Exactly a year ago, I went to Las Vegas to speak at The Amazing Meeting, the annual convention of the James Randi (aka Amazing Randi) Educational Foundation and its various supporters and enthusiasts. It’s a great group of speakers and guests, and I was thrilled to be a part of it. I was asked to comment on the theme of the event, “Skepticism and the Media,” and prepared remarks accordingly… (I was surprised, but few other speakers seemed to do so… they just delivered their really interesting, well done, involving presentations with lots of audio visual elements and great jokes. Me, I stayed up all night, the night before, and wrote a term paper. You can take the dork out of the eighth grade…)

Anyway, I had reason to revisit those remarks recently as I spoke to another group, and going over them, they seemed to be apropos as we go into the election. Some excerpts after the jump.

It’s very hard to be shaken from what we come to the media believing, and further, no matter what you believe, there will be some aspect of the media willing to confirm your beliefs. There is a media informational tab A, that fits into every conceivable type of audience slot B, the array of pre-packaged narratives to choose from is absolutely dizzying.

I am reminded of the old joke about the guy who visits the old comedians home. After dinner, every night, the residents stand up, shush the room, and say, “246!” and everybody laughs. Another old comic gets up, and says, “1,342!” And everybody breaks up. And the visitor doesn’t understand, so his host explains that these comics have been around so long, they know all the jokes there are, so instead of wasting time telling them, they just assign all the jokes a number and just use that. So the visitor, who’s a bit of a ham, stands up, raises his hands for quiet, and says, “436!” And he gets nothing, silence, a few coughs, people look at their plates. And the visitor looks at the host, and says, “What happened?” And the host shrugs, and says, “Some people can’t tell a joke.”

These days, media narratives – even opinions, value judgments, preferences – have all been prepared for you, and it’s hard to come up with anything that hasn’t already been pre-packaged, smoothed out, and edited to allow commercial breaks. It’s gotten to the point where we lose our sense of what we think, and what’s been thought for us.

I have a good friend, named Jess Bravin, who reports on the Supreme Court for the Wall Street Journal. I happened to be having a drink with him during the confirmation hearings for John Roberts. And I said, “So, this Roberts, person, he’s more moderate, I take it?”

And Jess said a very interesting thing. He didn’t say, “Yes, that’s right,” nor did he say, “That’s ridiculous, his clear blue eyes hide the fevered imaginings of a madman,” he said, simply, “Why do you think that?”

I said, “Huh?”

He said, “What information do you have that makes you believe that to be the case?”

And I stuttered, because of course, I had none. I didn’t know John Roberts, and to my knowledge, I don’t know anyone who knows him. I was repeating what I had been told, or, more to the point, what I had selected from my discriminating media consumer’s menu. I had selected Opinion of the Day #46, John Roberts is, in fact, a Sensible Moderate. Which, as far as I actually knew, had no more relationship to reality than Opinion of the Day #764, John Roberts is in fact, a bizarre creature composed of million of independent insects, who, through a hive mind, cooperate to maintain the illusion of a human body. If you were to put him in a strong wind, he’d disassemble.

And yes, that opinion is on the menu. You can believe anything these days, and find people who are perfectly willing to agree with you.

This is how this particular problem, how to separate what you know from what you think you know, plays out for me. I have to make jokes about this stuff, every weekend. I have to make jokes about this stuff after the brilliant Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert and their superb writing staffs have had four cracks at it. I have to compete with The Onion, which manages to be hilarious about the news while, in essence, writing haikus about it. Then I get an hour a week, which, with every thing else we do, the panelists, the calls from the listeners, the funding credits, gives me and my colleagues maybe a dozen chances for jokes about the week’s news.

And you have no idea how difficult it is not to just fall into the trap of: what’s funny this week? What’s the funny narrative? What’s the thing that everybody’s already thinking, and they just want us to repeat it, as a form of stroking? It’s so tempting. You know, if worse comes to worse, you can always get a laugh by making one more “Britney Spears is a slag” joke. Hell, our live audience is composed of people who paid twenty bucks or moer to see a radio show, one they could listen to for free come the weekend. They’re desperate to laugh at anything. It is very easy to give them – and frankly, you out there, listening – what I know you will like, because you’ve already heard it and liked it before. And I have been guilty of this many times.

But I honestly believe that if I get up there, and make some joke that just partakes of the narrative as it’s already been established – even if it’s a narrative that I happen to agree with – I’m not earning my meager, non-profit salary, which, by the way, is paid entirely in excess coffee mugs and tote bags.

So every week, yeah, we have a lot of fun, and we try to get in funny stories about people trying to smuggle exotic snakes in their pants, because, let’s face it, nobody is turning to us to explain the meaning of the world, because, if you are, then all you’re learning is that you really shouldn’t try to smuggle snakes in your pants. But still, every week, I hope that either from me, or from our panelists, or from one of our listeners, I hope that we say, in the course of our hour, one original thing. One thought that doesn’t yet have a number.

I think that as consumers of media, these days, we’re all trying to stand firm in face of an onslaught of information, a flood. It’s a Niagra Falls of data, and we’re trying to go up it, in a barrel. I think that in this almost impossible task your only protection – your umbrella, as it were – is an original thought. They’re hard to come by, these days… but I think it’s possible. You have to rely on your own insight, and you have to put yourself through an almost Cartesian rigor of doubt. You have to ask yourself the question that my friend Jess asked me: Why information do you have that makes you believe that to be the truth? Is it something you know, or is it something you were told? And if you were told it, what is the motive of the person who told you? Is he trying to fool you? Or, as is far more likely, is he trying to please you? That’s much more dangerous, and often more successful. Nobody wants to be fooled, and we’re on our guard against it. Everybody wants to be pleased.

What I try to do, at least once a week, is say something that I’m afraid will not please the five hundred people who make up our audience in Chicago, or the two million people who listen, or for that matter you. It’s a worthy goal, to be, at least for one moment, an irritant, a real jerk, but I hope I’ve accomplished it today. Thank you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Writing, Appearances, Radio Show. 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.