It is said that the majority of Americans read nothing except the paper. If they read that thoroughly, they have time for nothing else. Charles Dudley Warner, The American Newspaper

The Crisis of eloquence is not a little altered…as men now endeavouir to summe up their Notions, and draw them into a sharp angle…
John Hall, preface to Peri hypsous Or Dionysius Longinus of the Height of Eloquence

Reduction in communication is entirely necessary, and entirely unsatisfactory. In The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant[i] Stephen Jay Gould discusses the reporting of science, and warns of the dangers of reductionism. Gould has a laugh at the expense of headline writers: “Scientists say we use just 10 per cent of our brains (really? then what is the other 90 per cent doing?).” I’m not going to argue for a new type of Gouldean headline writing, but Gould’s point is simple. Who is doing the reducing?

Many years ago, the Nobel laureate[ii] Richard Feynman attempted to explain some of the world of advanced physics to undergraduates, in a bid to excite them about the intellectual possibilities of the field.[iii] Feynman apparently believed that anything that couldn’t be explained in a freshman lecture wasn’t yet properly understood. His introductory lectures were published as Six Easy Pieces. For scientific illiterates like me there is nothing easy about them, and reading them one summer served only to map out new areas of ignorance I didn’t even know I possessed. The theories and concepts that Feynman juggled so effortlessly could not survive the journey into prose, and although his book is fascinating, it certainly wouldn’t qualify the unscientific reader to have even a remotely useful discussion with a physicist.

Feynman is one of those people known to reductionists like me as ‘a scientific genius’. His intention was to communicate his subject beyond his peers, to a modestly wider group (his own university department’s undergraduates) encouraging them to continue on a formal intellectual and developmental journey. For them, the opportunity cost of listening to Feynman, or reading him, was limited to the other lectures they might have had to attend, or authors they might have had to study.

But on publication, Six Easy Pieces became available to all readers (and, via CD, to listeners too). Its reception was not confined to a scientific public or a numerate audience; it could reach a broader group – innumerate humanity. The latter crowd are most certainly not training to be physicists, nor could they hope to be. And the opportunity cost to them is the rest of their daily lives with all their attendant cares, priorities and necessities, and the benefit? Accidental fulfilment of an unguided intellectual curiosity.

Feynman’s problem is one all of us share, by degree. We have to communicate ideas, concepts and information by metaphor, analogy and simplification. The division of labour that allowed Feynman to research quantum electrodynamics, and Gould to study the genetics of snails, also requires the results to be communicated, argued over, funded, and that requires dissemination and the removal of some complexity.

From Feynman’s peak – addressing bright young physicists with a long-prepared summary of a field he’d spent a life-time researching – it is a very long way down to journalism. Journalists speak to every type of audience: from the narrow currents of readership of Scientific American, or my hometown paper the Great Yarmouth Mercury, to the broad channels of the NBC Nightly News.

As Stephen Jay Gould’s example demonstrated at the start, repackaging information for the market in as timely a manner as possible has its own problems. I don’t want to dwell on them too much here, suffice it to say, reductionism that is bad or stupid will always be bad and stupid.

The news media is under pressure to reduce rather more dramatically than science writers and nobel laureates. And the greatest pressure comes from the individual as reader, viewer or listener. Information is cheap and widely available. Time is limited. How people manage their time is their own concern, but we know that for many adults work, commuting, and care commitments occupy a large part of their daily lives. If we want to counter the reductive pressure of their limited time, we need to raise their consumption of news.

A quick look at a typical ‘time use’ survey gives us a pretty good idea of what people are actually doing with themselves. Americans[iv], for example, are watching TV for two hours and 38 minutes a day. Socialising takes up nearly 45 minutes a day. Reading takes them 23 minutes[v], and active leisure accounts for just 18 minutes. (In case you were wondering what’s different at weekends, people do a lot more TV-watching, and a little more sports and socialising.)

If we want people to consume more news[vi], we have two broad opportunities to influence them in their free time through their TV consumption or through their twenty minutes or so of time devoted to reading.

The average article length in larger circulation American newspapers is 1,200 words.[vii] 23 minutes reading at 250 wpm makes 5,750 words, so for highbrow newspaper readers that works out at nearly five items of a day. Speaking continually on television generates approximately 180 wpm at best, making it less efficient than reading. Programme structure aside, television viewing would give an absolute maximum of 21,330 words per day after advertising. This, then, is the existing attention slot in which journalism must stake its place, in competition with chick lit, self-improvement manuals, drama, comedy and made-for-TV-movies. Time is the great reducer.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Walter Lippmann, the man who invented the reductive concept par excellence, the stereotype, thought it was rather useful:

the stereotype not only saves time in a busy life and is a defense of our position in society, but tends to preserve us from all the bewildering effect of trying to see the world steadily and see it whole.[viii]

Lippmann’s defence also tends to politicize it, identifying reductionist journalist with a certain kind of manipulative populism. Lippmann’s public doesn’t need to understand the world, only to have its simple views unpacked and played with.

On the other hand anti-reductionist gripes like Gould’s, enjoyable as they are, don’t seem to take time in to consideration. Nor do they offer any account of what should constitute an appropriate body of knowledge for the individual. If things are not to be reduced, but laid out in relative complexity, what should be removed from our attention area? There is no ‘information curriculum’, against which we can judge the merits of apportioning our time to – say the New York Times, or Feynman’s book.

The anti-reductionists want people to spend longer absorbing information that is more complicated. But the reality is they are narrowing people’s breadth of information by increasing the detail and ambiguity of selected parts. Anti-reductionism has its politics too. It is frequently found as part of a package of social criticism that seeks to use the media as an agent of broad social change, bundled up with the antithesis of Lippmann’s democratic view of competing elites – participatory democracy.

But the same ‘time use’ survey that lets us know how much time the average American spends in front of the TV also tells us how much time he or she spends on civic and voluntary activity. That works out at just nine minutes a day, which probably falls outside the definition of enthusiastic political participation.

Political theorist Robert Dahl accepts that in large democracies there will be minimal citizen participation:

I think we must conclude that the classic assumptions about the need for total citizen participation in democracy were, at the very least, inadequate It would be more reasonable simply to insist that some minimal participation is required, even though we cannot specify with any precision what this minimum must be.[ix]

And he is pretty clear on where the blame for this situation lies: time. The public’s attempts to debate democratically hit the ‘time use’ survey problem. Not enough hours in the day. Dahl even comes up with a ‘law’ of time and numbers.

The smaller a democratic unit, the greater its potential for citizen participation and the less the need for citizens to delegate government decisions to representatives. The larger the unit, the greater its capacity for dealing with problems important to its citizens and the greater the need for citizens to delegate decisions to representatives … I do not see how we can escape this dilemma.[x]

I would suggest the same dilemma for journalism and reductionism that Dahl suggests for democracy and participation.

Dilemmas can be confronted, ignored or evaded, and for this dilemma, I propose evasion. If we understand journalism as the marketing of information then arguments about reductionism become less meaningful. The content of the information in the market matters less than its availability and the fact that it obeys the formal rules of the genre (facts are correct, etc.). If we appreciate journalism as a branch of rules-based non-fiction then it has its own enjoyment. Reductionist accusations don’t stop us appreciating Shelley‘s Ozymandias, Pascal‘s Pensées or Nietzsche‘s aphorisms. We allow them the generous leeway of art and philosophy.

There has been a lot of bad poetry, and certainly much bad philosophy. There is a lot of bad journalism too. But reduction is a necessary part of journalism’s tool kit, and the need to paraphrase, shorten, pigeonhole or stereotype is not unique to our profession, but extends to every branch of human endeavour. Even that scourge of journalistic reductionism, the late Stephen Jay Gould, is hardly an uncontroversial figure. Gould engaged in running feuds with other scientists, most notably educational psychologist Arthur Jensen[xi] who claimed that Gould had wrongly paraphrased, misrepresented and otherwise distorted his views and other crimes more normally associated with reductive journalism.

Reduction, so good for the sauces of Michelin-starred chefs and the sonnets of Shakespeare, so bad for the media, should not be just another rod in the bundle of sticks with which to beat journalists. The answer lies more broadly in how we use our limited time, and the solution for that lies well beyond journalism.

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[i] Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (New York: Harmony 2000): 333

[ii] Journalists apparently like appeals to authority, see Alexandra Kitty Appeals to Authority in Journalism, Critical Review 15, nos 3-4 (2004)

[iii] Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher (New York: Perseus Books, 1994)

[iv] American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t01.htm

[v] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11.htm

[vi] Aside from the obvious competing public health concerns that they undertake more active leisure pursuits…

[vii] The State of the News Media 2004 http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2004/narrative_newspapers_contentanalysis.asp?cat=2&media=2

[viii] Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922/1929): 114

[ix] Robert Dahl, Toward Democracy: A Journey. Reflections: 1940-1997, The collected works of Robert Dahl (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, University of California, Berkeley, 1997): 818

[x] Robert Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000): 110

[xi] Arthur Jensen, The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons, Contemporary Education Review 1, no. 2, (1982): 121-135