My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #13, October 11, 1999

AND THAT'S THE WAY IT ISN'T

It is all too easy, as Alexander Pope noted, to believe that "Whatever is, is right." When Walter Cronkite, who seemed so trustworthy, finished his news reports with "And that's the way it is," it seemed like the stories he told us that night WERE the news. They weren't ALL the news, though, just the few news stories, chosen from a multitude of events, that the producers found interesting and that fit into a 22 minute news hole.

The decisions they made were not the only possible choices. Producers who slotted lavish air time for every single event in the O.J. Simpson trial allotted virtually no time to reporting on the telecommunications bill which was going through Congress simultaneously. Reporters who spent hours talking about the wrangling of lawmakers over a tax cut that was unlikely to be signed into law, didn't get around to mentioning that those lawmakers hadn't passed appropriations to keep the government running until the week before the October 1 deadline.

Similarly, because cameras take pictures of things that exist, it's easy to believe that those pictures are reality. And yet the people behind the viewfinders are excluding some realities every time they decide what scenes to photograph in the first place, what angle to take the picture from, what kind of filter and film to use, whether to include people in the photo, which people, doing what, and whether to film them in close-up or from a distance. There are as many Chicagos as there are photographers, depending on whether they choose to take pictures of skyscrapers and parks and "cows on parade," down-at-heels stores and dirty subways and homeless people sleeping on benches, or people arriving at the opera, browsing in bookstores, and milling around during intermission at the theatre.

That millions of Americans live in suburbs miles away from their work and shopping, and spend hours every day driving, is a reality that was neither natural nor inevitable. It was the result of a series of decisions that excluded other possible ways of life: developers decided to build single-family homes far out in the boonies, rather than townhouses near rail stations; Congress decided to subsidize mortgages and build roads rather than public transit; state and city governments decided to extend infrastructure and city services to new developments rather than making developers pay their own costs; bankers decided to lend the money; and millions of individuals decided to abandon the cities and move to the new suburbs.

In fact, very little of what we see and hear is raw reality, but rather one possible reality among many, shaped by decisions people have made. The news stories that get told, the views that are aired on radio and TV, the rock bands who get recording contracts, the streets which get repaired, the location that becomes the new city dump -- these are not the only possible alternatives. Somebody chose them. And in so doing, they chose NOT to air other stories or viewpoints, give contracts to other rock groups, repair different streets, locate the dump elsewhere.

Asking what decisions were made in order for our world to come out this way allows us to ask some other questions, like, how and why and by whom did those decisions get made? What alternatives were considered? What assumptions were made? What consequences follow from those decisions?

For example, why is it that the substantial black middle class is so rarely seen on the news? How does it happen that blacks mostly figure in network news as gang members, rabble rousers, drug addicts, or entertainers? Why, when more than half the people on welfare are white, does the word "welfare" on network news automatically trigger a picture of black women and children? How is it that so few of the experts called on to offer explanations of events are black? Why are so few reporters and producers and editors black? How do these decisions affect race relations? Had different choices been made, might white America not have been quite so astonished at reaction of blacks to the O.J. Simpson verdict?

We could just as well ask who decided, and why, that the women we see in movies, TV, magazines, and ads are uniformly young, beautiful, and unhealthily thin, or that elderly people would be virtually invisible? Or we could ask how it was that for so many years most of us never realized that our public buildings were designed in such a way that the disabled and frail couldn't possibly get into them?

If we started looking at the world as the product of decisions made, rather than something that just IS that way, I think it would make it easier for us to get from (an unacceptable) here to (a better) there. It would be easier to think about the world we could make if other alternatives were considered, other assumptions made, by people other than the ones in charge right now. As Tennyson's Ulysses said, "Come my friends, 'T'is not too late to seek a newer world." Not only is "Whatever is" not right, we might just be able to change it.