Columnists’ deposits and withdrawals in the good will account
From a thoughtful piece in the Washington Monthly about why New York Times columnist Bob Herbert doesn’t get more buzz comes this:
Some experts suggest that human nature also just resists bad news. Dan Heath, coauthor of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, observed in an e-mail to me that columnists who inflict hard truths on readers
have to make deposits along with the withdrawals. Otherwise, if they cause us hurt twice a week, we instinctively look away, like smokers who don’t want to look at blackened-lung photos. Conversely, if Dave Barry took a stand on health care, I think it’d be fixed overnight … he’s made so many deposits and so few withdrawals that millions feel like they owe him something.
I imagine this principle applies even more heavily to bloggers.
Wordyard RSS feed
September 20th, 2007 at 12:38 am
What did George Bernard Shaw say? Something about the entertainment being the jam that coats the pill of morality.