Smoke-filled rooms are bad for the editorial vision

Last month, The Washington Post Magazine ran a story about superstar violinist Joshua Bell's gig in a Metro station. In brief: Would morning commuters be stopped in their tracks by the music of Bach et al. played by the nation's most prominent violinist? No.

The article by Gene Weingarten is interesting, though written in an overblown glossy-mag style:
The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

So, what do you think happened?

HANG ON, WE'LL GET YOU SOME EXPERT HELP.

He touches on the nature and purpose of beauty (always an interesting question for me, though I rarely, if ever, consider what Leibniz or Kant have to say about it; Weingarten managed to work them--and Plato and Hume--into the piece) and reports on several later conversations with communters who agreed to be interviewed for the article.

But the paragraph that stopped me in my own tracks was this:

In preparing for this event, editors at The Post Magazine discussed how to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous "what-if" scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up;....

(I left off the end of the final sentence, as it was clearly meant to be hyperbole.)

...In other words, these editors saw the city as populated by people pretty much just like themselves. They had no idea who really walked through that Metro station. No conception of a world outside their own spheres of awareness.

I feel like a shaft of light has singed part of my brain--a little dramatic, maybe, but think about the implications. If the people who largely control the content for major media outlets define what's significant by what they see as significant, how does that affect the way in which stories are told, and what stories get told? How does that affect who gets interviewed for stories, who gets to provide answers to reporters' questions, what the questions are?

I consider myself a healthily skeptical person, yet I used to think that by and large, editors and journalists honestly tried to approach things objectively--I suppose I still think that they do try. But this is such a revealing glimpse inside the editor's office.

But wait... yes, it's true: I am an editor. That's the other reason I can't let go of this paragraph. I know I'm guilty of this same solipsistic error. I justify it by thinking, "Well, I don't really know who the readers are, so I might as well make papers that I'd want to read." Or: "With 50,000 readers, there are bound to be a few who appreciate my editorial decisions." Or: "Writing is best when the author writes to a specific reader." (I sort of believe this, but not necessarily for journalism, even though once I did hear this point made in a workshop for journalists.)

But those are excuses for laziness. I always need to be asking myself: how is the world bigger than I realize?