OCT-NOV 97 - HOME
MEDIA BEAT
Good Grief: When It Reigns, It Pours
For several weeks now, a variety of news outlets have commented on the startling
importance of emotions. The death of Prin-cess Diana set off an explosion
that jolted many reporters into proclaiming that human feelings matter-a
lot.
"As a journalist, I've long avoided feelings," news analyst Daniel
Schorr confessed to National Public Radio listeners in mid-September. "I
used to consider thoughts important and feelings irrelevant. No longer.
Gradually, it's been brought home to me that feelings may have more validity
than opinions."
Kept under wraps or unleashed, feelings have always made a big difference.
The problem is that emotional reactions-whether masked by cerebral essays
or stoked by TV news-don't guarantee us anything. Fervent pleas can make
a case for compassion or cruelty. So can reasoned arguments.
The key issue is not whether feelings matter. (They do.) Or whether they
should. (They always will.) The deeper questions about news media revolve
around which feelings matter-and whose.
When the focus is on tragic events, media accounts seem to zigzag between
pallid facts and easy sentimentality.
Michael Herr, a journalist who covered the Vietnam War, later wrote that
the U.S. media "never found a way to report meaningfully about death,
which of course was really what it was all about." Obscured by countless
news stories, "the suffering was somehow unimpressive."
The same media outlets that can go into paroxysms of grief over one celebrity's
demise have shown themselves fully capable of ignoring-or even celebrating-the
deaths of many people.
In 1991, when U.S. bombs killed "enemy" soldiers and civilians,
the American news media rejoiced. At the end of the slaughter known as the
Gulf War, the Pentagon quietly estimated that 200,000 Iraqi people had died
as a result of America's firepower. Not a faint breeze of concern blew through
U.S. mass media.
Dan Rather-who was to join with other TV news anchors in protracted tribute
to Princess Diana a half-dozen years later-went on CBS at the close of February
1991 to warmly shake the hand of a U.S. general and declare: "Congratulations
on a job wonderfully done!" On highbrow NPR, which seemed to stand
for "National Pentagon Radio" during the war, the enthusiasm for
the killing was similarly palpable.
As this fall gets underway, a backlash is coming from big-name pundits who
bemoan the media response to Diana's death. The glossy news weeklies have
had the best of both worlds, pumping up the media furor over her death and
then decrying it.
In Newsweek's Sept. 15 issue, George Will denounced the media coverage as
"a spectacle both empty and degrading." He lamented that "we
have mass media with wondrous capacities for subtracting from understanding
by adding to the public's inclination for self-deception and autointoxication."
Will continued: "By turning everyone everywhere into bystanders at
events, and by eliciting and amplifying their `feelings,' the media turn
the world into an echo chamber and establish for the promptable masses the
appropriate `reaction' to events."
With like-minded indignation, Charles Krauthamp;mer filled the last
page of the Sept. 22 Time with an attack on "the psychic pleasures
of mass frenzy and wallow." He complained: "The public's surrender
of its sensibilities and concerns to mass media was never more evident than
during the Diana convulsion."
But none of these pundits-Will or Krauthammer or for that matter Daniel
Schorr-could be heard sounding the alarm when media hysteria ignited "patriotic"
passion in early 1991. On the contrary, by the time the first missile barrage
hit Baghdad, they were among the many journalists pounding the war drums
and screaming for blood.
Joseph Stalin would have understood. "The death of one man is a tragedy,"
he reportedly said at Potsdam in 1945. "The death of millions is a
statistic."
Journalists have a responsibility to disprove Stalin's horrible quip. That
would require going beyond comfortable biases and striving to treat all
human life as precious. Dylan Thomas, the poetic prince of Wales, advised
us to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." In contrast,
all too often, journalism does little more than turn the page.
Worshipping the New Media Gods
The cover of Time magazine showed Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on bended
knee, holding a cell phone and telling the head man at Microsoft: "Bill,
thank you. The world's a better place."
Huh?
The sudden Microsoft-Apple alliance was also on the Newsweek cover, which
displayed a lively argument. "Bill Gates is good for Apple," said
one senior editor. "No, he isn't," said another.
A fierce debate -within very narrow bounds.
And so it goes The titans of the computer industry stride the media heavens.
Bill Gates is our modern-day Zeus. Other gods are overwhelmed by his amazing
powers. What a story!
Meanwhile, back on the ground, mortals can only imagine what it's like to
move corporate mountains and build digital highways with the flick of a
pen. We're encouraged to look up with awe at the colossal deal-makers.
They're creating the software in our drives and the images on our screens-
and, increasingly, the dreams in our heads. They are the Providers. We are
the consumers.
The reverence in the air leaves an acrid smell. We may resent the Lord of
Microsoft and the lesser gods, but the media culture of worship seems almost
overpowering. An ultramodern theology now glorifies the quest for vast wealth
and technological power.
A decade ago, the advertising critic Leslie Savan noted the emergence of
what she called "secular fiscalism." Television commercials were
starting to tout the accumulation of capital "as an expression of inner
spiritual growth."
In 1986, Savan described a new MasterCard slogan- "Master the Possibilities"-
as "apparently est-inspired." She added that a Merrill Lynch ad
campaign, "Your World Should Know No Boundaries," was linking
investment with traditional religious images of "God's country."
By the early 1990s, such commercials were common. Savan dubbed them "spiritual
ads" and observed that they "help us to simultaneously see our
shallow, materialistic ways and exorcise them: We can consume the evil of
excess by making every purchase into a prayer."
And yet, Savan pointed out, those ads "clang with the contradiction
between the abundant material life that commercial culture pushes and the
more mystical injunction to shed that abundance in order to focus on what
really matters." The contradiction "is readily resolved by the
ads' `passive spirituality-be impressed by killer sunsets, feel awe from
celestial music-which works right into a consumer kind of spirituality."
During the first years after World War II, sociologist C. Wright Mills saw
the trend coming. He warned that money-driven fixations among elites were
having enormous effects on the entire society - causing people to shape
themselves to fit the "higher immorality" of corporate America
and "the social premiums that prevail."
The process was insidious and did not provoke a sense of public crisis,
Mills wrote in his 1956 book "The Power Elite." He called attention
to "a creeping indifference and a silent hollowing out." And he
commented: "Money is the one unambiguous criterion of success, and
such success is still the sovereign American value. ... It is not only that
men want money; it is that their very standards are pecuniary."
When such standards hold sway, even fame and fortune are not enough. The
dominant concept is always "more."
Maybe you've seen the new TV spot featuring one of the most acclaimed novelists
alive, Kurt Vonnegut, who appears in a commercial for Discover Card. He
talks about buying his own books at a store: "I presume I got a royalty
as well as the bonus from Discover Card."
Must all knees bend in the direction of Dollar Almighty? Of course not.
Despite the intense pressures, plenty of resistance continues. But deeper
values must withstand the assaults from the monetary worship that proliferates
in the mass media every day.
OCT-NOV 97 -- N.C.Xpress
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