What are talking points? Talking points are essentially bulleted ideas; a verbally presented PowerPoint, to make bite-sized arguments that you can easily chew on and mentally digest and remember.  More and more, in our fast-food as less media literate media world, they seem to be taking the place of rich dialogue. Now creating an almost scripted debate where we know what to say about an issue, because we’ve been given the exact words to use (like lifting lines from a press release). A trend we’ve become so reliant on over actually learning about ideas and policies, that if we were questioned further about our statements, it would quickly reveal we really don’t understand the topic we are speaking about. You can see what this can do to media literacy among the public.

Sometimes I don’t have to watch the news or opinion shows and during the course of my day. I’ll simply listen to friends and colleagues parroting the exact same words or talking points their news or opinion show guru delivered that night.

Is there something wrong with taking in a talking point? No. The problem is when we accept it as true on its face.  It’s a bit like cheating on a test. We have an answer but we don’t know how we came up with it. Or what to really do with it besides give it out as an answer.  A comedic example of what can happen when people just pick up and use media delivered talking points: The movie Idiocracy.

I talk about his scene in my new book Does This News Make Me Look Fat? It’s a great example of how simply taking other people’s talking points can foster unproductive debate. This gist of the story. From the present, an average-intelligence man is accidentally frozen for 500 years. He wakes up. And due to a worldwide dumbing down of the population via anti-intellectualism and commercialism, he is now the smartest man on the planet.  He discovers that the U.S. is facing a dying crop crisis due to the replacing of water with a Gatorade-like substance called Brawndo. And water, in the future thanks to marketing, is only considered worthy of being used for the commode. He tries to explain the advantage of using water on the crops to a room of dim-witted government officials.

Despite his plea, they can’t understand why they need to replace Brawndo with water (“Water? You mean from out the toilets?” they say). Their arguments to him were merely a circular loop of the selling points they picked up from Brawndo’s marketing. They answer back to him, “But Brawndo has what plants crave.” and “Yea, it’s got electrolytes.” You can tell from their vacant looks, they never bothered find out if or why plants actually crave Brawndo. They never thought about what on earth electrolytes have to do with plants. Or even if those things were true. Media illiterate, they just accepted two sexy sounded marketing data points as unquestioned gospel. To the point in the movie, their nation was in crisis over it. Thanks to the magic of YouTube you can see this scene for yourself. But do yourself a favor. See the movie, too.