"So the Daily Prophet exists to tell people what they want to hear, does it?" said Hermione scathingly.
Rita sat up straight again, her eyebrows raised, and drained her glass of Firewhiskey.
"The Prophet exists to sell itself, you silly girl," she said coldly.
J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter And The Order of the Pheonix
There isn't anything like reading the upper-market online magazines and then having occasion to fact-check them to disillusion you about the thrillingly naive myth that the electronic media was going to be a boon for the truth. Let me break this to you gently, the online Alternet, Salon, etc. are NOT a golden age of journalism.
Despite the popularity of the idea of I. F. Stone and similar giants of independent journalism at such places, their performance is more like Joe Pyne if not Westbrook Pegler.
You expect that from right-wing media, media which serves wealth and oligarchy, media which has traditionally been a receptacle for the kind of scribbler who flirted with the left during the 1920s and early 30s before they took a nose dive to the bottom, sometimes due to a lack of ability, more often in search of money. When it's someone who figured they were leaders of the revolution, by birthright and were disappointed when their lack of ability caught up with them, that dive was at free-fall speed and right to the bottom.
The "800 babies in a septic tank" story has been just another occasion for the journalistic wanna bees to show they aren't about facts. And they weren't necessarily the first with the false factoids, either. The old rump of print media was as invested in it as anyone. I haven't yet seen anyone wonder if, perhaps, just as the cabloid 24-7 "news" cycle forced a sensationalist and ideological cheapening of what was once the upper end of TV news, that the "new online media" hasn't had a similar effect on print. They certainly haven't been getting better since they've been forced to compete with online media.
What is ever more clear about commercial and for-profit online media is that it's driven by whatever attracts people to click on it, preferably repeatedly. Its income depends on that and its income is what drives its content in an endless spiral that seeks the greatest number of those. As I said, yesterday, it will use our greatest weaknesses and it doesn't care if those weaknesses are among our worst character traits. The thrill of hating on things, the gratification of using that to think better of ourselves and the gratification of identifying with a group that can convince itself of its superiority and virtue is guaranteed to get lots of clicks.
The media, unless it is forced to serve a higher purpose, like the common good, will pander to the worst in us. The worst in us is what is in its financial self-interest to serve, its real service base, its advertisers, its investors, its owners, are served all the better by appealing to our lowest and basest, most selfish and least thoughtful characteristics. And it does have to be forced to do anything better than that. I'm not under any illusions that is going to be done on the basis of regulation, not any time soon, not within my life time.
As to solutions, the only one I think has any chance right now is to amend The Constitution to make it possible for politicians and public figures to sue for libel and slander. The experience of the past half-century, during which New York Times v. Sullivan has been used as a license to destroy, mostly, liberal politician and figures with the kind of of sensational lies that can be designed to, as we have learned with the internet, go viral. That it was originally intended to be a protection of the media from lawsuits brought by right-wing politicians only shows that the greatest wisdom of Supreme Court justices is frequently not so wise in practice. The New York Times, the beneficiary of that ruling celebrated its 50th anniversary by pooh, poohing its usefulness to liars.
The ruling was revolutionary, because the court for the first time rejected virtually any attempt to squelch criticism of public officials — even if false — as antithetical to “the central meaning of the First Amendment.” Today, our understanding of freedom of the press comes in large part from the Sullivan case. Its core observations and principles remain unchallenged, even as the Internet has turned everyone into a worldwide publisher — capable of calling public officials instantly to account for their actions, and also of ruining reputations with the click of a mouse.
But the government can upset the Sullivan case’s delicate balance by aggressively shutting down avenues of inquiry, as the Obama administration has done to an extreme degree in prosecuting those suspected of leaking classified documents, and even seizing reporters’ records. Uninhibited and robust criticism can go only so far without meaningful access to information.
That the politicians who are being destroyed by the unrestrained freedom of the corporate media turn out to be those who would be least profitable to their advertisers is certainly no accident.
The steady drift of our politics to the right in those fifty years since the Sullivan ruling is, among other things, a direct result of the freedom with which the corporate media can lie. That is the profit driven media that makes its money by serving those with the greatest ability to by ads AND MEDIA COMPANIES. NYT v Sullivan didn't end up in the way that the Supreme Court justices believed it would in 1964, despite its intended effect in the case it was brought in. As anyone with a realistic view of the media and its perfect ability to be willingly corrupted could have predicted, it would end up enabling exactly the same neo-confederates and their descendants who now dominate our media and our politics. And the media "left", which has pretty much morphed into a pseudo-left, libertarian substitute for one, is just a invested in that corruption. It's no more interested in fact checking than CNN, in many cases, FOX.
The New York Times, no doubt, finds it in its corporate interest to be uninhibited but, as its role in peddling the invasion of Iraq proves, it used that lack of inhibition to sell a massive lie. That lie has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and the price in blood is still rising, as todays news shows. It has cost in sectarian bloodshed, it has cost women an enormous price in freedom, it has benefited the worst of the terrorist groups in the world. The New York Times, the impeccably modernistic, secular, sciency New York Times called that, the most bloody and most corrupt and dishonest of all crusades, by carrying the lies of the oil oligarchs and selling them to a public gulled by its authority as a beacon of truth and light. The Crusades along with the Inquisition are the two great items on the catalog of shames of the dark ages, our media glories in its ability to wage an inquisition and has promoted several crusades, William Randoph Hearst is reported to have boasted of his ability to do that at will. The most benighted of all are those who are benighted but mistake that dark for the light, holding it up as a banner and a virtue. That would be today's media, even at its highest end.
It's fun to watch "Citizen Kane" and realize how much hasn't changed, and won't change.
ReplyDeleteI confess to spending too much time at "Salon." Confess because I must justify my critique of it, because without spending so much time there, how would I notice?
First, the '800 babies in the septic tank." Mary Elizabeth Williams, who has taken that cause up as her own, has only recently and sotto voce, begun to acknowledge that part of the story is bogus, even as she is still committed to the evils of the Catholic nuns and the horrors of the vaccination story (which may also be more complex than she realizes. I still think the idea of "informed consent" as a social ideal is more post-Holocaust than pre-. We can decry the acts, as we decry slavery; but can we condemn the church alone because it's morality was not ours today? Or can we say they were wrong, and so were we? MEW prefers to keep it always at arm's length, and blame "them.")
But Salon also loves them some Neil DeGrasse Tyson. At one point they had five articles (or was it six?) on their front page, all somehow connected to Tyson, or including a picture of him when he wasn't named in the text. I'm not sure how they're going to cope with "Cosmos" now off the air.
Sure, that's marketing; Tyson=clicks. But it's a gross distortion at some point, an excuse to draw clicks, especially when it's one more Alternet article about Tyson v. the "Fundamentalists."
Maybe if Salon was interested in putting that whole struggle in context, linking it to the real Scopes monkey trial (not the one in the movie) and how that embarrassment sparked the fundamentalist fight with science we're suffering from today. Or even just investigating how many schools in Texas are really teaching Creationism (my school district isn't, and if they tried, I think the populace would rise up in righteous wrath. These people are, after all, mostly making their money from oil. They know better than to want to teach their kids the earth is 6000 years old.) That last is a constant refrain in Salon comments, bogus as it is.
It would be nice if Salon tackled a bit more of what is bogus, a bit less of what is sensationalist. Al-Jazeera apparently manages to report real news, not the reinforcement of prejudice of its audience that Fox does, or CNN, or most on-line outlets. Somehow that fracturing of the audience into interest groups hasn't really served the body politic well, or the body cultural, or social.
Wherever we go from here, it's certainly not to the new millennia of enlightenment.....
Not sure I quite agree with the NYT's concern, either, about prosecuting leakers of classified information or "seizing reporter's records."
ReplyDeleteThe 1st Amendment does not place reporters above the law and superior to government, even if "national security" is an overworked dodge and classification of records becomes an excuse to commit conspiracies that would make "The X-Files" seem tame. Part of the genius of the system is the jury trial (which should not be shut down in favor of "national security," but that's a different rant). If the reporter/leaker goes to trial, let's say Edward Snowden, then make your case to the jury.
In public, before everyone. That's the check on government overreach, and it's a damned good one.