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The Media Do Suck
19 March 2005(Why The Heathen Rage) Journalism, Democracy, and the Greatness of America's #1 Celebrity Weekly News Magazine By Jeff Sharlet
So I wound up on the sidelines, watching the march lurch past with a group of mechanics from a muffler shop. A man named Iszjen Jones asked me what the fuss was about. I tried to explain -- non-local control, crappy radio, propaganda, etc. -- but I didn’t listen to Clear Channel radio and had, until that point, tried to avoid thinking about it, so I didn’t have a good answer. Iszjen Jones did. “It is true,” he said, turning to his co-workers, who were annoyed by the marchers, “The media do suck.” All nodded sagely. For the last thirteen years I’ve been writing stories the reporting of which often began with a subject telling me why he or she hates “the media,” a phrase I surround with scare quotes not to suggest that it doesn’t really exist, but that “the media” so widely reviled is a hydra with no body; there is no common denominator to the hatred with which it is denounced. I began professional work as a reporter in the courtrooms of San Diego Naval bases, to which I won access only through fear and stupidity. I asked to attend courts-martial; the Navy said no; I was afraid of being fired; I called higher and higher up the chain of command, bleating about “First Amendment rights” I did not fully understand. Such is the power of Constitutional magic, though, that the one who says the spell needn’t comprehend its meaning. One day a press officer called me and invited me to a court martial of a young sailor facing 20 years for possession of a bag of pot; my welcome, however, came with the caveat that “no one there will like you.” But they did. The various parties involved in the legal processing of sailors-gone-wild (“fraternization,” usually in the form of sex up and down the chain of command, and drugs were the most common problems I saw tried) were bored by the buzz of fluorescence and the hum of antique air conditioning and the dull plodding of a court proceeding in which everyone’s clothes were pre-ordained; and thus, they seemed to enjoy the presence of a 20-year-old, long-haired, wide-eyed reporter, who asked the most amusing questions. But it was true that they did not like “the media.” It wasn’t political or practical; it was tribal. The military provided them with a world; “the media” was another country, where people talked funny. They didn’t mind a harmless tourist from medialand, but they sure didn’t want to live there. Is that all it is, the rage with which much of the population responds to the media it consumes in ever larger quantities? Us vs. the "other"? Could we explain away the anger by resorting to “red” and “blue” and the difference between NASCAR and cappuccino? I don’t think so. After the Navy, I turned to the Jews; I spent three years reporting on Yiddish culture in America, stories that often involved the word “last,” as in, the last Yiddish movie star, the last great Yiddish writer, the last Yiddish union. None of these “lasts” had much use for the media, either, but since I wrote for a Yiddish magazine, in English, I was deemed outside the range of their anger, which they reserved for press outlets that frame the story of Jewishness as beginning with the Holocaust and ending with Israel. “Fools!” the old yidn raged. Of course, they were right; and of course, it didn’t matter. They were not a part of the story. Exclusion is another reason some people hate the media. This past January, I was in Colorado Springs, reporting about that city's evangelical revival for Harper's. Over the last few months, reporters from the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone, among others, have also visited Colorado Springs, and all have gone to great lengths to portray the city positively. Still, locals are angry. "The media has come out in full force against the Christians," a friendly woman named Linda Burton told me over a basketful of warm, fresh-baked muffins. The best response, she believes, is war -- a term she uses metaphorically for spiritual and political combat. "The Media" is The Man, or it's another country, or it's a club you can't get into, or it's "against" you, or it do suck. I am not nearly as interested in the question of why the heathen rage as how they do so -- the “heathen,” being in this instance, those who feel that they are beyond the sphere of media decision-making and yet within the shadow of media power. Which is why I look with distrust on any attempt to diagnose the “problem” with media, such as “Journalism: Power without responsibility,” a lengthy essay by Kenneth Minogue in The New Criterion which has enjoyed much greater discussion among actual journalists than might have been expected due to Jay Rosen’s thoughtful analysis of Minogue's most valuable insights. Jay, The Revealer’s publisher, does a better job of summarizing Minogue than could I, and he sifts some actual gold from what struck me at first read as a very conventional lament for the decline of aristocracy (Minogue might call it meritocracy, a creature I've never seen with my two eyes). But if Minogue's essay is spiritual war by another name, that doesn't mean it isn't worth considering. Read Jay’s essay to find out why. It's important, though, to note that cultural conservatives of Minogue’s ilk no more speak for the most common forms of media-loathing than I do, since in the media landscape of the Christian right the "sensationalism" Minogue decries is the gold standard. Not for reasons of commercialism, but because it is proof that God is doing mighty things; that His hand is actually visible in the world. Look, for example, at the instant canonization of Elizabeth Ashley Smith, the Atlanta hostage who cooked pancakes for her captor and led him to God via a spiritual self-help guide. Or, for broader scale, look at the breathless reports on the Ukraine broadcast to millions of listeners on Dr. James Dobson's Focus network, listeners who believed that a) evangelicals were responsible for the peaceful defeat of communism in Ukraine; and b) secular media, deliberately or not, covered up their role in the process (I agree with B, and want to learn more about A). On evangelical programs from the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and Trinity Broadcast Network and other media, this "breaking news" style gets filtered through the journalism of first standing, scripture. The only way to get a grip on current events, goes the thinking, is to turn to a chronicle of ancient events. Secular media's failure to do that, from an evangelical conservative perspective, is gross negligence. For some, it's worse than that -- it's an outright renunciation of the Bible, and it merits not so much "rage" as wrath. Minogue isn’t wrathful. He’s erudite and yet ill-informed, so comfortable in his learning that he seems wholly unaware that his statement that “Journalism may thus be taken as a systematic defiance of the Socratic maxim that wisdom consists in understanding one’s own ignorance” applies also to his own 6,283-word screed, in which he condemns journalists for being too educated (that's always been my problem with The New York Post) and so pompous they describe themselves as “free floating intellectuals” (yes, that’s just what they call themselves at Fox); ignores the many brilliant, not-very-educated journalists who don’t fit his description of the breed as followers of fashion, such as Walt Whitman, Mary Austin, H.L. Mencken, and Scott McLemee (a winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, who left college after a year to pursue punk rock and Bolshevik agitation); neglects the entire history of documentary photography; and resorts to the passive voice to avoid naming names he doesn’t have when he charges intellectual fashion with promulgating a vague notion of “collective guilt” with which to condemn all of western civilization. (Like many cultural conservatives, Minogue is a master of classical references; but he seems to base his knowledge of the intellectual left on a close study of the Drudge Report.) But the greater problem with Minogue’s argument is his reliance on a phony clash of civilizations: “religion” on the right and journalism on the left. “The basic contrast” to journalism -- defined as obsessed with sensationalism and novelty -- “is with religion,” writes Minogue, and religion “is concerned with rituals and sermons revolving around beliefs about our eternal situation.” It certainly is -- if by “religion” you mean Christianity, as understood by intellectuals such as Minogue. Nothing in this essay reveals the particular shape of Minogue's own faith, or lack thereof, but the tone is high secularist, the paganism of the Greeks filtered through nostalgia for the rigor of the British empire. "Religion" in such a worldview is that which one finds on dignified pages; God is a gentleman of great learning. Leave aside all the religions that lack sermons, and all the beliefs that are unconcerned with our “eternal situation,” and even all the Christians for whom faith means bingo and potluck suppers and a place to go on Sundays to know your neighbors. When we focus only on contemporary, committed Christendom, Minogue seems yet more lost.
The assumption that there is any such thing as a “religious assumption” cutting across centuries and faiths and the vast territory of doubt is a dogmatic proposition of poor quality, rigid in its implicit claim to authority and so weak in its defense of its own “truth” that its invocation brings to mind a preacher who turns to the choir for a burst of inspiring song whenever he gets himself into a scriptural thicket. Minogue’s idea of "journalism" meanwhile, as, properly, the stuff of the news concerned with “events” and public affairs, is as undercooked as his understanding of religion and his rant against ideas minted since the turn of the century -- the 20th century, that is. Moreover, Minogue undermines his own premise by inadvertently expanding the range of journalism. On the one hand, he laments what he calls “Salvationism” -- muckraking, essentially, which he considers one kind of bad, because it distorts "our civilization" in the service of a pie-in-the-sky vision -- and on the other what he views as the degradation of journalism into “pointless” entertainment, which he considers another kind of bad. Both, he contends, involve the erasure of "individuality"; "Like democracy," he writes, "journalism is a manic equalizer." That sentence alone explains much of the conservative elite's distrust of the press, but it adds little to the opus of William F. Buckley. Minogue also neglects the economic realities of journalism, dismissing the profit motive as of less significance than “psychological valetism,” the “lowering and demeaning passion” of a servant to criticize his master. The problem with big corporate media, in Minogue's mind, is not that it creates and enforces a lowest common denominator, but that it caters to the base urges of those uncouth creatures afflicted by "curiousity," the desire to know things we do not need to know. Of course, many media haters rage precisely because they feel as if they’ve been pressed into the service of a narrative crafted by those who think themselves superior; class goes a long way toward justifying the fury of those who loathe the swells and the slicks of TV news. And yet, it is corporate media that is described nearly perfectly by Minogue’s over-broad condemnation of journalism in general, worth quoting at length: The journalist, living amidst opinions, knows by instinct the pains of being caught out holding a vulnerable opinion. The first move in his professionalization, as it were, must therefore be to evacuate any position that might be explained by others as arising from his own interest: anything having to do with class, nationality, or civilization: all such inherited baggage must be abandoned by the journalist. The problem is that whoever abandons interests—which have about them a certain discussable reality, where compromise is possible—finds that his stock of opinions consists of abstract ideas. These will usually take an ethical form, and that impels them towards righteousness. Any such package of opinions is likely to irritate patriots and partisans of all kinds. The holder of such a position is usually enormously self-satisfied, because, having arrived there by the process of identifying extremes as things to be challenged and questioned, he fancies himself as having all the rationality of an Aristotelian mean. In fact, he has arrived at a form of Whiggery— “A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of a drunkard’s eye.” But as the sage in Yeats’s poem adds: “All’s Whiggery now.” For us, it’s all journalism. Indeed. If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, “ethics” are the first escape hatch of media professionals. Here is where Jay Rosen’s distinction between “the media,” essentially a corporate construct, and the press, men and women who practice journalism, serves us especially well, although we mustn’t for a moment fall prey to the romantic notion that the latter is any purer than the former. “Writers,” Joan Didion notes in the introduction to Slouching Toward Bethlehem, “are always selling somebody out.” Minogue’s disdain for his subject suggests that he may not be familiar with more thoughtful practitioners such as Didion, who in the first pages of The White Album presents a subtler definition of what journalism -- including what Minogue would considers “pointless” gossip -- is, and why it happens: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five…. We live entirely, especially if we are writers… by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. That is Minogue's "salvationism," his pointless gossip. It is also fair description of the "curiousity" that is mother to myth, which is perhaps why conservatives such as Minogue dislike journalism that doubles as entertainment. "Religion" often does as much, a point of embarrassment to those for whom eternal verities are best taken as astringents. "Myths say, this could happen to anyone," writes the Sanskritist Wendy Doniger. So does journalism; so does democracy. My favorite metaphor for this claim -- and my guide to understanding what myth, journalism, and democracy actually do -- is "bali to," a Papua New Guinean linguistic convention described by anthropologist Steven Feld in Sound and Sentiment as "turned over words," language that "encompasses aspects of analogy, metaphor, euphemisim, litotes, irony, and sarcasm" -- and that's just for starters. "Turned over words" are like a pretty stone you turn over in your hand; those with eyes to see discover that the other side of the rock reveals new meanings; turn it again, and there's another. Minogue celebrates this kind of perception in "religious people, philosophers, [and] scientists," those whom he defines as "genuinely educated." Such people "will find new things in quite exiguous materials"; but then, sooner or later everyone will. That's the problem with those damn words: They keep turning over. Myth, journalism, and democracy are all notoriously unstable, as is religion, a kinship across ways of knowing and living that will as often as not lead to unanticipated and undesirable outcomes. The rage that results when the picture does not come out as expected, or worse, when you discover that someone has been taking pictures of you without your permission, is to be expected. It is not particularly "conservative"; it is, rather, a modern manifestation, intimately linked to the fact of religious pluralism, the undeniable truth that there are many, many ways to believe or to not believe or to avoid thinking about the question of belief all together. Let’s not neglect that last category. Minogue quotes with smug approval Alexander Pope’s remark that “amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think,” as if true happiness is an experience that in a just world will be reserved for those who prefer thinking to, say, waterskiing, or playing video games, or reading Star, "your #1 celebrity weekly news magazine," with googly eyes for all the shiny, crazy celebrities, an amusement I find deeply edifying.
The end of Malcolm’s book complicates her opening salvo, and points toward a deeper understanding of much of the rage against the media, one based, as it happens, on several religious assumptions, each radically different than the one Minogue proposes as definitive: Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses – the days of the interviews – are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife. Ah, complicity! This is not to say that journalism is nothing more than a chronicle of everyone’s love affair with themselves. Rather, that much of our rage can be traced back to heartbreak, and heartbreak to betrayal, and betrayal to our longing for a story in which to believe.
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