Q&A: Richard Rodriguez on the Decline of ‘News Literacy’

*What a great read,  and once you read this interview you’ll see there’s no pun intended. Whatever your take on Richard Rodriguez may be, this is deep food for thought. Why are people so quick to react and comment on headlines they read online, without truly understanding what they read? And how is this exactly what we asked for? Read on … VL

By New America Media

Ed. Note: The explosion of digital technology has transformed nearly every aspect of our daily lives, from social interactions to how we shop for groceries, and how we consume and understand news. In an edited interview with NAM Executive Director Sandy Close, noted author and speaker Richard Rodriguez says this transformation is directly tied to the decline in “news literacy,” an understanding of news grounded in place and on a “subtlety” absent in today’s media landscape. 

The term “news literacy,” what does that mean to you?

News literacy doesn’t mean a great deal. The two terms mean something – news and literacy. My concern with the term literacy is that people are not reading right now, or they’re not reading well, or intently. If you’re worried about the relationship between those two terms, then you have to wonder, how are people reading? And it’s a larger question, it seems to me. I don’t think people are reading.

There’s studies that have shown that people’s ability to comprehend what they read online is less than it is when they read in print.

I believe that. Part of the glamor of being online is that you do think quickly. You do make responses quickly, obviously. And there’s just this kind of valuing of spontaneity as opposed to reflection. When you value spontaneity (your own?) you also are referring to news in a way: I want it fast, I want this article to reveal itself pro/con, yes/no, are you there/ are you against us very early. There’s no, no subtlety to the discussion. That’s probably why so much of our news now tends to fall into ideological camps. We want a kind of way of reading that has nothing to do with the text. We want goggles that will help us not read the text.

To what extent is the fall, the decline in literacy, related to what’s happening to news sources and the changes in the news landscape?

The greatest catastrophe of the news right now is that we’ve given up the notion of news related to place. That’s related I think to the fact that people are not living in the place where they are living anymore. So they no longer care what’s going on in Omaha, Nebraska because they don’t live in Omaha, Nebraska. They listen to Rush Limbaugh and he’s in Florida. They argue with John Stewart and he’s in New York. And they live in a kind of global news empire that has nothing to do, or very little to do, with place. They’re not interested in Omaha, Nebraska. 

So what do you see replacing the city newspaper? Is it global news sources? And are people preoccupied with news?

I think people are preoccupied largely with the official news operations with national news out of Washington and groups like Politico. The movement of magazines, the Atlantic Monthly from Boston to Washington, for example, was a very shrewd move because the elite interest right now is in politics! National politics. And in so far as Omaha, Nebraska is concerned it’s only in relationship to Washington. 

The essay I wrote on the death of the American newspaper is written as an obituary, precisely because what I was trying to suggest in the piece is that the obituary itself is out of date. People are dying now in my society and their deaths are not being noted in any official obituary. 

In some way the death of the American newspaper is related to the death of the American cemetery. People are not being buried in cemeteries anymore. There’s no place for the dead go to, so in some sense Gramps died and we spill his ashes somewhere in the lake or by the sea and no one knows where it is. Or we put Gramp’s ashes in the call-set next to the Christmas tree ornaments. That lack of place I would argue is very deep and I think it’s related to the rise of digital technology.

In what way? 

I’m of the opinion that we invented Henry Ford. Henry Ford didn’t invent us. We wanted something, we wanted mobility, we wanted to get away from our in-laws, and we invented this man who gave us a cheap automobile and then we invented the interstate highway system to get as far away from our in-laws and then we found in the suburbs that we were lonely and we invented Steve Jobs, who himself was a son of the suburbs.

Jobs grew up in Mountain View, CA, which is suburban. He was bullied in junior high school and told his parents that because of the black and Mexican kids, “If I have to stay at this school, I’m going to drop out of school.” So they moved to a suburb more suburban, Los Altos, and in many ways what Jobs intuited was this ability to connect to the world without connecting to the world. You could go shopping without leaving your chair. You could meet the entire world without leaving your chair. You could have sex without leaving your chair. And in many ways the success of the Internet is related to the loneliness that generated it and that it tries to, in some sense, alleviate.

So, it’s interesting then that the suburb, which gave rise to the Internet, is now moving back into the city. Is that going to affect media?

It’s unclear at the moment. The critics of this movement say, “We are being colonized. The city is being colonized by this suburban technology, Silicon Valley is moving in and essentially taking over the city.” It is also possible that the suburbs are acknowledging the need for those things that the Internet they’ve created was supposed to alleviate. They want crowds, they want mess, they want complexity, they want congestion.

You think few people read anymore and yet you are a writer. You think as a writer. You live as a writer. You work as a writer. Who are you writing for?

I’m writing for a declining readership and I know that. I don’t get reviewed anymore. Newspapers don’t have book reviews, even distinguished ones. There are places you go to find a literary audience for the work you’re doing; you seduce, you go to book festivals and so forth. But the notion of the writer as a Tolstoy was for Russia is just impossible for America. 

We have politicians writing these ridiculous books about their tenure in the White House and all the people line up because they want Hilary’s autograph or Bill’s autograph. Or on Fox News, like Bill O’Reilly, he has two books on the bestseller list every month because he uses his show to pump these badly written books to a mass audience and they’ll buy, the lemmings will buy! But I’m not looking for lemmings, I’m looking for serious readers who like dense prose and I would argue that that audience is dying.

And yet you would also argue that there’s some really good journalism being produced now.

Oh, brilliant! Brilliant. My editor said in New York to me, “I’m having to turn down more and more books now because there isn’t an audience for them,” but she also said, “Writing has never been this good.” It’s almost as though in the knowledge that there are so few readers, writers are getting more intense, and that the books out there are brilliant because there are so few readers.

So how do we tie that back into the idea of “news literacy?” 

We aren’t going to get good newspapers if we don’t have good readers. What Emerson said in the 19th century is true today: “Tis the good reader that makes the good book.” Tis the good reader who makes the good newspaper. You’re not going to get newspapers if you don’t have readers. They created each other. 

The newspaper created the city the reader lived in and the reader has now grown disinterested in that city and is looking elsewhere, but I’m telling you what Rupert Murdoch knows when he’s trying to buy more and more movie studios, and that is that these media empires have no content. They’re looking for ideas, they’re looking for storylines, because nobody has them, they just have these enormous empires where “We have five billion hits or I have 20 million friends.” We don’t have content, we have tweets, and until we move from the tweet to the paragraph, we’re stuck. 

This article was originally published in New America Media.