New Journalism and the Wall of Sound

Every now and then technology runs in advance of the general public's ability to catchup. This happened in the 1930's when Hitler (him again) controlled and propagandized the airways, stage managed all his appearances and harangued his people into believing in an entirely artificial world that the majority of the German people could not see their way through. This led to nationalist hysteria and psychosis which had dire consequences for the world. Communist propaganda has been slightly less high tech and slick but, if possible, even more controlled and controlling.

The old logo of the dog with its ears perked up listening to the phonograph over the caption “his master's voice” was eerily predictive of a nation hanging on every word of an unscrupulous leader. A radio voice is compelling because it is disembodied, more respected because it is unseen, as if the voice and the person behind it were connected by invisible wires and airwaves to something higher power, ordained and irrefutable. On radio there are fewer images to clutter the senses so that imagination and psychology are free to affect the listener more directly and subliminally. Lies that if told in person would be unbelievable seem as if they could be real, first as if they might be and then as if they must be, as a person's incredulity is slowly suspended via repetition and turned into belief. New technology may loosen the bonds of reality that normally keep a nation grounded.

Of course in the1930's the same thing happened in this country but to a far lesser degree since the airwaves weren't manipulated and controlled by one source. FDR undoubtedly benefited from radio as he used it to create an aura and persona about himself which made getting public support for his policies easier to accomplish. He may not have been as successful with only the print media, newspapers and magazines, to try to sell his vision of the future as he was with the aid of radio and the new art of news reel footage shown in movie houses.

    These few examples show the possible evil of controlled sources of information in a country particularly when they are attached to or encapsulated in a dynamic new technology. The theory and the magic of the amazing technological advancement tend to merge together and blur reality.  Therefore a vast profusion of simultaneous potential sources of information must be better, right? Not quite.

     Today there is a sensory overload of new sources and technologies confronting the people. From this great Wall of Sound people tend eventually to focus on a few sources of information from the thousands available. And since many of these sources are journalistically suspect or manipulative or just wrong, a profusion of biases and misinformation can result.

      This will and has led to ideological fragmentation where an extraordinary number of conflicting opinions currently exist in our society side by side. Take for one, the myth that Barack Obama wasn't born in the US. This has been easily and widely and thoroughly debunked by any number of legitimate news outlets.Yet it persists like a rash among a vocal few, quite simply because they never bother listening to legitimate news outlets. Some people prefer to be propagandized and preached at and will invariably seek out the information sites that will oblige them.

This is not Walter Cronkite's world. Not too long ago there were just a few national networks which ran legitimate news operations. They would assimilate the vast amounts of news stories available and make news judgments as to which were most important. Then when they were ready and the time was ripe – meaning when the information had been nailed down, when all the sources had been checked, when there was space, they would air a fully crafted, detailed work of journalistic art. At least that was the theory. And to their credit it sometimes actually worked like that.  Newspapers generally operated with the same high standards.

Eventually some rather large mistakes and small oversights emerged with this process, like Vietnam and Civil Rights, that showed that their own biases had contributed to perpetuating a status quo and static view of the world that was less that fully accurate.

But at least there were very few half baked ideas floating around masquerading as truth, because good journalism ruled the roost and political lies that lacked its imprimatur could not paraded forth as news.

So where's the balance to be found today?  It will find itself. Clearly the public is working through and sifting these various news and information sources – cable TV, the internet, print journalism and even the old standby radio –trying to find a white cat of credibility in a huge blizzard of halftruths and nonsense. But so far the public which is only ever half paying attention anyway has shown itself to be more than just a little bit disoriented by all the competing voices. In this profusion of choices clearly myths and prejudices have arisen faster and sustained longer than they should and in almost any other time have been allowed to.

On the other hand,youtube and the internet and the blogs have also ferreted out and exposed many things that in another day would have remained hidden.

As far as the public goes, however, so far, predictably, they have tended to fasten on loudness and frequency and personality among all the bland noise for their sources of news. This has favored groups like Fox News which is loud, garish, opinionated and filled with personalities who are supremely self-assured, consistent and self righteous. This affords a biased argument a decidedly chiseled edge when competing with all the more carefully weighted and nuanced traditional news sources. These always react more slowly, as facts are slower to gather than preheld opinions; they must be more balanced in trying to weigh all these octagonally sided issues; and in this day of cutbacks and change, traditional media is very very insecure and unsure of their own footing in this new information age.

This same profusion of voices also favors traditional propagandists and demogogues like Rush Limbaugh. He has the disembodied voice of other worldly authority going for him that has worked well for his type to entrance the gullible. There is a reason his television show and all his other television appearances have been failures – he is not nearly as convincing when seen as when he is heard. Others are far better on TV and may be quite effective to a willing audience but in fact, lies are easier to detect on camera, where body language and facial expressions may be seen and tapes of previous statements may be played to refute and contrast later ones. It takes a different level of skill or perhaps vacuity to be convincing in this media. Yet some survive to talk on and on no matter how often they are wrong, particularly on a station like Fox because the audience they have to appeal to is, as it were, pre-screened by individual choice to be predisposed to convinced by even the unconvincing.

But before the people are judged too harshly for their occasional gullibility, newspapers and magazines and legitimate news outlets have had a very difficult time catching up to this new technology of this information age and have given them very little help. The Tea Party movement for instance. It took months for regular media to catch up to the fact that it was essentially a fairly small splinter group of the right wing of the republican party. This is because traditional journalists too, to speed up their work and make it easy on themselves, gather more and more of their own information from cable and the internet rather than original sources. They are often as much observers of the news as relaters of it. And at times they have seemed almost as easily swayed as the public is by the new propaganda and the misdirections which they are proliferating.

So when the Tea Party portrayed itself and was echoed by Fox and others as a vast new movement which cut across party and ideological lines and tapped into a massive outcry of anger welling up in the nation at large, the press believed it and more or less reported it that way as if it were true whether they believed it or not. The so-called legit press seemed as surprised as anyone to see how small and refractory and artificially manufactured the movement actually was. It is still of significance and newsworthy to be sure just not in the same way it was originally portrayed.

     Perspective is in fact the very essence of good journalism and it the thing which seems most lacking in news coverage today. To tell a good story from a bad one, the truth from fiction, a trend from a fad and to detect a cover up amid all the hype and spin is exactly what guys like Cronkite prided themselves on and is now a lost and devalued art. Often today's journalists, harried by the quickening pace of news reporting, can be led around by their noses by anyone with the position and skill to do it. Amazingly, they don't even seem to much mind.  The utter lack of journalism in the lead up to the second Iraq War would be a case in point.

     Partly the errors that are allowed to pass as truth today are possible due to the fact that it is easier to erect a scam than it is to unravel one. In this situation charlatans will always have the advantage. But in countless other less defensible ways stories that Walter Cronkite and his colleagues would have not given a second 's worth of valuable airtime his heirs will feature for days on end. Twenty four hour news programs will dote for hours and hours on the most mindless trivia imaginable even as real news stories, which they presumably know about and have the resources to air, are breaking and peaking and dying uncovered all around them,kept well out of public view.

Mainstream journalism is having troubles enough on their own but they are also under a concerted one-sided attack by the right wing.  This attack is entirely manufactured.

Because it is obvious that these refugees from good journalism have a vested interest in criticizing real journalists so their own followers and listeners will not stray or be swayed from the disinformation they peddle. So far real journalists have been too urbane to reply in kind and magnanimously afford an outlet like Fox free reign to attack them, which it does for political reasons as well as to pad their much envied and highly profitable viewership levels.

It is as if ABC came on the air everyday with a full array of deeply embedded overt and implied propaganda attacking the credibility of NBC and CBS merely to steal advertising dollars from them. It's hard to believe the two other networks would sit by idly and just watch.

And yet that is precisely what Fox news does. When bogus doctors promote bad medicine they are properly labeled by the AMA as quacks.  Perhaps like doctors and lawyers and many other professional organizations it is time for this mainstream media to have a Journalistic Board of Standards and Ethics. There should be an independent board which can condemn unethical behavior and praise good practices in the world of journalism.  There needs to be a seal of approval issued which the public can use to distinguish outlets which employ good journalistic techniques from those that are bred for bias and breed propaganda instead of news. 

By this standard Meet the Press would be approved and The O'Reilly Factor wouldn't be.  This wouldn't change anything immediately. But eventually reform might occur which make these outliers have to conform to well known good journalistic techniques, behavior and practices.  Even if they didn't reform at least the public would have guidelines to follow in separating the fiction from the non-fiction.  Even libraries and bookstores do that.

If legitimate news outlets feel constrained from criticizing bad behavior in colleagues perhaps a respected outside board would serve as an objective organization that could. If journalists won't unite to protect their own profession from this discrediting assault who will? At least with the creation of an professional board of standards they might make a pretense of fighting back and of keeping their dignity intact.

There is a reason guys like Limbaugh and political figures like Palin and contributors to Fox speak of the mainstream media with utter disrespect as the“lamestream” media.  Unfortunately the legitimate press tends to earn the appellation when once serious journalists fall all over themselves trying to cover Palin and hang on Limbaugh's every word. To wildly paraphrase Lenin, Murdock might say, “when we come to bury legitimate journalism they will give us unlimited free airtime to do it.”

They exacerbate this by increasingly running their organizations by emulating outfits like Fox. Feeling themselves less popular and successful they actually have begun to only consider themselves successful according to polling numbers and levels of viewership as if that was somehow a measure of excellence.  Of course, it's not and obviously this is no way to run a news shop except into the ground.

By virtue of these bogus standards by which they judge themselves the worst journalism always trumps quality because outlets like Fox have an inbred market share advantage. And even at that by a broader measure Fox still represents a much smaller slice of the larger media market which is divided into a much greater number of participants.

Still legitimate media seem unable to grasp the fact that if they simply ostracized Fox as being unworthy of emulation and instead limited themselves to competing for market share with like-minded, fair minded operators and other legitimate news outlets they would over the long haul be far better off.  Excellence actually will, sooner or later, be rewarded.  Even though no one network would have the resources alone that Fox can command, collectively they would be far stronger competitively and eventually financially.

Meanwhile, rest assured that the public is beginning to catch up with this new information and propaganda technology. One by one, slowly but ever so slowly, some of the worst and most egregiously bad actors and causes are being identified, brought out into the open and discredited. They can never be eradicated completely, of course, because this is a free country and there are too many aiders and abetters.  But eventually the loudest and most egregious operators are beginning to be replaced by the more dependable and more factually correct and coherent.

Because the main problem any news organization or individual is going to have naturally is veracity. Though the ever present desire for truth has been much abused of late it is not lost, it is an eternal goal. The problem that some of the players mentioned in this piece have is that they are so often wrong. Often belligerently so, but wrong nonetheless. Politicized news outlets and blogs and supporters who backed the Bush administration, for instance, had to take a hit to their credibility and slap to their journalistic face as, one by one, its most heavily invested positions turned wrong. Willfully manipulating the news to promote a political course and smear the enemies of that same course which is then discredited by events cannot help but discredit the purveyors and supporters of those policies.

It takes much longer though, for a good news source to become trusted than a bad one to be discredited. Bad journalists can create followers through sensationalism, because good journalism is more about hard work than cheap PR. So though we may be frustrated at how slowly the sifting and winnowing away takes, the false gods of the fabricated news outlets are slowly being separated from the real and enduring legitimate journalism principles they so fear and revile. This is the process currently underway. It would be helped if legitimate news operations did their part better by doing more to separate themselves from these self destructive tactics rather than try to mimic them. 

Truth and hard work will be rewarded and charlatanism destroyed – or at least put back in the box as a marginal force in society - but it takes time. The only solace is that the victory of good journalism, in whatever form good journalism takes in this new media age, is absolutely inevitable. We can only hope that not too much irrevocable harm has been done the body politic in the meantime.