["Mothers Doesn't Go Out Anymore"]
Have you ever read USA Today? Remember that's the new newspaper which hit the newsstands with such a splash one or two years ago.
Mostly it was a splash of colour. Its publishers boasted that they were using satellite technology to produce the nation's first national newspaper.
Well I've read USA Today and I secretly suspect I'm the only one around here who has.
Most of the people I know picked up a copy last April and when it first came out in New York and haven't read one since.
Yet the Gannett company who publish it claim a constantly growing readership.
They claim a readership of nearly 1.6 million people per day now which would make it the third ranked daily newspaper in the United States
after the Wall Street Journal and the Daily News. So who actually reads USA Today?
Who is this general interest newspaper meant for? What is the purpose of USA Today other than simply to make profit?
On September 15th 1982 USA Today first hit the streets in Baltimore and in Washington D.C.
Its chairman and founder Alan Newhearth had this to say about its purpose. USA Today he said hopes to serve as a forum for better understanding and unity
to help make the USA truly one nation. One nation united under USA Today so to speak.
That motto for national unity now graces the editorial page of every edition of the newspaper.
And indeed national unity is probably the strongest theme conveyed in the entire paper although I doubt that it's the kind of national unity that most of us want.
It's the unity of a homogeneous nation. A board sameness. The one dimensionality of lowest common denominator middle class culture and gossip.
There's no discrimination here between profundity and trivia. Indeed they're deliberately confused.
Let's take a look and see. Each edition of USA Today has four separate sections aimed at the broadest possible appeal.
There's news, money, sports, life. Who could object to that? In this news section there is always one designated cover story, one and only one.
And it's treated such profound topics as famous mom's working, a wild weekend at the Mardi Gras. Superstar lends hand to stop drinking, vacationing with a vengeance in 1984.
And the day after the defeat of the Marines in Lebanon when Reagan announced the evacuation plan, the cover story was headlined, even toddlers can care about others.
Another regular feature on the front page is USA Snapshots. USA Snapshots attempts to give readers a look at what the paper calls statistics that shape the nation.
Thus we learn that while 21.8 million long distance calls to mom were made on Mother's Day in 1983, only 17.3 million were made on Thanksgiving Day.
That 52% of Americans feel that they are not given enough information about nuclear weapons and want more, while another 6% also feel they're denied the information but don't want anymore.
And did you know that while 94% of the country bought tomatoes last year, only 72% bought broccoli? You would if you read USA Today, but there's more.
The money section also gives us Snapshots. Snapshot statistics that shape your finances. 11% of barbecue grill buyers bought their grills in department stores.
The sports section gives us Snapshot statistics that shape the sports world.
Carl Yastremsky has hit the most major league home runs after turning 40 years old. And the life section, well, you get the message anyway. Oh, I forgot to tell you how many homers he has got. He got 49.
Are these really the statistics that shape the nation? Who is it who needs to know or even wants to know these statistics anyway?
And what is it precisely that these statistics are telling us about the USA Today? You know, I have a theory. I teach statistics to geography students.
And I always start the course by telling them two things. First, as Mark Twain once said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Second, I always advise students that they should only use statistical manipulations when they're absolutely at a loss to know what's going on in the world that they're trying to investigate.
Now at first glance, these supposed words of wisdom wouldn't seem to apply to the USA Today.
How can they be perpetrating damned lies or worse when, as we shall see, they go out of their way not to argue anything very strongly at all?
And one would hardly accuse USA Today of employing sophisticated statistical manipulations on any of the figures that they gather.
Most of those statistics are straight poll results. But if we look deeper, we can detect something rather interesting.
The point is that by focusing on such trivia as broccoli and barbecue grills, Mother's Day phone calls and famous mothers,
they are trying to paint a very definite picture of the United States as a nation united.
We all have barbecues, and we all eat broccoli, or nearly all, right?
And who dares not to call home an organised guilt day, that is Mother's Day?
Trivia claims most of our waking hours, and so if you want to bind most people together around a common experience, feed them trivia.
In USA Today, our lives are mirrored back to us as just this, a confusion of trivia.
But it is trivia made profound simply by the fact that it is printed in a national newspaper.
Likewise, the really profound is deliberately trivialised when it is upstaged by the revelation that toddlers can even care.
Of course, this trivia formula could very quickly become very, very boring,
especially in a country where individualism is right up there alongside nationalism.
Their statistical polls therefore have a very two-sided role to play.
Not only do they give us a profile of the national average, but they also must give us a sense of individual averages
to reassure us of our individuality, so that we have something with which we can compare ourselves against others.
It's reassuring somehow to know that of the favourite five songs on the charts last week,
I've heard four of them, I even like three of them, and I actually own one.
But it's a different one from my friend Barry who brought records to my party last week.
But really there's a limit to how much this kind of psychic thrill can assure me of my individuality.
I'm not a secure person, and USA Today knows that.
They know they have to work harder to make me and all of you feel like real individuals
at the same time as we're supposed to be a nation united in trivial pursuits.
And so they've hit on the ingenious idea that while we are a unity, the most profound thing that divides us amongst ourselves is geography.
Yes, that's right, geography.
USA Today devotes an entire centre spread to what they call across the USA.
The idea here, quite transparently, is to make you feel a true local identity and individuality.
Each of the 50 states and DC is given three to four inches of a column
for what were presumably the most important news events in the state that day.
A random and quite unscientific sample from yesterday revealed the following gems.
From Hawaii, safeway stores will be allowed to sell 25,000 gallons of California milk in that state starting July 1st.
From Massachusetts, Governor Dukakis was expected to sign a bill yesterday
naming an expressway overpass, not even the whole expressway, after Abigail Adams.
And from Maryland, Gypsy Moth Spraying was due to begin in North Bethesda yesterday.
Pregnant women, children, the elderly, and those with allergies were advised caution.
You can't get much more individual than that.
It takes 17 journalists and editors to put just that feature together every day.
But just in case you want to try and get a little bit more individual,
just in case you're one of these people who are made secure by being told how zany everyone else is,
then USA Today, of course, has a column for you.
It's offbeat USA, which of course appears alongside across USA.
For example, and I quote this in its entirety,
spittoons will be installed in a student smoking lounge at a Palatine Illinois High School.
About 40 students who would rather chew tobacco than smoke it requested the Cuspidors.
Students need both parental and school district permission to smoke and chew.
Well, either it was a bad day for individuality in the USA Today,
or else individuality is even more trivial an issue than national unity and sameness.
Remember how I began this? I was talking about statistics and what I usually tell my students.
Well, I'm convinced that if the editors and publishers of this newspaper are not at a complete loss
to know what's happening in the USA Today, then they're certainly not telling it to us.
I don't blame the journalists, by the way, because this is a very definitely an editor's newspaper.
The journalists are given a very short path to walk and held on tight leading strings all the way.
As for lies, damn lies and statistics, it's clear that the barrage of useless statistics is a cover for something.
What are they really trying to convey with these statistics?
And I think the answer lies in their vision of geography.
Why do they have such a fetish about geographical differentiation anyway?
Geography is, in fact, a very convenient ideological tool.
Differences between people can be hidden as spatial questions.
We can be convinced that spatial differences are what are really important.
You and I are supposed to bow down to national boundaries
and accept that the Regans and Rockefellers have more in common with us
than we do with the ordinary working people of Japan or Russia, Ireland or El Salvador.
Personally, I would love to have much more in common with the Rockefellers and the Regans.
Their money, that is, not their politics.
But sadly, that's not the reality.
Look at my shoes.
Nationalism disguises the real difference between people,
which are political and social and economic, not spatial differences.
I'll give you just one quick illustration.
I drink in a great bar called CDRs,
and I could find you bars in Dalkees where I come from in Scotland that are just like it.
I'm thinking particularly of the unicorn bar on Old Dalkees Road.
The people there are kind of different from the people in CDRs,
but the atmosphere is just the same.
CDRs are much more in common with the unicorn,
which is 3,000 miles away than it does with the gentrified fern and quiche bar just around the corner,
the Amsterdam Café.
I'll tell you something you didn't know either, I'll bet.
Did you know that General Pinochet from Chile was a geographer,
and that he has mandated that all Chilean schoolchildren should learn geography
because it enhances the sense of national pride and nationalism?
Now, don't get me wrong.
It's not that I dislike geography.
I think if we knew more geography,
we would actually be convinced of an international perspective and not a nationalism.
And that goes for every other kind of regionalism.
I'd just like to finish this little bit by saying so much for the geographical stereotypes.
The nationalism and regionalism, which is inherent in the Gannett Corporation
and their USA Today newspaper,
is really an ideology diverting us from what the real social differences are between us
and what the social similarities are.
The Gannett Company ranks among the largest 500 corporations in America.
In 1983, its operating revenues were over $1 billion.
Its net income was $92 million.
Gannett has more than 27,000 employees.
Its board of directors includes the former chairman of Eastman Kodak,
the president of the Associated Press, and former First Lady Rosalind Carter.
Gannett owns 85 daily newspapers, 35 non-daily newspapers,
6 TV stations, 6 AM radio stations, 7 FM stations,
and the research firm of Lewis, Harris, and Associates, and USA Today.
We still haven't figured out exactly who it is that reads USA Today,
or perhaps more intriguing why they read it and what they get out of it.
Let's dive a little deeper in and find out.
This is the confusion of geographical trivia in the across-the-USA spread.
I hope you can all see this.
It's a crazy quilt of everything and nothing from everywhere and nowhere.
USA Today claims that it is a very easy newspaper to read, laid back and relaxed,
but for myself, I find this kind of newsprint frenzy utterly impossible to get into.
I might be interested in what's happening in the place where I live or where I've lived
or where I've even spent a lot of time, but it's not really their milk deliveries,
their Abigail Adams overpasses, or the tobacco chewing that I most want to catch up on.
I don't know about you, but this page basically makes me nervous.
And that's the point. It really isn't meant to be read.
What a stupid concept in the television age to read a newspaper.
Look at this weather page.
Once it's up the right way around, it's not meant to be read.
And with the exception of the place you're in, maybe the place you're going to this day,
it's not even meant to give you any information.
The USA Today weather page is meant to soothe you and mesmerize you like a mild psychedelic drug.
It's meant to give you the whole warm egg of the USA at once with the speckles marked on
as the places you may have been.
If you're silly enough to try and actually read the page, then you'll lose the effect entirely.
USA Today is generic news. It is formula news. It is television journalism.
The management provides a writing guide for their journalists entitled Working for USA Today,
in which they stress over and over again that journalists should emphasize what is new and what is coming.
Notice, don't emphasize the news, emphasize what's new and what is coming.
Don't prattle on for several graphs, they advise.
That's paragraphs to you and me.
Presumably graphs is new and coming for paragraphs.
And they find it necessary to tell a journalist to squeeze a fact into every line,
no matter how relevant it might be, we could add, and to allow only one idea per sentence.
In fact, the items in USA Today are so short, sometimes only three or four paragraphs,
that they would better be described as snippets, not stories.
Journalists themselves have ridiculed it as junk food journalism,
calling it mac paper, filled with McNuggets of news.
Someone more cruel still suggested that it may surprise us all some day
and win the prize for the best investigative paragraph.
You can see why in journalism circles it is the Rodney Danger field of the profession.
It don't get no respect.
But this lowest common denominator journalism, the churning out of your basic fluff,
this is a quite deliberate policy on the part of USA Today.
USA Today is nothing but verbal fluff, which is blown around each day,
then agitated back into place by midnight for satellite transmission.
Politically, this style could be characterised as right wing moderate.
In the editorial opinions and staged debates that take place with them,
USA Today generally manages to take up both sides of inherently conservative issues,
and only comes down firmly on one side when the issue is utterly unexceptionable.
For example, they asked, should the Olympics be political?
Well, you won't be surprised to learn that their answer was a resounding no.
Which is all very well, hardly anyone will disagree with them.
I'm sure, but it misses the point somewhat.
What do they really mean?
They condemn the Soviet Union for pulling out this time,
and they condemn the USA, which they call we, for boycotting the games four years ago.
It wasn't we who boycotted the games, it was Jimmy Carter.
A majority of Americans felt US athletes should have participated in the Olympics,
and American athletes certainly felt that.
The real question, of course, is who rules?
And how they roll? And in whose interest do they roll?
But there's too much substance in these questions to float with the fluff of USA Today.
Even when they try to inject substance, it's a half-hearted effort.
A recent front page headline read, Reagan team gets passing ethics grade.
Well, that seems to have a little meat to it at least, until you start to read the snippet.
And you find that 64% of people interviewed thought that the Reagan administration was, and I quote,
no better and no worse in terms of corruption than other administrations in the last 20 years.
Well, that's not much of a record.
It's not really saying much, quite literally,
given that the last 20 years have brought us Watergate and the Bert Lantz affair,
Richard Nixon and the Spiro Agnew affair, to name a few.
There's also the recent report in USA Today that some market research firm expects the number of well-off families to double by 1990.
Well-off is earning more than $40,000.
Now, the statistics are dubious to say the least, but even that is not the point.
USA Today is giving us the impression that the nation, whoever that is, is getting richer,
while, in fact, the number and percentage of people below the official poverty line has increased continually throughout the 1980s.
Again, at best, we're being given only one side of very little substance, which is intentional.
It's USA Today's policy.
It is what Gannett Chairman, Alan Newhearth, calls the journalism of hope.
This, he contrasts to the journalism of despair. Let me quote.
The journalism of despair is a derisive technique of usually leaving readers discouraged or mad or indignant.
With its politics of hope, Newhearth says, USA Today is seeking to cover all the news without anguish, without despair.
The good as well as the bad.
And, he continues, we want to do so with editorial voices that emphasise hope and ideas for a good life or a better one,
advocating understanding and unity rather than disdain and divisiveness.
And here we have the USA vision in a nutshell.
So much for journalistic objectivity.
Gannett's news must be sanitised through a hope filter.
Never mind that there is much in the world that is divisive and that should make us mad.
More forcefully than any other national newspaper, USA Today is telling us to ignore it.
Ignore poverty.
Ignore unemployment.
Ignore the realities of racism and oppression.
Ignore the US invasion of Central America and so forth.
You can't say their formula doesn't work.
If you can believe their circulation figures, they were selling one and a half million copies 18 months after they started up.
Am I ever going to tell you who reads USA Today?
Well, I'll tell you who USA Today says is reading them.
They claim their readers are an upbeat, upscale and active audience.
Their words.
It's an audience of travellers and college graduates who read the paper at home as well as on the way to work and on the road.
44% of USA Today readers earn over $35,000.
More statistics.
41% of their readers have professional and managerial jobs compared to a national average of only 18%.
3.9% of their readers own foreign luxury cars, etc, etc, etc.
What does all this add up to?
You may well ask.
But I have another theory.
This profile of audience adds up to another bland stereotype quite deserving of USA Today.
I am convinced that they're convinced that their readership is predominantly the young, trend-aid, gentrifying, urban professional, the famed yuppie.
The hallmark of these stereotype yuppies is that during business hours they are totally immersed in the real world,
but all other times they seek total escape from it.
And USA Today understands this.
They design the paper as what they call a second buy.
Your average yuppie needs the Wall Street Jungle, excuse me, Journal.
The New York Times or what not, to stay abreast of whatever it is that he or she is trying to stay abreast of.
But at all other times they need trivia as a cure for reality.
USA Today is in fact an asylum against reality.
It makes a virtue out of being vacuous.
It is an anesthetic against the world.
It soothes you.
It makes you feel good.
It is the mellow cocaine station of the newspaper world, bland but bright, frenzied relaxation.
And whatever else it is, USA Today is not the journalism of hope.
It is USA Today that represents the real journalism of despair.
It starts from the assumption that reality is so desperate and so depressing that we can't handle it.
And that rather than changing the world, all we can hope to do is to filter it through a powerful hope screen.
I don't believe the world is that desperate and I'm not pessimistic.
I'm not at all without hope and optimism.
But I'm optimistic about changing the world, not denying it.
I believe working people, organised, can and will change the world.
But returning finally to the question of who reads USA Today,
my guess is that the vision of the yuppie audience conjured up by the Gannett Corporation is itself a product of their hope filter.
I still haven't seen anyone reading the paper.
But that's alright. This is the journalism of hope.
I will therefore end with a piece of serious advice to the publishers of USA Today.
If you really want to sell the product, if you're serious about the upbeat, upscale yuppie audience,
then you have to get into the boutique world in which they live.
You have to change the name of the paper.
USA Today is far too bland and stuffy and not really very upbeat either.
I have a suggestion for you.
Fluff and Stuff, USA.
USA Today.
USA Today.
USA Today.
USA Today.
USA Today.
USA Today.
