Harvard University Nieman reports (Summer 2010 Issue) -3

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Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism

Where Journalism Fits 

This rise in emotional intensity poses a real problem for serious journalists,  as I describe in my book “What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism.” We have been trained for many good reasons to shy away from it in the presentation of news. But we see our audience drawn to it. And we do not even have a way of discussing which uses of emotion are misleading or manipulative and which actually can help people understand their world. 

The sciences of the mind offer a lot of help if we are willing to learn from them. They explain, for example, why the immediate crowds out the important. Why bad news attracts attention more than good news does. They can show us how emotion interacts with the human brain’s inherent mental shortcuts to lead us systematically to erroneous conclusions. They can point us to the ways in which search algorithms interact with emotions and these mental shortcuts to mislead people about the relative importance of various pieces of information. They can even help us understand the way our ability and impulse to read other people’s minds draws us to a story and light up other secrets of how and why narrative works. 

It should be clear by now that the challenge for journalists from here forward is not only the steadfast adherence to the values of accuracy and independence and the social responsibility to provide a civic education but also the development of new ways of thinking and talking about how to advance the social mission of journalism in a radically and rapidly evolving environment. The answer is not to figure out how to transport 20th century news presentation into 21st century delivery mechanisms but rather to create a new rhetoric of news that can get through to the changed and changing news audience. 

To conclude where I began, the audience will determine the future of news. Serious journalists must understand to the very essence the minds that make up this audience in order to know how to persuade people to assimilate the significant and demand the accurate. Anything less is the neglect of our most important social responsibility. 
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