What If?

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates last week, I’m struck, yet again, by the pointlessness of our news coverage.  I’m not going to get into the particulars of the case.  That has already been done ad nauseum, and since I wasn’t a completely neutral party who was there, how can I say what went on?  I will say this:  Instead of drinking beers under a magnolia tree, it would have been better had the President joined them in the White House screening room for a viewing of Rashomon.

Last night, while I was skimming the umpteenth post on The Daily Dish about what’s being moronically called Gates Gate, I was struck by the thought of how ephemeral the whole thing is, how although it’s the big thing of the moment, in a few weeks it will be forgotten.  The news, as a concept, is a voracious consumer of outrage.  Based in melodrama, it searches endlessly for heroes and villains and works mostly by manipulating emotions by taking very real people and reducing their sufferings to a kind of marionette show.  You can’t sell papers, even digital ones, without stoking somebody’s discontent or their pity.

The news is grounded in sentimentality, which makes it harder to take any given story seriously for any particular length of time.  Since the story is sentimentalized, it is shallow.  Since it is shallow, it cannot be sustained.  To do otherwise would be like watching the same scene from a soap opera over-and-over again.  And it’s hard to imagine anything that could be duller than that.

Even longer-lasting stories, such as the War in Iraq, are presented in sentimental ways and are presented as a series of distinct sentimental stories rather than as one continuing narrative.  In the case of the Iraq War, it started out with a patriotic pageant called “Shock and Awe.”  This was followed by the desert melodrama “The Looting of Baghdad.”  “Abu Ghraib,” “al Qaeda in Iraq,” “Saddam Down the Spiderhole,” “Crisis in Fallujah,” “Improvised Explosive Device,” “The Hanging of Saddam Hussein,” and “The Surge,” among a plethora of titles, all had their moments in the sun.  And just to be clear, I am not trying to belittle the suffering incurred by the soldiers involved, their families, or the Iraqis themselves.  These are all people who experience these stories not as melodrama but as tragic farce.  Their suffering is real and should not, cannot, be diminished.

And that is part of the hell of it.  By sentimentalizing such a story, the news business does exactly that.  It diminishes the suffering of those directly involved.  It takes something profound and makes it passing fair just for the sake of making a few more dollars.

The chaff of this approach to news is the kind of person we call a celebrity.  These are people of no discernible talent who attain a sort of notoriety, quite often from a scandal, and they work quite hard to remain in the public eye.  I just saw a headline concerning Kim Kardashian this morning that described her as a star, and I’m still not sure why I should know her name at all.  Except that she was involved in some scandal at one time, which made her part of the news cycle.  For the person who gets addicted to the notoriety, life becomes a melodramatic story of various romances and break-ups and career moves.  It’s a very sad thing, this addiction to fame, and I can’t imagine the bottomless, existential dread that must envelope Ms Kardashian every time she looks in a mirror and notices an imperfection.  Michael Jackson was killed by his fame and by the sentimentalized parody of a person he became in its service.

And so the omnivorous news cycle continues, chewing up people and stories and spitting them out as parody humans, no longer noble or tragic but merely pitiable.  And there’s nothing to be done about it because most people prefer melodrama to tragedy and sentimental comedy to farce.  They like everything tied up at the end with ribbons made of avuncular smiles and homebaked pies.  It’s a reality of a kind, a shabby, sentimental one, but that’s what folks like.  For the advantage to sentimentality is this:  When the emotions produced are fake and trite, you don’t have to risk the power of true pain and joy.

Newspaper Madness

One of the arguments that people–and by people I mean print journalists–make for the inability of newspapers to move online is the claim that the level of reporting would suffer because news outlets, due to the smaller levels of revenue available online, would have to close foreign bureaus and layoff staff and just generally not be able to do as much reporting as they have traditionally done.  Fair enough.  The loss of solid reporting would be a loss to society.  However, that argument can only hold water if the two basic assumptions underpinning it–that quality reporting can’t be accomplished without a wide network of standing bureaus and that online reporting is inherently inferior to its print cousin–are actually true.  I’ve encountered a couple of things in recent weeks that lead me to believe that neither is.

The first has been the coverage of the demonstrations in Iran.  While The New York Times has mostly reported on the press releases and statements of the most hardline Ayatollahs and the dismal to the point of being pathetic Ahmadinejad, Andrew Sullivan on his blog The Daily Dish has been doing actual reporting based on Twitter tweets and emails and on information gleaned from people who have connections with family and friends inside Iran.  This is reporting.  And this is why, when a very important and respected group of Ayatollahs came out against the recent election, all the big news outlets were slack-jawed in their disbelief while Andrew and his readers were not.

The second piece of reporting has had to do with the sudden resignation last week by Governor Sarah Palin.  (For the sake of the argument I am presenting, I offer no opinions for or against Gov. Palin.  This has to do with reporting facts, not opinions.)  While the MSM took the Governor’s statement at face value and, even in interviews, tossed her softball questions, online outlets were checking her statements to see what was factual and what wasn’t.  Again, the online outlets are reporting while the MSM is passing along press releases.

None of this is new.  The MSM let us down in considering the Iraq War.  They let us down on torture allegations.  They’ve let us down over-and-over again for the longest time.  It predates Mr. Bush’s presidency and it has outlived it.  The big newspapers and the networks and the other big news outlets have routinely relied on press conferences and government contacts instead of real reporting, which is simply awful and lazy journalism.  All the actual journalism that gets done gets shunted into a special category called “investigative journalism” and is done mostly by magazines rather than newspapers and news shows.  All the MSM really does is support the status quo, which is what state-supported media are supposed to do.  If they are not asking questions about everybody in power all the time (and this is where Fox News also misses the mark:  they coddle one side and attack the other) they are not doing their jobs.  They have stopped being reporters and started being merely typists and apologists.

I think that the MSM can either adapt or die.  I think that journalism suffers from being made into a profession instead of a calling.  I think reporters should dig and question and be cynical about politicians and aloof from them.  I think that finding ways of supporting them in their current condition is bad for democracy and bad for the Republic.