More Money than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, & Idiots Think They’re Right

by Penny, Laura

  It’s very difficult to disentangle news and entertainment when the news is trying to save itself by borrowing the trappings of entertainment. But news organizations are also turning to entertainment for cheap content as the traditional media piggyback on celebrity gossip sites and blogs. TMZ, a Time Warner tentacle that started online in 2005, has broken several big stories that eventually ended up gobbling plenty of mainstream airtime and inches of op-ed angst. Notable examples include Mel Gibson’s arrest and anti-Semitic outburst, Kramer’s krazy racist Komedy Klub meltdown, and Michael Jackson’s death.

  TMZ has been criticized for its sensationalism and the creepy insistence of its paparazzi. Critics allege that its editors pay sources and use less stringent standards than the traditional media, but TMZ gets many stories the old-fashioned way, by sifting through documents, working sources in hospitals, police departments, and restaurants, and pestering the ever-living shit out of its targets.

  This is simply to say that TMZ is an odd blend of old and new media, of traditional gumshoe reportage, the immediacy of the Web, and the superficiality of celebrity culture. When TMZ beat the L.A. Times to the story of Michael Jackson’s death, some saw this scoop as the new media triumphing over the moribund old press. Others refused to acknowledge TMZ as a legit source. CNN journos, for example, waffled about announcing Jackson’s death until the L.A. Times did. They mentioned that TMZ was claiming Jackson was dead, but Wolf Blitzer insisted that they wait for more confirmation. They might be corporate cousins – CNN also belongs to Time Warner – but CNN seemed wary of TMZ, as if it couldn’t quite trust the louche online upstart.

  This old-media hauteur is funny when you think about how much time CNN anchors spend reading viewer tweets and emails, deploying whiz-bang techno props like digital maps and holograms, and covering the same celebrities as TMZ.

  In a 2007 article in the New York Times, Harvey Levin, the legalist and investigative reporter who is the Grand Poo-Bah of TMZ, compared it to the Associated Press. He said, “We work as hard at breaking a Britney Spears story as NBC would work on breaking a President Bush piece.”5 If Levin and his bevy of youngsters had dogged Bush and Cheney in the lead-up to the Iraq war with the same tenacity that they monitor Lindsay Lohan’s leatheriness, perhaps some of their scandals might have broken sooner.

  Sure, TMZ covers vapid dingbats, but it does not worship them. It treats them much more harshly than the publicist-approved puff pieces we see on etalk or in the likes of Vanity Fair. It is a lot less deferential than the Hollywood or Washington press corps. Much of TMZ‘S coverage is mean, smirky, and snarky, more likely to bury Paris Hilton than to praise her.

  It’s easy to point to TMZ as yet another example of our brainless celebrity culture. Celeb gossip clogs the airwaves and Intertubes, crowding out more important stories. Rich, dizzy babes of questionable talent are bad role models for the kids. It’s a shame that pantyless party girls get more attention than the real heroes, the nurses and teachers and moms. All true, my earnest friend, all true. But that doesn’t really explain why people like TMZ. Loving gossip is certainly part of it, but TMZ also caters to our seemingly endless appetite for bad examples, stupid statements, and morons to mock.

  Talentless stars and clueless celebs are not really role models, at least not to the extent that some parents and cultural critics fear they are. Rather, the coverage of these stars tends to range from the faux concerned to the downright derisive. Celebrities often serve as objects of schadenfreude, a way for the audience to make fun of dummies and congratulate themselves for being more sensible or smarter than the rich and powerful. Britney or Heidi and Spencer might have money, fame, and miles of shoes, but they are miserable or moronic or dopey or douchey.

  Laughing at the clueless mouthfarts of cute twenty-somethings who spent their high-school years with vocal coaches or plastic surgeons is another variation on the theme “Are we getting dumber?” Ignorant or loopy celebs allow the public to express and exorcise their own anxieties about their intelligence. Jesus Christ, are all young people this stunned? Why is this trash in the paper? Who likes these people? Celebrity stories also offer a chance to complain about the whims of the free market. The economic excesses of celebrities always make for good gossip. Ten million bucks to get her in your movie? He’s bankrupt because he blew it all on jewellery and tigers?

  The publicly and lavishly squandered fortunes of celebrities – TMZ shoots a lot of shopping footage – tell us that economic rewards are fickle, fleeting, dependent only on popularity. Sometimes talent and hard work are rewarded and sometimes the world’s Kardashians prevail. One day everyone loves you, execs are hucking millions at you, and you’re buying mink-lined Uggs for all your pals, who chill at your mansion. Next thing you know, you’re outta work, in hock, and scrambling for a spot on Celebrity Rehab.

  Like school-sucks stories or accounts of campus decline, celeb coverage allows the media to play on our anxieties about how ignorant our fellows are, or are becoming. Then there are the semi-celebs who enjoy brief fame for blurting or doing something stupid, making a mistake egregious enough for the vast majority to point and laugh at. The most infamous recent example of this occurred in August 2007, when Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Caitlin Upton served up this word salad:

  I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to [locate the U.S. on a map] because, uh, some, people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.

  The clip became a popular news item and an instant smash on YouTube, where it racked up millions and millions of hits and thousands and thousands of comments.

  Upton quickly parlayed this exposure into follow-up appearances on programs such as the Today Show, where she was given an opportunity to answer the question again. She said:

  Personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on a map. I don’t know anyone else who doesn’t. If the statistics are correct, I believe there should be more emphasis on geography in our education so people will learn how to read maps better.6

  The hosts applauded her for this effort, which is not much of an improvement on the original. The grammar is better, insofar as there is some. But it is still redundant and narcissistic, disputing the stats on the grounds of her finger’s-breadth of experience, making an argumentum ad I-don’t-know-anyone-like-that, a popular undergrad essay move.

  Upton may have lost the pageant but she won the publicity, became part of the media mist. (Can you remember who won? Me neither.) Her garble was second only to “Don’t tase me, bro!” in the Yale Dictionary of Quotations list of 2007‘s most notable quotes. NBC, the network that broadcast the pageant, also used Upton’s jibber-jabber to promote the pageant in 2008. Their pitch: Come see which one of these dizzy babes will lose her cool and say something ridiculous this year.

  Upton got her fifteen minutes because she is a blonde-joke blonde who gave America the opportunity to ask itself the question “Does this bonehead represent an endemic national boneheadedness?” The morning shows answered this with a resounding no. She’s just a pretty girl who cracked under the pressure – time for a makeup test and a cookie! The Web is a much harsher taskmaster. Bloggers and posters reviled Upton for embodying a host of bobble-head stereotypes of ladies and blondes and Americans. The general tone? Thanks a lot, you ditzy bitch, for handing the world’s lesser nations yet another chance to point and jeer at that big ol’ doofus the U.S. of A.

  There is a lot of wrong on the Internet: page after page of execrable grammar, bad information, and delusional ranting. But it also hosts countless sites devoted to the excoriation of ignorance and sloppiness, where the persnickety share and shred everything from poorly spelled signs to
disingenuous reporting. The Internet is also home to various experts – professors, economists, statisticians, veterans of the old press – who can provide more detailed interpretations of ongoing events than the confines and constraints of a column or cable squabble allow.

  A 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press found that more people were getting their national and international news from the Internet than from newspapers. Forty-two per cent of respondents went to the Net for news and 33 per cent still trusted ol’ Inky. But the vast majority, 71 per cent, said that TV was their primary news source. This helps explain another finding from the survey: the accuracy and credibility of the press has tanked. Pew has been conducting this survey for nearly two decades. In 2009 the number of respondents who said that the press usually gets things right, 29 per cent, sank to its all-time low. The majority, 63 per cent, said news stories were often inaccurate, and 60 per cent thought the news was politically biased.7

  Republicans have been working this angle since the 1980s, arguing that bland moderate media outlets like CNN, which frequently air the opinions of corporate lobbyists, are actually radical leftist organs. But Democrats increasingly also see the news as biased. Both sides think the press is in cahoots with the powerful people and institutions it should be policing. Both have decamped to their own cable channels. Republicans watch Fox, Democrats watch MSNBC and CNN, and never the twain shall meet.

  Though they may put a partisan spin on the events of the day, cable networks and the stodgy old broadcast news organizations share one trait. They chase the latest blip, no matter how trivial or half-baked it may be. The best recent example of this happened on October 15, 2009, when the media entire went apeshit over “Balloon Boy.” The story, which was the story everywhere that afternoon, went like this: Six-year-old Falcon Heene of Fort Collins, Colorado, climbed into his dad’s homemade helium balloon, which somehow managed to get off the ground. The boy was trapped in the unforgiving skies, skidding through the air with helicopters, rescue services, and hordes of reporters in hot pursuit. Where and when would he land? Would he live?

  I freely admit that I know very little about physics. But I, like most festivity-attending North Americans, have held a helium balloon. I have also seen balloons fly and float, and Heene’s UFOish silver handiwork did not appear to be dragging ballast, or at least not kid-sized ballast. By late afternoon, when the balloon landed, boyless, the media began changing their tack, but nobody dared insinuate it might be a hoax until the next morning, after the family’s interview with CNN‘s Larry King. The boy blurted the wrong thing to the World’s Oldest Interviewer, confessing that he’d hidden in a box “for the show.”

  For the next couple of days, the unravelling hoax led the news. The Heenes were the number-one search topic on Google and the family appeared on ABC and NBC, where the kids were nervous to the point of puking. Reports surfaced that Heene and his wife were long-time publicity hounds and wackadoodle ones at that, who had appeared on ABC‘s Wife Swap. Heene père also believes in the Lizard People and chases storms. He concocted the hoax because he was mad with cockamamie dreams of his very own reality show.

  The media granted Heene’s wish. Media critics saw the Balloon Boy debacle as proof that the press is more interested in being fast than in being right. Just like Web commenters who love to declare “firsties,” so too does the boob-tube brigade break stories before they have the relevant details, piling onto the new new thing, fearing that another channel might beat them to a scoop. The result? Hours of repetition, speculation, and vamping as the info trickles in. This torpor is punctuated by occasional feeding frenzies whenever a particularly meaty chunk of info bobs up among the chum. And other stories – the ones scheduled before the latest Shocking Developments! – get bumped. The economy, health care, and Afghanistan can wait until everyone’s done gawping at the drifting balloon.

  Again, as in the Lauren Upton example, the Internet media were much harsher in their assessment of the story than the mainstream. Bloggers and message-board posters argued that the story was likely a hoax while the balloon was still in the air. Of course, it is easier to speculate about a child’s life from behind the Web’s veil of anonymity. At the same time, I saw a lot more balloon-related physics online than I did on CNN, and bloggers were quick to link to old YouTube clips of Papa Heene having conniptions on Wife Swap.

  Once it became clear that the story was indeed a hoax, the old media lingered in Fort Collins for well over a week, providing constant updates about the likelihood of Heene’s being charged or fined for his shenanigans. Sheriff Jim Alderden told reporters, “I am confident that you folks have something better to do.”8 The next day, Alderden appeared on Fox’s O’Reilly Report.

  Like bad dinner guests, TV reporters show up too early and stay too late. They rush stories to air, throwing what little they know at the audience to see what sticks. If a story attracts a lot of attention, they flog it until the audience starts to turn on the tale. Then they dump it down the memory hole, never to be seen again. Internet time is different; stories appear online even more rapidly than they do on TV, and they linger longer too. The Internet allows people to participate in the story, to embroider it with their opinions or expertise in ways TV does not. Granted, sometimes this degenerates into commentary that is the digital equivalent of dirty graffiti in a bathroom stall, but there is also a lot of really great, thoughtful writing on the Web.

  Some have gone so far as to claim that this is a golden age of writing. In The Economist‘s More Intelligent Life blog, professor Anne Trubek declared in June 2009 that “we are all writers now.”9 Her students’ steady diet of Facebook status updates, texts, emails, and tweets meant they were reading and writing more than previous generations. A similar article in Wired two months later showcased the work of professor Andrea Lunsford, whose study of Stanford students’ writing habits found that they were doing more and more “life-writing” outside the classroom. “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she said.10

  It is indeed true that young people are typing more than their forebears. But that has not led to any marked improvements in the student essays and emails I’ve seen over the past decade. I haven’t done a formal study, but the thousands of pages I’ve corrected strongly suggest the following: Students who read books, for class and for fun, write fairly well in class and online. Students who balk at reading books send me mangled, misspelled emails and hand in essays that drain my marking pens.

  This optimism about the transformative powers of the Internet becomes a problem when it starts to affect the education system. The idea that schools and universities should abandon books and follow the kids online, meeting them where their cool new literacies live, is wrong. If students are going to spend more time writing and reading, they need a rigorous education more than ever, to serve as a counterweight to the speedy, sometimes sloppy and slapdash nature of the Net.

  I love the Web. However, I do not think, like some tech-noptimists, that skimming blogs or completing a Facebook quiz is equivalent to reading challenging material and learning how to make an argument about it. Rather, unprecedented access to information means it is all the more urgent that we teach students how to evaluate that information, how to judge the countless claims on sites of wildly varying quality.

  Print culture and digital culture may overlap, but there are still significant differences between them. Perhaps the starkest example of the difference is the Modern Library’s list of the top one hundred English-language novels of the twentieth century. The editors posted their choices and then encouraged Web-types to vote for their favourites. The editors’ top ten selections were

  1. Ulysses (James Joyce)

  2. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

  3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)

  4. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)

  5. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

&nbs
p; 6. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)

  7. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

  8. Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler)

  9. Sons and Lovers (D. H. Lawrence)

  10. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

  I think Lolita is better than Gatsby or Portrait, but this is a pretty predictable canonical ranking. Hundreds of thousands of Internet voters produced the following list:

  1. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

  2. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)

  3. Battlefield Earth (L. Ron Hubbard)

  4. The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien)

  5. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

  6. 1984 (George Orwell)

  7. Anthem (Ayn Rand)

  8. We the Living (Ayn Rand)

  9. Mission Earth (L. Ron Hubbard)

  10. Fear (L. Ron Hubbard)

  This poll ran in 1998, when publishers were just starting to dabble in digital democracy. The Modern Library launched the project to get people talking about the great books, and hundreds of thousands of people did. Lamentably, the majority flipped the bird at the great books and mass-clicked in support of agitprop for objectivism and Scientology, two of the twentieth century’s daffiest dogmas.11

  I imagine this list might look slightly different now. Ayn’s turgid, rapey doorstops would still do well, but she and L. Ron might have to cede a couple of slots to recent blockbusters like the Left Behind books and the Twilight franchise. These books have some of the highest scores and the most ardent fans, so they must be the greatest. Conversely, nobody really likes – or reads – challenging shit like Ulysses. And any nerds who say that they do are likely indulging in old-culture snobbery, affecting cultural preferences to make other people feel dumb.

  The death-of-book-reading story has been getting a fair amount of play in the press, since it goes beautifully with the demise of journalism. For example, when a reporter from the New York Times asked Apple’s Steve Jobs in early 2008 about plans for an iNifty e-book reader, he dismissed the idea outright: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty per cent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”12