In yesterday’s OpEdge entry, I analyzed how the media covered the release of the U.S. Census Bureau’s recent voluminous report.  I found it strange that the New York Times decided to focus its coverage on the fact that the suburbs have seen a large increase in the percentage of foreign-born residents and not on the fact that virtually everywhere across the country, households have less income than they did five years ago.

I want to do what I call thought-process analysis, a kind of deductive reasoning that tries to construct a likely thought process that people may go through when reacting to something or given some information. What I want to analyze is how people react to reading, seeing or hearing a certain piece of news.

Let’s start with the emotional level. When you read, see or hear news, the emotional part of the reaction reduces down to a simple and immediate decision—is this good (for me) or bad (for me).  That’s the first emotion and everything else plays off of that, even if you change the emotion once you get more facts.

Now taking into account all the rhetoric that politicians and pundits have thrown around recently about immigration, the economy and the American dream, ask yourself this question:

Will most people view the fact that household income has shrunk almost everywhere in the U.S. as a good thing or a bad thing?

Virtually everyone will view it as a very bad thing that household income has shrunk (except perhaps for those few who realize that the shrinkage has resulted in more profit for owners and investors and like that fact).  The very idea that incomes are falling even as fewer people can find jobs is a rather severe indictment of our economic policies, which remain anchored in the idea that the unregulated free market solves all problems.  The various responses that people will propose to address this trend will tend to fall on either side of the left-right divide.   But in all cases, the focus will be on the “how,” because virtually everyone agrees that we have to change the “what.”

Let’s go through a similar analysis for the trend that the Times decided to feature and make into the key fact to remember about the report:    

Will most people view the fact that a greater percentage of suburban residents are immigrants almost everywhere in the U.S. as a good thing or a bad thing?

No need to go to the studies—we know the verdict is mixed.  Many of us just don’t care who our neighbors are as long as they cut the grass and keep the noise down.  Some embrace the idea of a more diverse society. But many will see the news as another sign that immigrants are taking over and ruining our country.  None of my thousand independently operating minds (joke) is in the anti-immigration campaign, and I consider the common arguments that immigrants take jobs that Americans could/would fill while depressing U.S. wages to be specious and proven false by real economic research.  To my way of thinking, direct analogues to the anti-immigration stand exist in both those who deny global warming and those who believe in Creationism.  Be that as it may, the collective reaction is different from the news that household income has shrunk in two ways:

1. The country will be divided on how they react to the news about immigration.
2. The issue is a matter of “is this good?” and not “what do we do?”  Put in another way, we are discussing a religious issue, not a scientific one.

We’re wading in a little deep now so hold on steady: “How” is what science and the scientific method is all about.  We know global warming exists, how do we slow it down and protect people from its harmful side effects?  No one likes to see incomes shrink, how do we get them growing again?

The discussion of immigration typically conjures deep-seated and irrational beliefs that societies have always held regarding the mysterious “other.”  Is immigration good or bad? To a great extent, it often depends on what you believe. Thus, the immigration story inherently revolves around “belief,” which, of course, means that we have entered the realm of religion. 

Issues of belief often create a kind of intellectual gridlock that prevents action by society.  We can see this syndrome most clearly in the global warming debate.  Because the news media keeps alive the debate “does it exist” (similar to “is immigration good?”), we never get around to discussing the scientific question of how to address it.

In the case of the immigration issue, the Times presents a story that has no inherent value-system attached to it—more foreign-born are living in suburbs—so the natural reaction is that people use the fact to support their own deep-held beliefs.  It helps them to dig in and creates intellectual gridlock.

There is a value-system inherent in the decline in incomes and everyone agrees about it—it’s bad.  So the impact of replacing the real news—people are making less money—with a less newsworthy item—more immigrants in the suburbs—is to divide the country more than it is already divided on an issue that is no doubt of less importance to everyone in the long run.  The dividing action leads to a kind of paralysis in the nation’s will that mirrors the gridlock that we see in Congress on a growing number of issues.

Thirty years ago on the evening of December 8, I was working as a fill-in writer for the award winning 10:00 pm news show on KTVU, the independent Oakland, California broadcast television station. 

(To give you a flavor of what it was like to be in TV news in the early 80’s: a month earlier, I had been the producer of NBC’s coverage in San Francisco of the Reagan-Carter election and six months later I was an on-air reporter for the first nationally broadcast business news show on TV.) 

I was sitting at my shared space typing away on the rewrite of an A.P. story when the blond kid who worked the assignment desk starts to shout and wave around some perforated paper he had just pulled from the wire machine.  I can’t remember his name but he was a beefy offensive lineman kind of young man, whose open and friendly facial characteristics suggested he would be embarrassed saying a curse word. Like everyone who worked for KTVU news at that time, he was idealistic, hardworking and dedicated to the news director.

So our beefy tow-headed nighttime assignment editor starts yelling, “John Lennon was murdered.”  And there is a strange mixture of terror and delight on his face, the terror telling everyone that John Lennon was one of his biggest heroes, but the delight expressing what all of us knew: that we were going to destroy the competition in the ratings that night because everyone else had an 11:00 show and ours started an hour earlier.

And we did destroy the competition.  I was part of a team of several writers and editors who used file footage and news morgues to put together a 10 or 15 minute news story and retrospective on Lennon.  The KTVU 10:00 pm news experienced one of the highest ratings it ever scored.  If I remember correctly, by 10:30 pm the local NBC, CBS and ABC affiliates had all begun to change their regular programming in some way to make room for the monumental news story.  Remember Lennon was assassinated at the very dawn of the expansion of television media by cable and satellite TV and long before the eruption of cable news on Fox, CNN, MSNBC and the Internet. 

Memory plays out in the mind in a series of facts and images, many faded, many distorted by one or two attributes that tend to dominate the remembering of the moment over time.  But sometimes a memory bursts inside the mind that is so crystal clear that it becomes an imitation of reality.  You think of the moment and you remember all of it and experience it again—the constant backbeat of the typewriters and TV monitors, the smell of coffee and cigarettes, the way all heads turned to the assignment editor’s sudden urgent shouting of the news, the way the overhead florescent lights glared off his solid yellow shirt with a fly-away collar, the fold of the paper in the large hand he was waving over his head.

But most of all I remember the two emotions that flickered across his face, seeming to dance together or battle for dominance.  Should I mourn this unspeakably horrible tragedy?  Or should I joyfully exult in my team’s impending victory? 

And that’s where I was the night John Lennon died.

Most of what we hear out of Washington, from Republicans especially but also from Democrats, is that the federal deficit has grown so much that if we don’t address it now, our economy will enter rapid and permanent decline.  And yet our elected officials are negotiating to extend temporary tax cuts, not just to the middle and working classes who at least would pump most of the money from an extended tax cut into the ailing economy, but for the wealthy, who judging from the past, will invest it in ways that do not create additional wealth, e.g., into hedge funds, the stock of existing companies and art created by deceased artists.  To get this new tax cut, Republicans and some Democrats are holding hostage an extension of unemployment benefits, a necessary expense in a moral nation that wants to keep large numbers of its citizens from losing their homes.

The biggest farce of all is the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which officially announced its plan to “lower the deficit” last Wednesday.  Funny, the commission calls its report, “The Moment of Truth,” when in fact it is full of distortions in its overall strategy and the rationale for its specific proposals, especially regarding our only financially strong program, Social Security.

Most commentators and politicians are giving the co-commishes a large “attaboy” or three for taking on the onerous task of addressing the deficit, but then wring their hands that Congress won’t pass the plan because of political gridlock and short-term thinking and isn’t that too bad. 

For example, in the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday New York Times, Matt Bai postulates that the report will go nowhere and then asks why Americans who long ago sacrificed to win wars don’t want to sacrifice to eradicate the deficit.  His answer: “What makes this case for sacrifice so much harder to embrace, perhaps, is that it goes to our national psyche, threatening our self-image as a land with limitless potential. While past generations have readily sacrificed for national greatness, debt reduction — at least in the gloomy way its advocates argue for it — feels like a call to sacrifice in the name of our national decline.”

Bai’s article explores this hypothesis with broad-stroke history and standard ideological assumptions about the free market and lifestyle expectations.  He proposes that the problem is merely that advocates of deficit cutting must repackage their proposals by focusing on the assumed positive outcomes.

But that dog won’t hunt, it won’t bark and it won’t even roll over to scratch its back against the carpet, because anyone who reads the plan will see its not-too-hidden agenda is not to address the deficit but rather to reduce taxes on the wealthy.

A brief look at the plan should be enough to convince most that the commission should change its name to “National Commission to Lower Taxes for the Wealthy.”  Throughout the document it calls for sacrifice, and yet it proposes to give a bonus to the wealthiest of Americans.  Why don’t rich folk have to tighten their rather large belts with everyone else?

In the latest Nation, Professor Leon Friedman of Hofstra Law School estimates that if the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform’s plan becomes law, the top income group will get a reduction of 12% off their taxes.  Friedman, by the way, proposes a one percent annual tax on the wealth of anyone with $5.0 million or more in assets, something they do in France.  That sounds like a reasonable way to reduce the deficit and invest in our infrastructure and economic future without hurting anyone, since $50,000 a year is not a lot of money if you have five million tucked away.