Criminal phone hacking was a tabloid hiccup in 2006. Five years later it’s a malignant tumor in the head of the mighty News Corporation. Now It threatens to derange an octogenarian king of kings along with his princely successor.
The phone hacking scandal is tarnishing brands and destroying shareholder value, but it does have a silver lining for learning pros. It reveals how the commingling of information and entertainment - the secret sauce of all Murdoch properties - makes content irresistible.
The “information” I’m speaking of is the daily news. We seek it online, in newspapers and magazines, on the television and radio. Entertainment shares all of these broadcast channels but until recently news and entertainment were separate and distinct categories of content. No more.
Before King Rupert stretched the meaning of “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” you might say that William S. Paley (CBS) and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (NYT) ruled the empire. Not that they controlled it or ran the most profitable enterprises, but they published and broadcast the daily news with something that was once known as journalistic integrity. To them the news was factual, accurate, objective and important content - vital for understanding the world and for successfully living and working in it.
In the Paley-Sulzberger view the news is educational. You read or watch to become informed, to enlarge your acumen, to grow into a more skillful and capable member of your community. Can you imagine a more preposterous value proposition than this in the 21st Century? Yes, of course you can. Those other educational enterprises - schools and colleges - package content for precisely the same reasons. And like much of the news media, many of them are failing miserably. We’ll see why in a moment.
Entertainment always coexisted with the news in rags and on the boob tube, but separately and for very different reasons. Entertainment was just for fun, to be easily enjoyed and forgotten. Entertainment didn’t promise to develop you or even challenge you to “think different.” On the contrary it invited you to sit back on the couch and pretend you are a potato.
Long before the phone hacking scandal, way back in the 1970s when living in England, I saw the writing on the wall for news media (and for education). The “wall” was a News Corporation tabloid named The Sun - a daily sibling of the weekly News of the World - yes, the very same journal that was shuttered recently during the phone hacking scandal. King Rupert borrowed a page from Hugh Hefner’s playbook, the magazine Playboy, and coated page 3 of News of the World with pornography. My puritanical American sensibilities were amazed - naked ladies in newspapers! How can this be? Why is this happening?
Well you probably know why naked ladies were pictured in the News of the World. For the same reason that Hefner put them among interviews of statesmen and articles about evolution: to sell print. But why did pornography help to sell the news? Has anybody bothered to ask?
The News Corporation so liked the answer that they made it into their global brand. Pornography is just a low form of entertainment. Lift up your head a little bit and you’ll find a wider variety of entertainment clogging the news arteries these days - not all of it dirty, but most of it mindless. Higher and lower styles of entertainment all have this in common: they’re fun to consume. People want to be entertained and have fun. Given the choice, they vastly prefer entertainment to information and education. They must be forced to attend school (work), but they willingly and gratefully pay to attend the theater (play).
The phone hacking scandal is not a case of journalists aggressively reporting news. It’s just a zealous impresario preparing our entertainment. We like stories that shock and amaze and titillate. We used to rely on novels and movies and sports for our entertainment fix and we still do, only now we also get it on Fox News and CNN.
As learning professionals we may be offended by the commingling of news and entertainment. News for most of us is serious whereas entertainment is frivolous. News is factual, entertainment is free to imagine. News is constant, entertainment is protean and subversive. At least you may think so, but I don’t buy it.
News - and more broadly speaking education - has run its course. To the extent that it edifies without entertaining, it fails. That is not a truth for all times and places, but it is true for American civilization in 2011. Did you get that? Let me just repeat it for the benefit of speed readers: To the extent that education edifies without entertaining, it fails. Period.
Before you imagine a future in which text books have centerfolds and lectures are performed on a trapeze, let me recommend a different vision. It is a vision of education that both edifies and entertains. I have argued elsewhere and I sincerely believe that there is no useful contradistinction to be made between the two. The arts have been edifying and entertaining for millennia and they are doing so today. The most celebrated and enduring works of art are as complex and subtle and insightful as the best lecture or seminar you ever attended in college - maybe more. And yet they are also ravishing entertainments.
The problem we face now - the one brought into clear focus by News Corporation - is not structural (the recipe of information + entertainment) but qualitative (the editorial chef). For the moment at least, our news impresarios are so lacking in integrity that they pander to an audience that they imagine is too stupid and lazy to be cognitively challenged. They pander because they lack the talent to come up with better content.
When News Corporation inevitably drifts away from its immoral and unethical founder it may stop behaving illegally, but it can’t and shouldn’t betray its brand. It must continue to blend education with entertainment or consumers will abandon its networks and journals. Same goes for the rest of the fourth estate. The “fitness” of news has been redefined.
We on the side of education and training are meantime arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We stand by the ponderous, the pedantic, the hopelessly obscure, the impossibly erudite and the shamelessly monotonous as we compete with mobile devices for the attention of students - and generally finish second. Because we are smart and not moronic, most teachers and trainers have not sullied their content with pornography and ideology, but neither have we made it fun. We ignore the writing on the wall as our huge bureaucratic learning industry steams into the ice flow.
Those on the cutting edge of education are heading for the lifeboats by experimenting with serious games - mortar and pestle for grinding information and entertainment into amazing new forms. That is a hopeful sign. Those on the cutting edge of entertainment are doing the same on Comedy Central. Over a cold dark sea of educational futility that most of us can’t bear to face, there are courageous and engaging ways forward. Feeling brave? Grab an oar!
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