Why Are There More and More Voices, and Less and Less Truth? | 2017 Book Picks, Part 5

On "ways to think through some of today's problems," two new books: Page One and Climate of Hope. Plus a few older ones.

Strictly speaking, these are not offered with the rigor of a "best books of the year" list. We went through a lot this year, and these books, published in 2017, happened to help us think it through.

We are recommending books in four categories: humanities and social sciences (fiction excluded), business and technology, lifestyle and aesthetics, and fiction.

The candidates in the first three categories came from two sources: recommendations by more than 20 professional publishing houses, and recommendations from QDaily's editors, reporters, and contributing writers. For the fiction section, we gathered the views of writers, translators, scholars, book critics, book editors, and literary critics, and commissioned the pieces from them. The rest was written by QDaily's editors and contributing writers.

We read these books through as far as we could, and we "sincerely believe they really are good" — as last year, that is the least we owe readers before recommending anything.

This is the fifth and final installment of our humanities and social sciences book picks of the year. It covers two new books, Page One and Climate of Hope.

Page One

Why are there more and more voices, and less and less truth

Bill Keller said that most of the time, when we talk about new media, we are not talking about how journalism is made but about how it is distributed.

He said that seven or eight years ago — a long time, for an industry that now moves this fast — and the noise about new media has not stopped since. The result: more and more voices and less and less truth; more and more people who claim to make "content" and fewer and fewer reporters; more and more discussion of the problem and fewer and fewer solutions.

But what is there to discuss about how news gets made?

Take the standards a news organization is supposed to meet: serious, comprehensive, ethical, accurate, international, wide-ranging, impartial, not extreme. That is the BBC.

Or take what a good media brand is supposed to do: push people to understand their own situation, give them ideas to think with, and encourage them to pursue what really interests them. That sounds airtight too, and stirring — what we actually do falls a long way short of it.

And what a reporter is supposed to do: surviving in this world does not require a reporter to sell out his principles. Verification, understanding, balance, fairness, and a focus on serving the public — these will always make journalism a priceless form of communication. In America you can add faith in democracy. Over there, journalism is part of the democratic system. (Not the same here, so let's not copy it over; here it is mainly propaganda — and, having just censored myself, I think that line is politically correct everywhere in the world.)

All of this comes from Page One: Inside the New York Times and the Future of Journalism, a book that sets out to examine exactly that question of how news gets made.

As executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller had two enemies in mind back then: WikiLeaks and Arianna Huffington. The first was an unedited source of information that turned straight into news for the world to see. The second, as he saw it, simply dumped "celebrity gossip, cute cat videos, unpaid bloggers' posts, and other publications' news reporting" onto her own site, then rode the traffic to the top of the heap.

Keller's anger was hard to miss:

What we used to call "writing," "reporting" or "news" is now all called "content." Buying an aggregator and calling that playing the content card is like a company announcing it plans to hire people who cook the books to improve its balance sheet.

Strictly speaking, these two enemies were Walter Lippmann's enemies. What he said a hundred years ago is still journalism's basic principle: "The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct."

Lippmann's point is that the essence of news is editing. There is no good reason to blame the rise of fake news entirely on Julian Assange or Huffington, but most of today's confusion about what counts as truth, what counts as news, and what can be trusted comes out of the disruption and the experiment those two set off.

The two of them made the production of news more democratic. In any other field, democratization means production costs fall, the barriers to consuming and to producing both drop, and consumption eventually booms — all of which sounds good. For whoever is supposed to supply the truth, maybe not. "In a press with no editorial gatekeeping, full of slanted reporting, whoever shouts loudest or sounds sweetest wins, and truth is the first casualty."

Blur came out in Chinese in 2014, a book by a veteran New York Times reporter. Set against all that noisy talk of democratization, this passage stands out:

We cannot ask that the sources quoted in a story, even anonymous ones, be free of bias; that is impossible. What we can ask is that reporters and news providers tell us about whatever bias a source may have, so that we can see why the information is slanted and still judge the story reliable. One measure of a reporter's credibility is how far they help us examine their sources, rather than simply citing sources for their own ends.

Unless we need to redefine truth, that is what getting at the truth actually means. You can hold every line in that book against the way today's flood of information products is made, against the distance between Assange's "publish without vetting" and Huffington's "anyone can publish" — and then you can see where our confusion comes from.

Set the United States aside and talk about our own situation, and it is truer still. What was opened was not just a box labeled fake news.

It is against this backdrop that people in the trade have started to panic. "We no longer have to go looking for news; the news finds us." News is read as headlines (a reporter's work feels insulted, and frustrated). The definition of news has changed. Nobody reads long articles anymore, and now there has to be interactivity too... Is the meaning of all this change small or large? The New York Times's A1, once a reporter's "holy grail," produced through countless editorial meetings and endless effort, turns out to be worth less than a twenty-something junior editor (the Times has those too) putting a blog post on the website. By that account, publishing a story used to be the last step of a reporter's job; now publishing is where the job begins — Ms. Huffington, I think, said that.

Everyone knows by now that traffic is king, and after that first step of publishing there are plenty of tricks to follow. This is what Bill Keller meant by the form of news distribution.

James O'Shea wrote, in a piece called The Deal from Hell: "For publishers, the fact that journalists are blind to the problems inside their own industry has a lot to do with the wall that stood for years between the newsroom and a paper's business side — a wall put there in the first place to protect the integrity of the journalism." That sounds a little absurd: these journalists (it holds in both China and the United States, though the wall in China is less pronounced) are insiders who at the same time know little about their own industry. So their panic is real panic, their worry real worry, their fear real fear —

I know traditional-media people who have been scared half to death by Mimeng. Mimeng, for her part, has never hidden how she makes those posts with millions of views, or how she uses them to crush her former peers. When I try to talk these colleagues down, the first thing I say is: think of Mimeng as a talk show. Even if you were Peter Hessler or David Remnick, holding The New Yorker or The Washington Post, in the television age you still could not have beaten Oprah Winfrey... Usually, if the other person looks like they are turning it over, there is still hope; if they put on the face that says, "You coward, you can't beat her so you say she isn't even in the same business," then go and fight it out with Mimeng yourself.

On the whole, being an optimist is not a bad thing. Whether in Blur or in Page One, these commentators who came up as reporters are, deep down, enormously proud people — and I think that is a club worth joining.

Blur makes the point that every technological revolution redefines the role of the citizen:

"If the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s let people learn of distant news events within minutes or hours, then the arrival of radio in the 1920s let people hear some news events for themselves."

"New communities forming, political realignment, and a running conflict between fact and belief: the same pattern appeared again. The huge changes of the industrial revolution had fragmented the national population; radio tied those scattered publics together in a way local newspapers never could. All at once everyone was listening to the same national radio news, something entirely different from reading a local paper in the age of print. Being able to read also stopped being a requirement for learning the news."

I agree with all of this.

Maybe all we need to add is time. When rotary printing brought newspapers into people's lives on a mass scale, the yellow press drove people to despair — but the high-end goods soon followed, magazines like Time and The New Yorker, and the real rise of big papers such as The New York Times came after that too. Television turned everything into entertainment, and while people were lamenting that we were amusing ourselves to death, CNN broke out in under twenty years. Journalism today looks beaten to pieces, and it feels as though this has gone on a long time; it has actually been about ten years.

Truth is still something we can expect.

(We went back and forth on whether to recommend a book this close to our own trade, and this specialized. But since everyone today is swept along in a great flood of information while the truth feels ever further away, this recommendation may not be a mistake after all.)

Climate of Hope

What Bloomberg can do for us

Three reasons pushed us to recommend this book. Put simply, it is about how to be a mayor. There must be other books on how to be a mayor, but not many about New York.

The book is Climate of Hope, by Michael Bloomberg and Carl Pope. The Chinese edition's subtitle — "Former New York Mayor Bloomberg's New Business Strategy for Environmental Governance" — makes it sound like the kind of self-published book you see here. Bloomberg's books are always like this; the last one of his I read was called Bloomberg by Bloomberg. Of the two, I think that one was worth more.

All three reasons are simple. The first is how government deals with business.

As an unrepentant capitalist, I am not the Sierra Club's (an environmental group) usual partner. But I believe government's most important duty is to protect public safety and health.

When the pursuit of profit threatens public health, I have no sympathy for companies that ignore consumers' health, even their lives, for the sake of production.

That does not mean I want to abolish these companies outright. I think tobacco companies, for instance, have a right to remain in the market. But to protect everyone's interests, we should reduce demand for tobacco and let tobacco companies leave the market gradually.

We should raise tobacco taxes until they match the social cost tobacco creates. At the same time we should use regulation to cut the harm tobacco does, and public campaigns to make people more aware that it is harmful.

We need the same strategy for coal companies.

The last sentence is the point. Bloomberg's co-author on the book describes their solution like this:

If they (the coal companies) were willing to close their oldest, dirtiest coal plants and buy an equal amount of clean wind power, cutting carbon emissions, the Sierra Club would agree to let them finish the plants they had built halfway. Both companies eventually took the deal. Under it the companies, the environment, and above all the people living nearby, who would otherwise have gone on breathing the fumes from those old plants, all came out ahead.

When we want blue skies, coal companies become the guilty party as a matter of course. But if a company operates legally and can pass the new emissions standards, its survival ought to be secure. Government learns to compromise and to let as many members of society as possible gain; there is no enemy here. If there is a lesson in this, it is that we are known for efficiency here, so in the end we treat everyone who digs coal, hauls coal and burns coal as the enemy — which is how Shanxi, once a province rich in resources, suddenly landed at the bottom of the GDP tables, and cold on top of it.

A willingness to compromise matters with companies big and small; with ordinary people, who are, after all, voters, you have to be more careful still. That brings us to the second reason: if your policy may affect ordinary people's lives, be more careful. Bloomberg gives an example from Mexico City. In our terms, it is the question of how you handle people's "way to make a living."

To control emissions, Mexico City limited driving by the last digit of the license plate, odd or even — here great minds thought alike; the method was much the same as ours. What followed was similar too. It did not have the intended effect, and the reason for the failure is no surprise: people bought a second car with a different last digit, usually an old wreck with no modern emissions controls. This is probably where we differ, because here we would also limit your right to buy a car, and force the scrapping of vehicles that fail emissions standards. "The new rule only made commuting harder for the middle class and working people, and air quality did not improve." People felt no benefit from the new policy; life simply got harder. In the end Mexico City chose a more effective strategy: investing in the subway and the bus system, and putting public bicycles on the street. Our subways do get built fast enough, but in the big cities the buses have already been cut back to almost nothing... Of course, what we are really good at is driving people out.

So the third reason is what a city is actually for, and what a mayor is supposed to do.

Bloomberg writes: "When I was mayor we ran a careful study. It started from one number: one million. In 2005, population experts at New York's city planning department projected that by 2030 the city would have one million more people than it had in 2000 — even if everyone in Atlanta and Miami willingly moved to New York, you would not get an increase that large. New York's population was already at a record, the crowding was already too much, and most of the infrastructure was a century-old relic. How were we going to handle those extra one million people? One million new people."

Wow.

In 2005, however ambitious Bloomberg was, he could be sure he would not be running New York in 2030. He still had to think about that moment, and every piece of planning had to turn on it.

He says: "Don't get me wrong. This is a sweet burden — every mayor would want it. A city is not static by nature; if it stops expanding, it starts to die."

I have to say that not every mayor wants it. The Shanghai plan the State Council approved recently holds the city's population under 25 million and its developed land under 3,200 square kilometers through 2035. Not much to say about that: for the next twenty-odd years, we are not growing. You would not get the chance at that sweetness even if you wanted it.

Beijing is the same, and is supposed to shrink further. We don't see anything sweet in it.

If you tell me they simply don't understand the logic, I would put that at about a 40 percent chance. Most of the reason is the voter problem.

Several widely circulated articles by Lu Ming make this point: if the target is zero population growth twenty years out, then all city planning has to follow that target — but by the logic of economics, urban population growth may be unstoppable... So the end result is that the population passes the target while the city's capacity has been planned around an imagined figure, which leaves the city less livable and its big-city ailments worse. That is where the line "the planned population target is the real culprit behind big-city disease" comes from. Officials and internet moguls who think a dose of big data justifies the planned economy — got it?

As for the environmentalism Bloomberg and his environmental-warrior friend talk about — the point of this book — I don't buy their arithmetic.

Word is that India plans to spend hundreds of billions on a power grid, which means first building large power plants (mostly coal and hydro), then running copper cable out to every village, then putting up incandescent bulbs. Note that at this point the grid looks unnecessary.

Then comes a conclusion, right away: doing it this way wastes resources badly. Only a small share of the electricity generated from coal is actually used for lighting, and much of the grid's copper cable gets stolen. That, supposedly, is why a third of India's people still have no access to modern energy. Note that at this point the grid is not merely useless; because theft makes it inefficient, the grid has become the reason people can't get power.

The solution, they say, is that an average household needs a one-time outlay of only US$200. A basic solar lamp that can replace a kerosene lamp costs only US$40. That solves the cable theft and the lighting at once... US$200 and US$40 are not small sums, but by their account the money saved by not building the grid can cover them. As for how to do this for more than a billion people, they don't think that far.

Because a new conclusion arrives immediately: to build an energy system fit for the future out of solar and wind, the two cheapest sources of energy, we need a better transmission system. (Wait — weren't we not building a grid?)

Not only build one: they say outright that a monopoly national grid is the best kind, and the model is of course China, which is to be envied. Fortunately the example he then gives switches back to the United States, and the tone returns to wide-eyed innocence: every summer, Chicago's electricity demand peaks around sunset. But at that moment Arizona is in a sun-drenched afternoon, its solar output at its peak and running a surplus. If the United States built a high-voltage direct-current network across its regions, as China has, the surplus power Arizona generates in the afternoon could meet Chicago's demand just as people come home from work and turn on the air conditioning.

An American reporter, it seems, came to China to report on the coal-to-gas conversion — before everyone spent the winter with frozen hands and feet. By the standard of American environmentalists' enthusiasm, China had solved a big problem. The habit of self-examination they keep ready for their own system, and the criticism they keep ready to swing at their own government, were both stirred up at once.

I know this kind of admiration is nothing new in history. "Mussolini made the trains run on time" fits it perfectly.

Peter Drucker wrote about exactly this, and sharply, in The End of Economic Man.

We often laugh at the old spinsters who, asked what they made of a visit to Mussolini's Italy, answered that they had not seen a single beggar and that the trains all ran on time. But their impression came closer to the essence of fascism than most academic papers do.

Trains on time, no beggars on the main streets, the fastest steamships and the widest roads in the South Atlantic — all these purely mechanical details, describing technical efficiency and organization, describe exactly the goals of Italian social development, whatever the technical, economic or military value behind them. Democracies came off worse by comparison, not only because they could not produce social equality, but because they could not mobilize a million people for a mass rally, still less get an entire nation to applaud a leader in unison.

Free capitalism was held inferior to the totalitarian economy not because it led to depressions, but because it could not run centralized foreign-exchange controls.

A leading Nazi spokesman once said that Nazism's greatest achievement in history was to bring Germany's assorted provincial governments to a surface unity.

Next to Michael Bloomberg, Peter Drucker is a master I respect more. He understood the subtleties of running a company — or rather, his understanding of those subtleties rested on insights as large as these.

The End of Economic Man was published in 1939. Drucker said: "I began writing it a few weeks before Hitler took power in 1933. The earliest excerpts were printed as a pamphlet in 1935 or 1936 by an Austrian Catholic and anti-Nazi publisher, discussing the part anti-Semitism played in the Nazi demonology and why it had such deep appeal."

Its subtitle is "The Origins of Totalitarianism" — yes, the same as the title of Hannah Arendt's immortal work.

Cover image: Unsplash