Ethics Newsline®

by Rushworth M. Kidder

You may think this column is about the environment. In fact, it’s about the moral responsibility of the news media. First, some facts:

• In the first four months of 2007, clothesline sales rose 150 percent and sales of clothespins by more than 1,000 percent, according to one British retailer.
• Also last year, a leading maker of clothes-drying racks in Australia saw revenues rise by 15 percent.
• “Right to dry” activists in Colorado, Connecticut, Vermont, and Ontario, Canada, presently are seeking to overturn laws that ban backyard clotheslines in some communities.

Why? Because energy-hungry tumble driers are fast becoming the major-appliance equivalent of gas-guzzling SUVs. If, as some experts suggest, environmental action depends on behavioral change, a shift from clothes driers to clotheslines could be a leading indicator of a change in public attitudes toward global warming.

Now I’m pretty sure you never said to yourself, “I need to know more about clothespin trends.” Yet I bet that, like me, you find the “right to dry” movement intriguing. But I also suspect you’d never heard of it until now. Nor had I, until I saw the story in last week’s New York Times.

And that’s the point: I never planned to read that story, yet I did. Why?

It’s not because I have a laser-like focus on environmental issues. I don’t approach each day’s paper like a heat-seeking missile, ignoring every target but the one I’m programmed for. I want to know about lots of things. What’s more, I know I haven’t got time to read everything. So, like most of us, I tend to read about what I already know I want to know.

But there it was, on an inside page, illustrated by a large photo of a woman hanging out clothes in a snowy backyard in Aurora, Ontario. It was well constructed, broadly sourced, and engagingly written. It got me thinking about the ways in which some of our laws actually prevent us from conserving energy.

Would I have read that story on a Web page? I doubt it. I find I go to the Web to learn about what happened yesterday to Hillary, Zimbabwe, the markets, gas prices, or other things I’ve already defined as “the news.” This wasn’t news. It was something we in the trade call a feature story, which, unlike a news stories, can be read tomorrow as well as today and still remain relevant. But even as a feature, I wouldn’t have defined this topic as relevant to me. It wasn’t by-lined to a well-known correspondent or columnist. I didn’t see it as a must-read piece that everyone would be talking about. Neither, apparently, did most readers of the Times’s website. It didn’t even show up on that day’s list of the most downloaded stories.

Yet there I was reading it — all because my eye happened to catch it on the page.

As the economics of print drive newspapers toward a Web environment, one of the casualties may be what New York Times editor Bill Keller has called “serendipitous encounters” of this sort. The Web, after all, lives and breathes a sense of quickness, purpose, and drive. We go there to get what we need. Unlike the broad visual expanse of a well-designed newspaper, the Web doesn’t naturally draw us into corners of thought we never meant to visit. That’s partly because, on most news-related websites, the blurb for each story looks pretty much like every other blurb, making no story seem more important than any other except by virtue of the sequence.

Now, I admit to some bias. I spent several years as feature editor for a major international daily newspaper, so I love good feature stories. I like encountering examples, comparisons, and insights I wasn’t looking for. I relish the way a good newspaper, without warning, ambushes my single-mindedness and leads me to acquire a multitude of engaging but unrelated ideas. I look forward to the way it invites me to rise from fact to metaphor — so that, looking at one thing (a mere clothespin), I’m encouraged see another (an environmental trend).

Yet each week, I find I’m spending a little more time getting news on the Web and a little less time reading newspapers. I’m at risk, then, of the inevitable narrowing that comes with deep immersion in the Web.

I know, I know — I can already hear the outrage of Web addicts who insist that surfing the Web is hugely expansive. Agreed. But this isn’t about addicts. It’s about ordinary people with serious schedules who can’t spend time surfing, have no appetite for traipsing through chat-room threads hoping for the odd tidbit, and yet need to be informed about things they didn’t know mattered.

In a world of exponential increases in information, we have a moral responsibility to remain broadly informed. So, too, our editors and Web designers have a moral obligation to keep us from funneling down into the narrowness of our own repetitive preconceptions. They need to invent ways to recreate the spatial expanse of a newspaper, where the eye falls on the unexpected and the mind turns distraction into education. They need to do whatever they can to compel these “serendipitous encounters.”

Sure, I can get by without reading about the right to dry. But can the world survive without our collective capacity to contemplate big-picture trends by looking at things as small as clothespins? The poet William Blake referred to it as seeing “a world in a grain of sand.” If all I learn is what I tell myself I need to know, am I seeing Blake’s world? Or am I just staring into the mirror of my own certainties? Without a broad, unintentional, serendipitous engagement with the world, where does creativity come from?

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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