With apologies to the Beatles and “A Day in the Life”:
One of my daily habits is reading through the major online news sources to get a sense of what is happening here in the U.S. and in the world. I often find it fascinating to see what subjects are drawing the most media attention—and the kind of attention they are attracting. Here’s a brief round-up of recent “stuff”:
Placebos are in the news (again): One of the things I find most interesting about placebos is that articles about them written by medical doctors studiously avoid the word hypnosis. They are comfortable saying that the placebo effect is “psychological” and referring to the “power of belief,” but they seem really uncomfortable with the possibility that hypnosis accounts for the placebo effect. (See “On the Brain: When Believing is Healing,” @ http://bit.ly/lXKMYA.)
I wonder where and how they think beliefs originate when they aren’t derived from direct experience, such as putting your hand on a hot stove. I suspect that they have been hypnotized into believing that there is no hypnosis….
Sarah Palin is in the news (again, and again, and again): The most interesting thing about Sarah’s being in the news again is that the media pundits complain at length about how much news coverage she has been garnering. When they aren’t talking about where she is and what she is doing, they discuss how much coverage she is getting from the “lamestream media.” If media pundits were sharks, you’d call their coverage of her a “feeding frenzy.”
The Big Question is whether she intends to run for president of the U.S. in 2012. She says that her tour is “just” a family vacation, with stops selected to help people understand the history of the U.S.
The Republican primaries are in the news (sort-of): The main question about the Republican primaries is whether anyone both qualified and desirable is going to run. There’s almost as much redundancy in the coverage of the Republican primaries as there is in the coverage of Sarah Palin. It is, in fact, hard for pundits to mention the one without mentioning the other.
Men behaving badly are in the news (a lot): The most recent example is Wiener’s weenie—the photo shot seen ’round the world…. Whether his Twitter account was hacked or whether he simply sent his crotch shot to the wrong person, the problem isn’t quite in the same league as Brett Farve’s cell-phone photos. Neither are anywhere close to the problems Arnold Schwarzenegger is facing, and that is a far cry from the kind of difficulty the former head of the IMF is in as a result of an “encounter” with a hotel maid. It seems almost too coincidental to be coincidental that an Egyptian banker found himself in the same kind of hotel-maid difficulty. And then there’s John Edwards, who was recently indicted for spending campaign contributions to cover up an affair. I wonder if he knows Arnold….
The list of men behaving badly could, of course, go on a long time. Such behavior may prove Lord Acton’s dictum that “power corrupts,” that hormones are more powerful than reason, or both.
The U.S. economy is in the news (still): Will we or won’t we raise the debt limit? I admit that I don’t fully understand everything that’s going on with the economy, but I’m not happy with the inability of our elected leaders to discuss the issues (not only the deficit, but also the related issues of unemployment and long-term fiscal stability). One of the reasons we don’t see much in the way of reason is that most of what’s said is a matter of belief (can anyone say “placebo”?) rather than evidence. Those who provide the numbers and their logical consequences have not been able to compete with those who provide platitudes.
Not in the news but should be: What’s hard to find in the news is much in the way of evidence to support many of the beliefs being bandied about. Where are Korzybski and the metamodel of NLP when we need them? The news, and perhaps especially political news, favors “map” over “territory.” Politicians are hardly ever asked hard questions, such as “How do you know,” or “What (Who, When, or How) specifically?” The dots we really should be connecting are between the “maps” as expressed in various platitudes and the “territory” we are attempting to navigate.
The news media are essentially giving us placebos when we need the surgery offered by a strong dose of reality. But “reality” is also available on the Internet for those willing to search for it. If, for example, you (or those in the media wanting to report the facts) wanted to know whether taxes in the U.S. are too high, information about tax rates over the years is available. If you wanted to know the relationship between taxation and levels of employment, that information is “there.” If you wanted to know how the current financial deficit compares with the amount of debt in times past, that information is there as well. If you want to compare the costs and outcomes of health care in the States with costs and outcomes in other countries, that information is available.
I suspect that pretty much anything you might want to know about is available—and not just in the form of someone’s belief, but in the form of facts, figures, and other relatively “hard” evidence. One of my beliefs is that the quality of products, services, and statements of belief is inversely proportional to the amount of TV advertising it receives. Political “talking points,” for example, are almost guaranteed to be more fiction than truth, more “map” than “territory.”
Unless you make an effort to find the “territory,” however, you will find yourself navigating by someone else’s map. And that may well have the same result as driving around Chicago while using a map of Detroit.
