and facilitates the ever-increasing polarization of opinions and perspectives. Simply put, if you are going to re-center a show from news to debate, if everyone agreed or had only nuanced differences of opinion, the show would fail. The central entertainment element of the show is no longer the news but the theater of competing perspectives, which means the individuals with the most extreme perspectives and the partnerships with the most divergent perspectives will be most successful.
Third, in a very surreal and circular way, increasingly the debates themselves (which were initially meant to be a commentary on the actual news) have become the “news.” For example, in recent years, NFL players taking a knee during the pre-game national anthem has become a source of great controversy. However, imagine with me that had happened 30 years ago when there were only 4 television networks and 2-3 hours of news programming a day, only a fraction of which would relate to sports. It likely would have been reported once or twice by the news. It would have made an impression on some. Others would have been mildly irritated. Still others would have barely noticed. Within a few days it would’ve likely been a footnote to the season, unless the players had made more sustained and substantive efforts to advance the movement.
In our current reality, however, because ESPN is actively in need of topics of discussion to fill 24 hours of programming, this “story” was discussed ad nauseum, with a repetitive and systematic emphasis on opinion and perspective. This not only kept the original story in the news but made people’s reactions to the story the news itself. And because it was good theater, the story became a feedback loop that couldn’t not be covered (because of its entertainment and thus economic value). Soon the President was tweeting, and people on both sides of the issue were threatening to boycott the NFL. (Side note: what a fascinating culture we live in when two opposing groups can boycott the same entity over the same issue.)
Now, here is the point of all this: What has happened to ESPN has happened to all news networks. I chose ESPN as the example because it is, at least theoretically, innocuous and apolitical and wouldn’t instantly alienate a partisan. But ESPN is clearly not unique. What has happened to ESPN has happened to our entire media landscape. News networks are first and foremost entertainment properties. (Actually, that isn’t true. They are first and foremost engines of economic profitability, and entertainment is the product they are selling.) Thus, in order to fill airtime and maximize profitability, they have shifted away from objective, unbiased news toward opinion.
Additionally, as the “news” media has shifted away from reporting to opinion, the net for what constitutes “news” has been cast increasingly wider. When I was a journalism student nearly two decades ago, one of the first things you learned in class was the concept of “news values.” In essence, an immeasurable number of events take place each and every day on Earth, all of which cannot be reported. Thus, as journalists we must have criteria for evaluating what constitutes “news” and merits reporting. (Traditional news values are impact, timeliness, novelty, proximity, prominence, currency, consequences, etc.).
The shift in the media landscape in the past 20-30 years has completely unraveled this system of discernment. In fact, it has inverted the entire equation. Whereas in the past media outlets needed to wisely filter the cacophony of daily events, determining what merited inclusion in the limited airtime available, now media outlets must actually seek out news to fill space. The result is that increasingly trivial events and statements are reported on and imbued with an air of significance they do not merit.
In other words, as far as the political dialogue in our country goes, the media is a problem! (Just not the way the talking heads lead us to believe!) We are led to believe that partisanship and bias are the insidious and destructive forces of the media, and of course bias and partisanship are a problem. But they aren’t the deepest, most dangerous problem. The deepest and most dangerous problem is that our media ecosystem is constructed to divide us. It creates and perpetuates the assumption that personal opinion and argumentation are the center of human life and society.
*******
In order to grasp the true significance of this, we need to shift gears and talk about the human brain again. One of the most significant concepts to come out of neuroscience in the last few decades is the idea of Neuroplasticity (or Brain Plasticity).
For most of the 20th century, still under the intoxicating influence of the Industrial Revolution, most people thought of the human brain as a machine (or eventually a computer), with a collection of specific systems dedicated to specific tasks. We used terms like “hardwired” to describe mental and behavioral phenomena. As a result, at least once people reached adulthood, we thought of the brain as fixed and immovable. During childhood, the machine was being built, but by adulthood, the machine was constructed and no longer changed. It was what it was. You were what you were! (In retrospect, this is a depressingly fatalistic way of viewing humanity.)
However, recent advancements in neuroscience have revealed those assumptions to be patently absurd. In reality, the human brain remains remarkably malleable for the entire lifetime. Our brains are always forming new connections and strengthening existing structures based on our habits, routines, and the tools we use. In his award-winning book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr says this:
“Plasticity,” says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a top neurology researcher at Harvard Medical School, is “the normal ongoing state of the nervous system throughout the lifespan.” Our brains are constantly changing in response to our experiences and our behavior, reworking their circuitry with “each sensory input, motor act, association, reward signal, action plan, or [shift of] awareness”... The genius of our brain’s construction is not that it contains a lot of hardwiring but that it doesn’t.
Natural selection, writes the philosopher David Buller in Adapting Minds, his critique of evolutionary psychology, “has not designed a brain that consists of numerous prefabricated adaptations” but rather one that is able “to adapt to local environmental demands throughout the lifetime of an individual, and sometimes within a period of days, by forming specialized structures to deal with those demands.” Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its mind— over and over again.
Our ways of thinking, perceiving, and acting, we now know, are not entirely determined by our genes. Nor are they entirely determined by our childhood experiences. We change them through the way we live— and, as Nietzsche sensed, through the tools we use. Years before Edward Taub opened his rehabilitation clinic in Alabama, he conducted a famous experiment on a group of right-handed violinists. Using a machine that monitors neural activity, he measured the areas of their sensory cortex that processed signals from their left hands, the hands they used to finger the strings of their instruments.
He also measured the same cortical areas in a group of right-handed volunteers who had never played a musical instrument. He found that the brain areas of the violinists were significantly larger than those of the nonmusicians…. Playing a violin, a musical tool, had resulted in substantial physical changes in the brain. That was true even for the musicians who had first taken up their instruments as adults.
Similar studies in countless arenas have confirmed these results. In one particularly famous example, a group of researchers in England compared the brains of London taxi drivers, who are required to memorize and navigate a plethora of routes through the city, and London bus drivers, who drive consistent routes daily. When the researchers scanned their brains, they discovered that the part of the brain that handles navigation and spatial awareness, the hippocampus, was substantially larger in taxi drivers’ brains than the bus drivers’ brains. Their daily habits had literally made an area of their brain grow!
In other words, our habits, routines, patterns, rituals, and experiences are constantly reshaping the structures within our brains to make them better at those things!
Now, if you think about it, this is both incredible and utterly terrifying. It is incredible because it means that change is always possible. If there is something in your life, personality, disposition, etc. that you want to change, you can actually do that through the creation of new patterns, habits, and disciplines. However, it is terrifying because it means that if and when we have unhealthy patterns and dispositions, and we are not actively aware of and working to change them, our brains will continue to reinforce those patterns and neural pathways. For example, if you are judgmental, angry, or depressed, when you indulge in these things, your brain is deepening those neural connections, making you better at those things and more likely to continue in those patterns.
Now, what does this have to do with a discussion of media? Well, the media we consume form some of the central tools and patterns within our lives. Thus, if we are daily consuming media built around opinion and argument, then our brains are adapting to these stimuli and our neural pathways are re-wiring themselves around these principles. The more we consume media that marginalize facts, information, and deep thinking and privilege opinion, perspective, and argumentation, the more our brains build themselves in that image, increasing our desire for those things, and reducing our ability to do anything else.
The media is certainly a problem in our culture, but not simply because of partisanship and bias. The media is a problem because it is constantly and systematically shaping our brains to be opinionated, judgmental, and argumentative. It is programming us to not listen to the other side, to not engage in constructive conversation, to argue from previously determined conclusions rather than entering into discussions with humility.
In 1 Corinthians Paul gave us the famous Body of Christ image, in which he extols the church in Corinth to see themselves as a body with a wide variety of disparate and uniquely gifted parts that only together can be a fully functioning and healthy whole. We typically apply this to our need for community and serving within churches. We need people with different gifts and talents in order to reach our full potential as communities, which is without a doubt true. As Paul said, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?” (1 Corinthians 12:17). Diversity of skills, passions, and energies is central to being a whole, healthy community.
What if this is true with perspectives too? What if we need a wide variety of opinions, experiences, stories, and perspectives to be healthy as a body politic. If that is the case (which I believe it is), we need to be able to talk to one another in humility. To establish common facts and foundations upon which we can build discussion. To not assume we know all the answers, and to have a collaborative approach to politics.
To do that we are going to need to have a much higher level of media literacy and overcome a system designed to do the opposite.
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