Tuchman's Law

Yesterday evening my wife and I watched A Night to Remember. About midway through the film, as the decks started to slope and the Titanic’s passengers grew truly frantic for the first time, my wife turned to me and said, “I don’t think I’m ever getting on a boat again.”

I had to agree. The ocean bothers me anyway, and I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about sinkings lately—from teaching the Lusitania earlier this semester to passing the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic earlier this month to reading up on the deadliest sinking in history, that of the Wilhelm Gustloff, last week, which led me to revisit the Goya and the the Cap Arcona and the General von Steuben and…

But is this really reasonable? Don’t most ships make it safely to port? Aren’t these noteworthy precisely because of how much went wrong on their voyages, placing them well outside the norm?

All this brought to mind something else I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially in relation to the way we keep up with the news: Tuchman’s Law.

The Tuchman there is Barbara Tuchman, author of The Guns of August among many other bestselling works of history. In the introduction to her book A Distant Mirror, about “the calamitous fourteenth century”—a century I revisited twice in my Years Worse than 2020 series in December—Tuchman examines the formidable obstacles faced by modern people seeking to understand the Middle Ages. In addition to the vast cultural differences—differences in belief and worldview, imagination and priorities, among others—there is the inherent bias of all written records:

A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disporportionate survival of the bad side—of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process—of lawsuits, treaties, moralists’ denunciations, literary satire, papal Bulls. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something. Negative overload can be seen at work in the religious reformer Nicolas de Clamanges, who, in denouncing unfit and worldly prelates in 1401, said that in his anxiety for reform he would not discuss the good clerics because “they do not count beside the perverse men.”

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

Or the way I often explain this concept to students: the mere fact that something is given media attention makes it seem X times more common than it actually is.

I appreciate the way Tuchman herself applies her law to the news media. Clearly we are wired to build probably scenarios out of the stories we hear, especially when they bring to light shocking dangers—however remote. There’s a natural pattern-seeking at work there which will inevitably skew your perceptions of what is normal, especially when overwhelmed with information.

What Tuchman clearly does not anticipate is the manipulation of this tendency, the artificial construction of narratives out of the news media’s vast sea of white noise—so aptly described by Postman, who I’ve mentioned in this connection before. These narratives may or may not actually reflect real world trends, but the mere fact that stories supporting the narratives are reported makes it that much harder to determine. And this is not even to factor in deliberate dishonesty, of which there is plenty.

I’ve found Tuchman’s Law a helpfully specific way to apply skepticism when looking at a news story, especially one, as the news is wont to do, meant to shock, disturb, or scare you—or, increasingly, call you to some kind of righteous indignation. In addition to basic questions like those proposed by Alan Jacobs here, ask something like: Barring intentional dishonesty about this story, how common is what it describes? It has a salutary effect on the intellect not unlike getting away from the computer and taking a walk in the sunshine and fresh air. You know—the real world.

I’ve critiqued the news and especially our consumption of it before here and most recently here.