Your Call Is Important To Us

by Penny, Laura

  This is why the news is fundamentally unlike all the other shows. Even though the news is sold like any other program, with an eye to ratings, demographic wedges, and the concerns of advertisers, it is not like other programs. A free press is an integral part of a democracy, and the media have a greater role to play than simply raking in the bucks and the ratings. Thomas Jefferson said that if you could only have one or the other, democracy or a press, he’d take the free press. The media still sees itself as a watchdog, and is forever telling us that it’s on our side, getting all worked up into a lather on our behalf. It’s just a shame that so much of that perfectly good anger and attention has been squandered on trifles like sharks and kidnappers, on stories that fondle the feelings and bypass the brain.

  A study on press credibility, conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, found that more than three-quarters of the people they polled believed that the media spent too much time on scandalous stories because they were sexy or exciting, not because they were actually important stories. Scandals may provide a cheap, quick ratings boost, but they ultimately erode the credibility of the profession, and audience for the product, particularly when the scandals are presented as newsworthy simply for being scandals. When you do sleazy stories in a sloppy fashion, the slime can’t help but stick. Journalists are no longer perceived as the cigar-chomping, fedora-sporting champions of the common man, and, before their post–September 11 boost, they ranked somewhere around lawyers, insurance salesmen, and politicians in polls about public trust.

  When the media does assume the advocacy role, it’s often against an itsy-bitsy bugbear, issues more appropriate to a small claims court. Or we are driven into a tizzy about some unlikely scourge, like the West Nile virus. Or we are presented with ridiculous duct-tape solutions to Orange Terror Alert problems. We get the shocked and appalled, but we rarely hear how we could make things less shocking or appalling. The news always happens to someone else, and the farther away they are, the less we care, unless they’re already famous.

  I’m not saying there’s no news out there. In fact, the great paradox is that you can drown in news if you care to. This is a great time to be a news junkie, if you’re willing to do a little digging. The public broadcasters, like PBS, NPR, CBC, and the BBC, have gotten a little flashier, but they still do excellent investigative work on programs like Frontline and The Fifth Estate, and air longer, more thoughtful pieces than your average cable blip. The Internet, in particular, is a news junkie’s dream. Most of the world’s major papers and broadcasters are but a click away, which is not even to mention the countless online-only news sources. One of the frustrating things about the fake Web page look of the new cable news channels is that it assumes that people like the Web because they can get lots of short little bursts of info. This misses what people really love about the Web, which is the sheer abundance of information from a plurality of sources.

  The blogosphere is beginning to overlap with the MSM in all sorts of curious ways. Perhaps the best example of the collision between the old media and the new media is Rathergate. In September 2004, 60 Minutes did a show on Bush’s Texas National Guard Service, or lack thereof. Right-wing bloggers began questioning the validity of the documents the report was based on, and their concerns migrated back to the MSM. CBS admitted that it probably shouldn’t have aired the show without making sure the documents were kosher. Dan Rather apologized. Right-wing blogs rejoiced, and took Rathergate as a sign of their triumph over the lumbering, liberal MSM.

  Blogs make no pretense to objectivity, but their flagrant partisanship is part of their charm, particularly when compared to Fox’s disingenuous claims of neutrality. Even though banners and pop-up ads are irritating, the information-to-ad ratio on the Web is as good as, if not better than, that of newspapers. It remains to be seen how long the Internet will remain a haven for independent media providers and a cheap conveyance for heaps of information. The usual suspects are rubbing their hands and wondering how, exactly, they can fashion the Internet into something infinitely more profitable and obedient. The cable companies and the Baby Bells are successfully lobbying the FCC for more telecommunications deregulation. In June 2003, the FCC suggested further relaxation of media ownership rules, allowing companies to own more outlets in the same markets, and to own both broadcasters and newspapers, even if that makes the company in question that city’s only news source. The motion passed by a margin of 3–2, and has since been contested by the commissioners who were outvoted, in the Senate and Supreme Court, and by millions of angry activists who think the media are consolidated enough, thanks. The 1996 Telecommunications Act, the last major bout of FCC deregulation, set the stage for almost-monopoly control of phone service, and the subsequent expansion and collapse of WorldCom, the second biggest phone behemoth. You probably heard about WorldCom in the news, but you probably didn’t hear so much as a syllable about the 1996 Telecommunications Act—yawn—and how it made a crisis like WorldCom possible. A corporate corruption story is a good story. An explanation of the effects of industry deregulation, particularly when media giants want more of the same, is not a good story.

  You can watch TV news, or read your lousy local chain paper, and not get very much news at all. They’re like fruit drinks, colored sugar water with 10 percent juice. I don’t know what your particular “action” or evening news shows are like, but all the ones I’ve seen are pretty much the same. There’s maybe five or ten minutes of local news, and five or ten minutes of rehashed world news, if you can make it past the forty minutes of advertising, inane banter, chummy chuckling, grimaces of solemn concern, promos and teasers for upcoming stories, and health and lifestyle stories that are, more often than not, video news releases produced by PR companies hired by companies that produce health and lifestyle products. The audience for local news has decreased to 59 percent of those who watch the news, but local newscasts remain lean, mean profit machines, with solid ad revenues and increasingly frugal production values. People watch them out of sheer force of habit. They don’t make you think, but they do make the bucks.

  Despite all the fluff and sleaze and doom and gloom, people haven’t given up on the news. In fact, the good news about the news is that 80 percent of Americans still pay attention to it daily, for about an hour on average. But the bad news about that good news is that most of those people watching the news are fossils—meaning anyone over the age of thirty-five. Old people love news, and they tend to get their news from old-school sources, like the newspaper. Young people are the least likely to pay any attention whatsoever to the news. Less than a quarter of people under thirty read the newspaper, and the numbers for those aged thirty to forty aren’t much better, hovering around 30 percent. People aren’t picking up the paper as they grow older and become more responsible. In fact, the thirtysomethings spent more time reading the papers when they were in their twenties, and have drifted away from print journalism over the past decade.

  When youngsters do consult the news, they tend to graze, checking out the breaking stories on CNN or Fox, finding something on the Web, listening to the radio on the drive to work, or laughing at a topical gag on a late-night show. The New York Times Magazine ran a fretful cover story about how kids these days seem to be getting all their news from David Letterman and The Daily Show. In The Daily Show’s defense, the nice people who make The Daily Show are the first to tell you that they are a fake news show, and that you should watch the real news, too. Most Daily Show viewers do; one study found that they were actually better informed about current events than those watching the big three newscasts or cable news. The Daily Show may be hilarious, but it also covers a lot of hard news stories, and has a Peabody to show for it, which is more than you can say for Bill O’Reilly.

  But I digress. The move to softer news, the increased use of graphics, titles, and soundtracks, and the shrinking of sound bites to blips on a crawl are all attempts to cater to the grazers, desperate attempts to reach out to that elusive, lucra
tive youth market. The drive for better ratings is not simply a matter of getting more people to watch your show. Would that it were so simple. The big question is, who are the people watching your show? Are they young, attractive types, or are they demographically undesirable fogeys? This is important for advertisers, since the youthful contingent is their holy grail, worth two or three times as much cash as their elders. It seems very ass-backwards, insofar as older people have way more access to money and credit than young people, but the theory is that if you get them young, you’ve got their money for life, so get them young you must.

  Cable news picks up more of the kids than the big three, but the average age of a regular Fox News Channel or CNN viewer is still about forty-four, a decade moldier than the cut-off for the chosen market, eighteen to thirty-four. CNN Headline News was built for the express purpose of luring those recalcitrant, media-resistant kids. One exec said that the channel was perfect for the way the youth viewed news, since they could dip in and grab a dab of all the trouble in the world. Heaven forfend that programmers detain the little ADD-lings for twenty-two straight minutes of news, or forty-four agonizing minutes of documentary exposition. Why, these young people went from Sesame Street to MTV to video games and the Web, and they demand constant stimulation, staccato bursts of super-cool content, 24–7. To get their attention, you need dancing numbers, you need irony and technology, you need to make the news fun. So, Headline News has a faux-Internet busy screen, which features a foxy talking head, alternating with short texts and big graphics, framed by a succession of insipid headlinettes, a weather graphic, and a sports scoreboard graphic. It’s too much information and too little information at the same time, an unholy stew of War on Terror and freaky deaths and truncated quotes from White House spokespeople and celebirthdays and box-office totals, shorn of any and all context. You never see a story longer than a sentence, and the writing staff favors bad puns and lame pop culture gags, like “Hussein on the Membrane,” for a story about Saddam. They’re aiming it right at relative whippersnappers like me, but I can’t dip in for more than five minutes at a time lest I rouse the nervous tic in my right eyelid. In May of 2003, they ran repeated coverage of the man with the longest ear hair in the world. Freakish? Certainly. News? No. We were having a couple of wars and a corporate crime wave back then. Those things are, y’know, newsy.

  Fifteen minutes here and fifteen minutes there, especially if it’s fifteen minutes of adverinfotainment, is a flimsy basis for formulating an informed opinion on any matter of consequence. If you strafe people with short, flashy things, their capacity and willingness to pay heed to long, dullish things diminishes from lack of use. Reading the headline of a news story is like reading the title of a book. It’s a good start, but that’s about it. Dumbing it down for the kiddies, a tried, tested, and true marketing strategy from blockbuster films, is not a good idea for the news. Any time a serious news organization tries hard to be cool, they end up coming off like your grandma rapping, which is to say, deeply awkward and decidedly uncool. Making the news a fun cool thing like all the other fun cool things gives people the option to treat the news like other shows, watchable or unwatchable based on how much you enjoy watching it, a game the news will always lose. When news organizations dumb the stories down for the kiddies, they also make sure that they will never, ever grow up. A PBS Online NewsHour forum on youth and the media featured one posting by a teenage girl who said that teens like her want to hear more about depressing stuff like war in Afghanistan and murder trials—not! Instead, she suggested, the news should show more upbeat stories, like a new polar bear being born at the zoo. A baby bear? Save that shit for the Discovery Channel. That is not news. And we shouldn’t make it news to please idiots of all ages who are like, ew, the news is hard and war is so totally depressing. Another post offered a helpful suggestion for the disgruntled teen. She should really try Headline News, said a CNN exec. It was perfect for busy people like her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Convictions are more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  This has been an easy book to write and an impossible book to end. New shit just keeps pushing the old shit into obsolescence. This is usually the part of the book where the author offers practical solutions: I’ve got nothing. I am not a problem solver. I am a crank. It was lovely to discover, however, that I am not merely a crank. This book is only the tip of the shit I sifted through, which is but the teensiest pore on the great Godzilla of bullshit.

  Although I am Canadian, this book wound up being primarily about American bullshit, which is much more ubiquitous, well funded, and outrageous. Canada thinks America is loud and dumb, and America thinks Canada is lame and boring, but they are still brothers, raised with shared Enlightenment family values, like freedom of the press, free markets, and democracy. Canada venerates moderation, while the Yanks excel at extremes: the best and the worst, the richest and the poorest, the puritans and the pornographers, all living cheek by jowl.

  America is also at a particularly bullshitty moment in its own history. Since I started cobbling this book together, in 2001, America has been in war mode, and war and bullshit go together like peanut butter and jelly, gin and tonic, or Oceania and Eastasia and Eurasia. The word bullshit first appeared in a dictionary as American vulgar slang in 1915, but some etymologists argue that the term was popularized during the world wars, overtaking previous epithets like chickenshit. Moreover, I think that the vast bullshit-disseminating apparatus is a descendant of the war propaganda deployed in the service of both world wars. Bernays, the father of PR, learned the rudiments of his trade working for the government, bolstering the war effort that happened at home, the war for the hearts and minds. Be they Axis or Allies, nations at war produce gross buckets of propaganda and moral suasion. They have to. You can’t convince people to sign up for something so ruinous and costly without euphemisms and evasions—strong rhetoric about impending danger and/or a just cause.

  The Bush administration is the latest in a long line of wartime bullshitters. When the threat-based justifications for the war, like weapons of mass destruction, were proven to be false or exaggerated, the administration simply switched emphasis, pushing the just cause and the spread of freedom and democracy. In Bush’s 2005 inaugural speech—which was pretty short—he used the word freedom twenty-five times and liberty fifteen times. Freedom, and the glorious struggle for liberty, is a classic war speech theme. How do you disagree with it? Everybody except evildoers likes freedom. Even though the Bush administration has curtailed civil liberties in a host of ways, it consistently wraps itself in the flag of freedom and liberty. It also uses the rhetoric of freedom to push its domestic agenda; whether the issue is tax cuts or the privatization of Social Security, Bush spins it as freeing people to spend their own money and make their own choices.

  What I find really pernicious about this is not just the fact that Bush bullshits, like every politician. Bush and company distinguish themselves by believing their own bullshit. I don’t think Paul Wolfowitz was spinning when he said that American troops would be welcomed in the Middle East as liberators. I think he actually thought that, and refused to entertain evidence to the contrary. This is the other big problem with the Bush regime: It brooks no dissent, and does not take kindly to being called on its bullshit. Moderate Republicans like Paul O’Neill, Christine Todd Whitman, and Colin Powell have been driven out of the government for questioning, or disagreeing with, the policy initiatives of the inner circle. Several commentators have noted that this inner circle is as clenched and concealed as a sphincter.

  In a chilling October 2004 New York Times Magazine article, writer Ron Suskind detailed Bush’s distaste for debate, and reliance on instinct and religion to the detriment of evidence or fact. One of Bush’s aides mocked Suskind’s attachment to quaint notions like facts and evidence, and the writer’s allegiance to “the reality-based community”: “That’s not the way the world really works anymo
re,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

  In your face, you fact-loving pussies! Have fun studying us, losers, while we remake the world in our image and then remake it again. This attitude gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I am not alone. The phrase “reality-based community” has migrated to the blogosphere, where progressive bloggers declare themselves proud members.

  The declaration that the empire is creating its own reality, and that the rest of us can just take notes, is not just bullshit but meta-bullshit, bullshit about bullshitting. The disdain for the reality-based community is merely the latest manifestation of a long and successful campaign of right-wing reality creation, of bullshitting about their own bullshit. For example, Bush and his ilk have done an excellent job of redefining certain words, like elitist, conservative, and liberal. Elite used to mean somebody with lots of wealth and power, like, say, Dick Cheney. Now elite means somebody who reads books and indulges in hated nuance, like that ol’ flip-flopper John Kerry. Bush and the gang are not conservatives in the traditional, Burkean sense of having respect for established authority and tradition. They may be social conservatives, but more than anything else they are free-market radicals, who dismantle established programs rather than conserving them. Some are bloody anarchists. Talk to the kid at the protest rally with all the anarchy symbols on his jacket, and you will probably discover that he wants more government, like fairer trade regulations. Grover Norquist wants to drown the government in a tub.