To “real” cricket aficionados, the Channel Nine commentary team can be extremely tedious. We don’t need to hear the leg before wicket rule explained for the umpteenth time. We know the new ball tends to swing, and the old ball “goes reverse”, and spinners like to land the ball in footmarks because it will spin sharply out of them. But Nine knows its audience contains a lot of people who are less familiar with the game than I am, and, for those viewers, the explanations help to make sense of a game whose subtleties are far from obvious. And, according to some interesting research on public trust in journalism from the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, sports commentators are on to something.
The research was conducted in the UK, during the primaries for the 2008 US presidential election. Five focus groups were conducted with a variety of “news consumers”, many of whom the researchers classed as “regular newspaper readers”. Amongst other topics, the researchers asked the focus groups about the primaries. Not a single participant in the focus groups understood that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were from the same political party. This is mildly surprising, but what was really odd was the response from the journalists who the researchers then spoke to about this. They weren’t surprised at all that their audience didn’t understand the story that their media organizations had spent so much time covering. The researchers go on to contend that this failure to adequately explain complex stories – and provide the backstory in the way that Richie and the rest of the crew do – is one contributor to a failure of news media to connect to their audience.
There’s much more in this report, drawing out issues of social class contributing to a more general failure of connection between the media and the public, and the role of social media, which I’ll leave others more expert in that side of things to comment on. But for my own posts on LP, I would hope that they’re generally accessible to an intelligent, engaged, but not necessarily expert audience. Do we assume too much background knowledge sometimes?
Robert,, its always a little hard to tell. I’ve found one way round it is to send chapters I write that deal with Australian history to American friends in California and Montana, and American history to Australian and European friends who’ve never studied American history, with specific instructions in both cases nto point out stuff that might be unclear because I’ve assumed the reader knows something when in fact they don’t. So far, it works.
Being a hiogh school teacher, you’re reminded not to assume knowledge all the time …
I often find myself pausing after some reference, even with younger teachers, and finding out they don’t know stuff I’d assumed everyone literate should know. Then the tricky part is how to explain it without sounding condescending.
good method, Paul.
Fran, a friend was giving a talk on “Earth, Moon, Sun” to a group of high school teachers about 15 years ago. Began by metioning that the Sun’s apparent “movement” across the sky was due to the Earth’s spinning on its own axis.
A hand shot up: “What do you mean, the Earth spins?” Speaker was approx 40 years of age, with a North American accent. The other teachers sat there in silence. Speaker tried to politely lay out some accepted facts.
You just never can tell what background knowledge folks bring.
I know it’s a TV show for children, but “BTN” = Behind the News, does a reasonable job.
The earth is flat! The earth is flat!
[Runs away and hides.]
Still there a moment ago Roger
Robert, I think the analogy with sports commentary is a bit misleading, as a lot of what those people are doing is explaining professional sporting concepts/strategies to an audience of laymen who don’t actually know as much as they think they do about the game they’re watching.
The last bit of the SBS Ashes coverage I saw included Warne explaining the strengths and weaknesses of Flintoff as a bowler. Warnie mightn’t be the greatest sporting analyst evah, but I could tell he was talking about the game at a higher level than any backyard champion could.
Self-inflated expertise by laymen is a bigger source of grief for we who read this medium than any old honest ignorance is.
That’s why a thread at LP like ‘The Rules’, designed purely to draw out the anti-AGW laymen cranks, is of questionable value, IMHO. Totally head meet brickwall stuff.
I enjoyed this bit from the paper Robert.
a) The earthquake was news
b) Me bed was shaking
a) I put the telly on GMTV and that was the first I heard about it. That’s what I call news.
Twitter’s success in a nutshell, though on an almost global scale – even though that specific focus group had probably never heard of Twitter, they defined it.
Breaking, fast and experiential. Something that increasingly applies to all media, raw and unmediated.
Yes, I read the whole paper, lots of interesting nuggets in there and well worth the time to read if you’re interested in media perceptions. It will be passed on.
As far as you post goes, agree about sports commentators. Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen in cycling are a good example. Anyone who actually knows about the sport finds them maddeningly obvious, but they have contributed massively to the growth of the sport beyond someone like me. A great team and we’re lucky to have them in the booth.
As to your posts, all good from where I’m sitting, always an enjoyable and informing read.
Layoff about the AGW,otherwise you will have to listen to the ABC radio personalities segue this segue that!?Then again, you could offer a solution to the Cricket Broadcaster via the Digital Teev…email,sms your questions if you don’t comprehend!? The ABC does that boringly well,or don’t you listen to their radio commentary,and turn the other down!? Can pretzels be wired,and how many coils numbers before they could act as a mini what’s it!? May 30th 2009 NASA putout a release of what could happen in the year 2013,meltdown of electrical production equipment,radio and sattelite and generally telephoney will go possibly bonkers.The Earth is heating and Cooling in different ways.As much as I dislike the ABC they have shown repeated wisdom about when matters celestial are affecting their activities.To say ,like Bob Brown and others in a different way,have said,that thinking the Earth Warming is old science ,if some out a space component is suggested,is,well as stupid as Australia’s preparedness about that.God help me!
Good post Robert.
I too taught for yonks and a key factor in communicating a concept whatever was context.
You build on what is present and expand from there. If you assume context is present but it isn’t then you have problems.
That is what is wrong with mass media communication.
Rarely is the background/context explained and so today’s news item, the sound bite whatever, is placed within a historical vacuum and becomes mere noise.
Its all too quick and isolated for real meaning.
Probably partly at least a deliberate ploy. If the reporters or analysts tried to place their news bite in context then they would expose their own shortcomings.
A classic example is the pseph wars between bloggers and the MSM where the bloggers know about things like margin of error etc but the MSM can’t pass that on to their readers or their subsequent comments are shown to be vaccuous.
Possum and co expose them regularly.
And you can come up with numerous examples from several fields that show the same thing.
A lack of history.
History is dangerous, it teaches people things they shouldn’t know.
As Roger Waters said “History is for fools”. [Thats irony just in case some take it seriously].
Its also an area where the blogs have great advantages over the MSM.
Links can lead people off to explore context, gain extra dimensions, which the print media can’t and/or won’t do.
Blogs can also involve a running commentary in time, I can check back via archives or embedded self referencing links on ideas and concepts and events relevant to whatever is being discussed at any one time.
And most importantly perhaps interaction.
Within a few minutes there is likely to be comments agreeing or disagreeing, placing in a wider or differing context etc with my humble contribution to this discussion between peers.
Much prefer blogs to the MSM.
You are rather assuming a simple relationship between social reality or truths, the media and the public, as if there is a real world, a media whose job it is to report that world, and a public who knowledge of the world comes from the media. But the three levels (if that is even a viable typography, which it isn’t) are far more interrelated and interlinked. The media produce forms of social and political knowledge, publics are produced by them, etc etc.
For what it’s worth, while I find the posts and comments on this blog generally well-informed and interesting, when it comes to areas of specialist knowledge and experience that I myself happen to have, I am surprised at the extent that knowledge I assume is generally held, is in fact not so. News media, blogs, academia, and other sites of knowledge such as “common sense” and ideologies all contend for claims on the “real” truth.
This article addresses those people who actually engage with the news media in some way. There are plenty of adults out there who don’t watch TV news, don’t listen to radio news, don’t look at news on the Internet. The only exposure they get is if events interpose themselves on their social interactions.
I think we should have some form of multi-choice testing as part of the voting process and a vote is weighted according to the score on the test.
Razor
What weighting would you give someone who merely put a question mark on the multiple choice?
How many languages would the MC be in anyway?
Thanks for the link Robert, more reading…
Just a quick observation about visual mass media (ie TV), it is often assumed that the words spoken in a “news” story constitute the message, the same thinking is at work with presenters and other personalities in other areas yet the medium is rich with non-verbal symbols which often convey information to the audience that is not connected with the “words”. This aspect of the visual mass media is often ignored in the context of its information dissemination role yet it is a crucial consideration in its presentation and delivery.
They mightn’t understand which party is what or who is on the ballot sheet but people’s impressions and emotional responses are guided. This non-verbal molding of opinions is all the more effective since it escapes public discussion, since seeing is believing.
FB @ 12 – if you score zero then I think you should get a quarter weighted vote. Better than 75% gets 100% weighting.
English is the language of this country, unless I missed a change recently.
Is it how we consume the media that matters? I’m often stunned how many times I can ask someone about something we’ve just collectively watched on TV and they’ll have absolutely NO recollection of what was said.
It goes in, gets digested/filtered and spat out. I suspect this reflects that the BULK of our viewing borders on mental respite therapy – the content allows us to “tune out” and allow some senseless show to wash over us. When people watch the news, unless it’s something that directly affects them (“that cyclone’s getting close” or “how much money is Rudd giving me?”), they simply allow the content to “wash over” them. This allows them to pickup the basic information (someone called Obama and Clinton yelling at each other) but little of the detail (“aren’t they from different parties?”).
“I think we should have some form of I think we should have some form of multi-choice testing as part of the voting process and a vote is weighted according to the score on the test.”
I’ve heard this point made before (you should have explained Razor that “multi-choice testing” refers to knowledge of events that will be affected by a change of government) and I hafta to say I’m not totally out of sympathy with this approach.
Certainly preferable to granting the franchise on the basis of property ownership.
As someone once said, “democracy is the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
On the other hand, as a fat drunken half English/US aristocrat pointed out, democracy still remains the least worst form of government.
Razor @ 11, your proposal reminds me of a passage early in Catch-22, where one of the characters suggests that decent folks (rich WASPs like him) should get more votes than the rest.
“English is the language of this country, unless I missed a change recently.”
Yep, you missed something and it was not just a recent thing.
See my comment on voting here.