Last week in class we had a discussion about a chapter of the book Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. He expressed a variety of strong opinions, but one in particular stuck in my mind. Thoreau was very dismissive of news, saying that "I am sure that I never read anything memorable in a newspaper," and that "all news, as it is called, is gossip" (69). Thoreau is criticizing those who read the newspaper for entertainment, and the specific events he references as unimportant are fairly trivial. Thoreau criticizes those who may literally gossip about the latest murder, the latest fire or accident, and so forth. In that he has a valid point, that it isn't desirable to read the news in order to entertain oneself with mundane events. The problem is, murders, accidents, and everyday occurrences are not the only subjects of newspapers. Thoreau would have also read about the Mexican-American War, the Indian Removal act and the subsequent conflicts, half a dozen revolutions in Latin America, and numerous other large-scale events. According to Thoreau, however, those events aren't memorable. Thousands of American and Mexican deaths, the violent expulsion of many native groups, and nations throwing off their colonial rulers in favor of self determination, are nothing but gossip. He took an idea he had about a subset of news, and applied it to all news, and, consequentially, almost any significant political or social event. These events are hugely significant, however. Both the Mexican-American War and the conflicts with Native Americans resulted in huge territorial gains and societal shifts, shaping the nation that Thoreau belonged too and in which we live today. I don't think many people agree that those events are merely gossip. Thoreau's statement is an example of a generalization that, beyond it's original subject matter, is inaccurate. It can be tempting to draw broad conclusions from specific cases, but those conclusions are very often wrong when attempting to describe different circumstances.
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When I first read the quote, “all news, as it is called, is gossip” (69), I also believed Thoreau was making a generalization about the worthiness of news. But after our class discussions on underlying narratives and the reconstruction of stories, I now read this quote in a new light. Whenever the past is retold a new narrative is created, and those narratives only multiply as the original story continues to be retold. If the primary role of the news is to retell moments of the past—moments that are reconstructed differently depending on the person—how are we supposed to truly know what had occurred? I agree the news holds a valid purpose, yet one must also consider the subjectivity of news and how it is presented to us.
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