Media Madness

Once upon a time, when I was a young lad, I was a News Junkie.  I starting subscribing to TIME in high school.  In college, I added a subscription to US News and World Report (note for the youngsters—that used to be a weekly news magazine.  One year it decided to rank colleges.  Now it solely exists as a college ranking service.)  I would occasionally watch C-SPAN in high school.  For fun.  My parents thought I was odd.  I watched the nightly news.  I read a daily paper.  In short, I knew what was going on. 

Fast forward.  I now read The Wall Street Journal.  One day late.  It arrives by mail and I read it the next morning.  So, if something happens on a Monday, I find out about it over breakfast on Wednesday morning.  This drives my wife nuts.  I am quite happy being pleasantly two days out of date in the modern world of instantaneous communication.

What happened?  I don’t really know.  But, I may have just discovered part of the explanation.

First, a digression.  (Insert sounds of shock.)  In addition to the assorted books I read, I subscribe to a few magazines which I religiously read cover to cover.  Four, to be precise.  The Claremont Review of Books, First Things, The New Criterion, and Wired.  (All together now: one of these things is not like the others…)  All four are great; well worth reading the entire issue.  But, The New Criterion has an aspect not contained in the other three.  I have a favorite writer in The New Criterion. He is a regular—a monthly column.  It is usually my favorite article in the issue.

James Bowman is a Critic.  Not someone who just criticizes things (thought he does do that), but one of those essayists who reliable critiques a matter in a way that makes one (well, me) sit up and think, “Wow!  I never really thought about it that way.  He is onto something there.”)  He does this all the time.  And, the fascinating thing: he writes on the Media in every issue—and yet, issue after issue, he always has something illuminating to say.  Bowman is incisive and perceptive.  Always.

A number of years ago, he wrote a book: Honor.  Excellent.  If you haven’t read it, you should.  Guaranteed to make you see the world in a new light.  As I said, Perceptive.  Very perceptive.

But, that is all just prelude to the matter at hand.  Bowman has another book, which I finally got around to reading:

Media Madness The Corruption of Our Political Culture

The book was published in 2008 and I never got around to reading it because I figured it was just the same thing as his monthly article in The New Criterion.  I was wrong to put it off.  Then again, by reading it in 2014, I realized that everything he argues is even more apparent now than it was in 2008.  So, I guess it is like reading a day old newspaper—I’m just reading a 6 year old book about contemporary society.

The thesis is in the title:  The Media are Mad, producing “the real arrogance of assuming that no other belief is possible without the assumption of the believer’s lunacy, imbecility, viciousness, corruption, or some combination of all four to explain it.” 

Start with the myth of objectivity: “You speak, as it were, from no point of view….In other words, you speak with the voice of God.  To believe this is the very essence of media madness, and it is to eliminate the need for fairness.  It is only when bias is acknowledged that fairness becomes a consideration.”  Add to that the Culture of Emotionalism, which puts feelings at the center of attention.  “The perfection of the passio-centric universe is our celebrity culture, so it is not surprising that the media’s coverage of everything more and more tends to resemble their coverage of celebrities.”  Move on to the manufacturing of reality:  “You might almost say that reality, as the media-mad are accustomed to using the term, can be defined as what the administration does not (officially, at any rate) believe.  Therefore, when the media say that the administration…is out of touch with reality, it is a tautology.  This is to say that by the terms under which the media culture has become established, it is the administration’s job to be out of touch with reality just as it is the media’s job to point the fact out to us.”

It just gets better from there.  Once we have established the nature of the media’s madness, what follows all fits into a whole.  Why the obsession with scandal?  “The media’s assumption that it is the job of government to hide things and their job to find them out thus allows them to cooperate in the charade by which even those things supposedly creditable to the government are hidden from the public so that the media can triumphantly expose them to the world like a magician displaying the rabbit or the quarter or the hard-boiled egg that he himself has hidden.  Scandal and hype therefore become much more than any individual case of wrongdoing or the hyperbole with which it is blown out of proportion.  They become a way of media life.”  The same with the endless obsession with finding the root causes and the use of celebrities as experts.  It is all just a part of this bizarre self-made world in which members of the media know the truth and there is no possibility that a rational, thoughtful person disagrees with that truth.  In that world, the job of the media is no longer to report or analyze or whatever.  The job of the media is to endlessly preen.

And that is undoubtedly part of the reason why over the years I lost interest in The News.  I can no longer stand TV news.  Janet watches it, and I sometimes make it for a whole 5 minutes before wandering off to TV-less parts of the house.  It is also why I no longer care about the immediate News Cycle—it is amazing how much of what is reported as “news” is totally irrelevant two days after the fact.  And, if it doesn’t matter in 48 hours, did it ever really matter?  And in that case, why did it get so much attention at the time?  It is also why my magazine reading moved from news magazines to the journals above—all four of which, in their own way, look at things which will matter in the future.

So, here I have just read a book by James Bowman on a topic on which I read a monthly essay by him, and I learned something.  Bowman is a brilliant essayist.  He has a marvelous Style—seemingly wandering through a wide terrain until the end which snaps everything into focus. 

He writes movie reviews which are closer to thoughtful essay than simple reviews of movies.  I have yet to watch a movie he rated highly which I did not think was every bit as amazing as he said it was.  (Truth be told, he doesn’t rate many movies very highly—thus far in 2014, there are four such movies.  There were 7 in 2013.)  [However, loath as I am to say this, honesty compels me to note: Bowman does not show proper reverence for all things Superhero when it comes to movies.  He obviously believes that movies should be substantive and thoughtful if we are going to say they are good and worth viewing, but he has this crazy idea that Superhero movies don’t get a free pass on those grounds.  So, let’s agree to overlook this critical failing.]

What does the future hold for the media?  I suspect it is not going to be pretty.  The signs are obvious—in the internet age, the idea that there are go-to networks will increasingly decline.  (This is why the media shows such hostility to bloggers.  They are a real threat to the myth that the media Knows Things we mortals do not know.)  FOX and MSNBC are the future of News, I am afraid.  Pick your view and then pick your media outlets which will confirm your view.  Media Madness is then no longer a thing—we’ll just have to call it Human Madness.