Too much information or not enough?

The Atlantic recently published a piece by Conor Friedersdorf lamenting the fall of local newspaper coverage. His piece was a response to Matt Yglesias’ piece on Slate glorifying the state of today’s news media.

Yglesias’ general premise is that because of the internet, mobile phones, and other technologies, we have access to more information than ever. Newspapers online don’t have space constraints and therefore can provide more stories and don’t have to cut words, limiting the information we get from what they do publish. Fair enough. He frames this around the bank bailout in Cyprus and sites many websites to get the story from every point of view and where to find interactive features that let you make decisions and see what (theoretically) will happen.

Friedersdorf’s counter argument is that while the information available on the Cyprus bailout is astonishing, it’s not exactly useful to the average American. Friedersdorf argues that we should be judging the new media on: “How well does it provide citizens the information they need to govern themselves? How effectively does it fulfill its role as a watchdog?” To meet those standards, newspapers need to provide better local coverage, something that Friedersdorf asserts has been decimated by the internet age (interestingly, less than a week after Ygelsias published his piece extolling the glories of journalism he published this piece about local news).

I’m inclined to agree with Friedersdorf. The coverage of the bank bailout on the other side of the world gives me, an unemployed 26 year old female in California, no useful information. How does that help me to understand what is plaguing the California job market? What information is there that could help me to determine what measures I should vote for in November to aid my local economy? What does that tell me about the state of my local schools, and should I be voting for a bond measure to increase funds for them? 

Another thing noted by Friedersorf is the news media’s role as the watchdog, not just informing citizens, but protecting them. A few years ago, a couple of local beat reporters for the LA Times uncovered fraud with a capital F in Bell, CA. Citizens were being screwed to the wall to fatten the wallets of city administrators and council members and no one did anything about it. According to former CA Attorney General and current CA Governor Jerry Brown, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System knew what these guys were earning and didn’t question it. Brown says that “CalPERS should have told someone, and the attorney general’s office would have been a good place to start.” Would the Economist or the BBC have done the investigative legwork required uncover that information? No, it took a couple of reporters that focused on local news.

While Yglesias is right, and we do have access to more information than we could have ever thought possible, having to access to relevant information is more important. And, unfortunately, this is what is declining. And it’s not all the internet’s fault. Newspapers have been padding their issues with wire stories and cutting local stuff for years.  It was in 2005 when Mitchum Huntzberger told the editor’s of the newly acquired Stamford Eagle-Gazette to stop relying on wires and start increasing local coverage on Gilmore Girls. I remember the first time I opened the local paper in Eugene, Oregon, probably in 2006, and there was very little written by staff reporters. Most of the paper was wire stories, without so much as a local bent on the story. I think that if a newspaper is going to run a wire story, it probably makes sense to figure out why I should care.

Don’t get me wrong, I support open access to information. I do think that Yglesias is right and new technologies have led to more in depth coverage and in many ways a more complete picture. The problem is that we see the benefits of this on really a small number of national stories. We need news outlets, whether they be papers, television or online, to dedicate more of this type of reporting to stories that will actually inform the public of the things that matter to them. 

"Let's Eat Some Veggies" Said No Teen, Ever

Maybe we should have a standardized diet. We can all eat the same things for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. They can come in little tin packages, labeled “Monday Breakfast” or “Friday Dinner.” I’m sure we can create a government office to handle this. And since citizens won’t have to go to the grocery store, we can fund this program with the households' grocery budgets. Although, now that I think about it, hosting a party would present a logistical nightmare…

Ok, I’m kidding. Some people probably think that’s a great idea and others probably hate it, if I can judge by the comments under any Los Angeles Times article that even hints that maybe schools should step in to teach healthy eating to students. Those comment boards are usually littered with people either blaming parents for not teaching this, or people proclaiming that no one should interfere with their right to teach their kids to eat garbage. It turns out, though, that what parents teach kids has very little influence on what teens actually eat.

Patricia Mawusi Amos, Freda Dfiza Intiful, and Laurene Boateng published a study on SAGE Open in December that found that teens’ peers have more influence on their eating habits than either the media or the teens’ parents. They conducted their study in high schools in Ghana, and found that adolescents eat what their friends eat, and that the more influence the friends had, the less healthy those habits were likely to be. And in another stinging blow to feminists, girls were found to have less healthy habits than boys.

I think, then, that we can assume we need to start warning kids in the second grade not to succumb to peer pressure to eat a cupcake. Peer pressure’s already in the curriculum, warning kids to ‘Just Say No’ to offers of alcohol or drugs. “Red Ribbon Week” takes place each October, where students are encouraged to wear red and sign pledges avowing they will remain drug-free. Let’s schedule “Green Ribbon Week” for November, where students will sign pledges to remain sugar-free and to eat more vegetables.

But more seriously, kids spend a lot of time with their friends, so is it any real surprise that these friends are so influential on diet? And so it seems that perhaps early intervention in schools would be a good thing. Overweight teens are a problem for the United States. Teens don’t eat right, and they do follow the lead of their friends. I knew that Cheez-Its and Dr. Pepper did not constitute a healthy lunch in high school, but that’s what I ate most days. That, or something even more disturbing like Flaming Hot Cheetos and Pepsi, was what my friends ate. Was that an act of rebellion? Probably. I can’t speak for my friends, but I know that my parents not have let me get away with eating like that if I had been at home.

The thing about diet is that a crappy one in high school can leave lasting physiological effects, even if the diet is later improved. UCLA researchers found that subjects who didn't have enough iron in their diets in their teen years had structural changes to their brain later that made them more vulnerable to neurodegeneration. These teens were otherwise healthy.

If friends are the biggest indicator of how well a teen is going to eat, then it makes the most sense to try to get all kids to understand how to eat well and then make that available to them. Going after companies and limiting advertisements during programming aimed at kids is fair, but not maybe not the most effective approach. If we want kids and teens to eat healthier, we have to teach them to want that first. Because I'll be honest, tin boxes packed by a government agency determining what we eat sounds terrible. If nothing else, that would take all the fun out of going to a Chinese restaurant and ordering dishes to share.