Seriously

Thomas Sowell is a columnist you should always take seriously. In an excellent column at Townhall, Mr. Sowell accuses our media of the obivous — being unserious:

In these grim and foreboding times, our media have this year spent incredible amounts of time on a hunting accident involving Vice President Cheney, a bogus claim that the administration revealed Valerie Plame’s identity as a C.I.A. “agent” — actually a desk job in Virginia — and is now going ballistic over a Congressman who sent raunchy e-mails to Congressional pages.

This is the frivolous media — and the biased media. Republican Congressman Foley was wrong and is out on his ear. But Democrats in both Congress and the White House have gone far beyond words with a page and an intern. Yet the Democrats did not resign and Bill Clinton’s perjury, obstruction of justice, and suborning of perjury by others were treated as if these were irrelevant private matters.

Even when serious issues are addressed, they can be addressed either seriously or frivolously. If you are content to see life and death issues of war and peace addressed with catch phrases like “chicken hawk” or to see a coalition of nations around the world fighting terrorism referred to as “unilateral” U.S. action because France does not go along, then you are content with frivolity.

This is exactly why I don’t rely on the lamestream media, the Wall Street Journal excepted, for my news. What Mr. Sowell doesn’t mention, but what worries me deeply for its implications to the future of America, is why the lamestream media is unserious: because unserious news reporting makes money, and serious news reporting doesn’t. Yes, Virginia, it really is that simple. Most Americans will gladly spend money to read about celebrities, or sports, or left-wing rants — but they won’t spend money for serious reporting that requires one to think. There are niche exceptions, of course — the Wall Street Journal, various specialty journals, and so on — but the sum of their revenues is miniscule compared with the rest of the unserious media. Ponder the long term implications for America of this preference for the unserious. It’s not a happy thought…

Mr. Sowell concludes his piece with this observation about the war in Iraq:

Those who discuss the current war in terms of frivolous talking points make a big deal out of the fact we have been in this war longer than in World War II. But, if we are serious, we would know that it is not the duration of a war that is crucial. It is how many lives it costs. More than twice as many Marines were killed taking one island in the Pacific during World War II than all the Americans killed in the four years of the Iraq war. More Americans were killed in one day during the Civil War. If we are going to discuss war, the least we can do is be serious.

Exactly right. But most Americans don’t seem to understand this, and I’ve been surprised about why at least some of them don’t. During the runup to the Iraq war, and for the first year or two of it, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with quite a few people who were opposed to the war. A few of these people — depressingly few — had fairly well developed positions, based on reality and their own opinions. I disagreed with these folks, but was cheered by their seriousness. However, most of the people I talked with who opposed the war did so for a variety of absurd “reasons", impossible to respect. Some were of the tinfoil hat, Michael Moore school of reflexive Bush-bashing: never mind if he’s right, he said it, so I hate it. But what brought these folks to mind today was another pattern I saw, which Mr. Sowell’s conclusion reminded me of: a significant proportion — perhaps half — possessed a context so warped, so divergent from reality, that it prevented them from analyzing the war in Iraq in anything like a rational manner. One recurring example of this was exactly the point Mr. Sowell raised about relative casualties. I talked with dozens of Americans — almost all of them college graduates, and most considerably younger than I — who really believed that the casualties we experienced in the first year of the war in Iraq were numerically comparable to, or even exceeded, the casualties America suffered in Vietnam, the two world wars, or the American Civil War. In a dozen or so cases, when I shared the actual casualties of those past conflicts with the person I was conversing with, I was frankly disbelieved. In more than a few cases, we repaired to a reference work to ascertain the truth of my assertions — and in one memorable case, even then I was disbelieved!

Some of you may be surprised at this. Myself, I’ve become quite cynical about the general American understanding of history. Mind you, I’m no history expert myself; my small knowledge of history comes mostly from reading I’ve done on my own. But my default assumption about other Americans' knowledge of history — especially those much younger than myself — is now approximately zero. And I’m right far more often than I’m wrong.

What does this portend for America? I don’t pretend to know the answer to that, but it’s very hard to see how the result of such profound ignorance could be good…