A Trickle Down Theory Summer 1986· RAIN Page 31 ,· of Media by Walter Truett Anderson This was.written as a background paperfor a "U.S. Associationfor the Club ofRome meeting. The two-day conference in Washington DC was aimed at promoting effec- ·tive coverage oflong-term global issues in the communications media. The Association·can be contacted at 1325 G Street NW, Suite 1003, Washington, DC 20005. -FLS · We are living in a time in which the basic dimensions of politics are changing-moving toward a global scale and producing exponential change in many areas of life. In this new framework of political space and time, new "problems"-such as acid contamination, terrorism, what to do about biotechnology-emerge regularly and require social responses. Sometimes they fit into pre-existing categories of thought, but more often they require new ways of thinking. Without ideas and concepts of a different kind from those that have governed thought in the past, we are unlikely to be able to cope with the challenges of the years ahead. Over three decades of working as a professional journalist while observing the media from the outside as a political scientist, I have come to the conclusion that the American media are open to new ideas, but that this js subject to certain cultural ground~rules that we should try to understand to be effective. The first is that we are a genuinely anti-intellectual society in which ideas are consistently undervalued. Americans on the whole place a high priority on "action" and do not ordinarily think that actions are motivated by abstract ideas: "Doing something" is invariably preferable to "talking" or "head tripping." As a result, journalists frequently are not aware of their ideological biases, because they think they don't have any. While ideas may be popularized in the mass media, they never originate there. As a general rule, the larger the circulation or audience of a given communications medium, the more its content is likely to be borrowed from other sources. The mass media generally want ideas that are instantly recognizable, and are not interested in trying to present new or unfamiliar ideas-such as, "soft path," "global problematique"-that have not already gained some currency and/or respectability. Hence the "trickle-down theory"-that new ideas are more likely to be formulated and expressed first in more specialized media and picked up later in the mass media. The hierarchy is roughly as follows: •Specialized print pubiications; •Books; . •Newspapers and general magazines; • Movies and television. At the bottom of the list is commercial advertising, which is more or less devoid of ideas as such but highly imitative and quite sensitive to whatever is going on in the general culture. The current increase in health consciousness, for example, is reflected in ads which sell the health or nutritional benefits of their prodqcts. There are of course many refinements to this. Some newspapers are more interested in ideas than others, an op-ed page is more likely to have new ideas than a news section. Magazines follow other magazines. A Hollywood promoter I used to know said that if he wanted to get a picture spread on something in LIFE he would first get an article in Time, . which was easier to do anci would set up the LIFE pitch. And there is some tr~ckling up, but not of ideas. The "Where's the beef?" slogan found its way into a presidential campaign, but its effect was to distort rather than clarify the debate on issues. It was a non-idea that substituted for an idea. o o
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