So why did the press go so far astray this week? How did many fine, otherwise fair-minded journalists allow their judgment to become so clouded? Let’s venture briefly—and hopefully not too speculatively, lest I be accused of double standards—into the realm of cognition. Organizational theorists such as Karl E. Weick, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan Business School
, have researched how we react to unexpected events. In his 1995 book Sensemaking in Organizations, Weick notes that we humans automatically categorize what we encounter, ushering messy new complexities into tidier established categories (“myths, metaphors, platitudes, fables, epics and paradigms,” to be precise). When something bad and inexplicable takes us by surprise, our brains reach for the handiest existing narratives, and accuracy falls by the wayside in favor of simple plausibility. “The stories are templates,” writes Weick. “They are products of previous efforts at sensemaking. They explain. And they energize.”
Contributing to such tendencies are the habits of newsrooms. In their 1989 book How Do Journalists Think?, S. Holly Stocking and Paget H. Gross note that a typical reporter launches into a story with an investigative hypothesis, one that is often bolstered during the reporting process by “confirmation bias.” Only with great reluctance—in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—is such a hypothesis normally discarded. Added to that is the weakness that competing hypotheses are tested one at a time, so that alternative explanations for the same data points are almost never considered simultaneously. “For example,” write the authors, “if one is testing a theory about the negative impact of feminism on women’s lives, one is unlikely also to test theories about its positive impact.”
At this point, however, a reader might reasonably ask why, in this case, launching into a discussion of political hysteria was such a bad thing. If the shootings in Arizona can serve as a springboard for discussing a significant, if not necessarily related, societal menace, why not let them do so? After all, much of the right truly has become unhinged.
Well, yes, but let’s remember that the deaths caused by Jared Loughner were preventable. There were concrete things that could have been done and that we now should do. Some people think we should place more restrictions on gun ownership. Some think we should provide more security services to members of Congress. Some think we should have improved mental-health resources. Such solutions may be wise or foolish, but the point is that they are directly relevant to the tragedy of last weekend.
By focusing on explanations that are abstract and speculative and only indirectly related, however, we risk losing sight of the crucial and immediate questions at hand. For instance, when Congressman James Clyburn was
interviewed by NPR about the shootings, Clyburn followed the lead of all the major news outlets and focused almost entirely on “the discourse around the political arena,” suggesting a reexamination of the Fairness Doctrine. In short, Clyburn largely ignored a real problem while pledging to focus on an imagined one. That is the danger here.
In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York killed 146 garment workers, most of them women and immigrants. Fortunately, the outrage that followed it went in a healthy direction, resulting in new federal workplace safety laws. This was a lot more helpful than essays blaming the fire on misguided ideals of femininity. There’s a place for speculation and supposition, of course. But not a big place, and not for long. It’s well past time for journalists to move on from what we don’t know about the causes of last weekend’s tragedy and grapple seriously with a great deal that we now do know—even if, God forbid, it means we’ll have to abandon our hypotheses.
T.A. Frank is a writer in Los Angeles and an editor at the Washington Monthly.
Image by wayneandwax via FlickrDaniel Hernandez, Intern Who Helped Save Giffords: Political Discourse Has Become "Completely Destructive"
