http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_001786.php
The Media Do Suck (Why The Heathen Rage) 19 March 2005
Journalism, Democracy, and the Greatness of America's #1 Celebrity Weekly News Magazine
By Jeff Sharlet
"Mad as Hell" Two years ago, I was reporting a story on media giant Clear Channel for The New York Times Magazine (which killed the piece; it wound up in extended re-mix form in Harper's). I started by attending a march of Clear Channel opponents -- anarchists, Quakers, "culture jammers," evangelical housewives, militant nuns -- through North Philadelphia, hoping to learn from them why Clear Channel, a purveyor of bland, pre-packaged radio, merited not just dislike but visceral hatred. But I didn't get far; most of the marchers refused to talk to me when I said I was reporting for the Times.
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.
"Be a scribe! Your body will be sleek, your hand will be soft. You are one who sits grandly in your house; your servants answer speedily; beer is poured copiously; all who see you rejoice in good cheer. Happy is the heart of him who writes; he is young each day."
--Ptahhotep, Vizier to Isesi,
Fifth Egyptian Dynasty, 2300 BC