Yesterday Josh posted this 'news' story from The Onion. It's almost two years old now but it still gets laughs. It got me thinking. Last week I wrote here about the propensity of the media to embellish 'news' to promote consumption and that topic got a lot of play at a house party a few nights later. I think my earlier entry was a little glib but I was making an effort to keep it loose so as not to bore anyone. I thought maybe I should revisit these ideas. Especially when my Canadian friend Suzy wrote and sent a link to the Chronicle Herald out of Halifax that discusses the recent rant among conservative sources regarding President Obama's preference for Dijon mustard.
Apparently Fox's Sean Hannity has been stirring up the controversy along with conservative blogger and Cornell Law School professor William Jacobsen. The problem it seems is that it's too snooty, elitist and yet another example of Obama's pandering to our enemies. Has he forgotten 'freedom fries'? At issue, beyond his predilection for haute cuisine, are attempts by his staffers to cover the whole thing up. Below the link Suzy plaintively asked "please tell me this is a hoax"? Well the Anderson Cooper story is a hoax but 'Dijongate' is the real thing. The problem is the veracity of the one is as improbable as the other and silly as it all seems it calls into question the credibility of 'news' altogether.
Josh, that day, had also posted a quote from Abe Lincoln (I think) saying, "We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read". Today, as then, news headlines are one nightmare after another. One day the recession is taking the world to hell in a handbasket, the next day the signs of recovery are pointing to a hopeful future. The swine pandemic will put us all in an early grave on Monday but by Wednesday things are back to normal. In the midst of this roller coaster of reportage comes Dijongate. So long as our attentiveness to serious issues is destabilized we will lack the tools to form consensus. Without consensus there is tyranny.
Trust me, I'm not picking sides. I don't care if you're a liberal or conservative. I don't wholly buy in to either ideology. The implications have more to do with economics than partisanship. Just to cut to the chase here, my ham-handed interpretation of this situation is this: Capitalism preserves its control through hegemonic culture. Hegemony is achieved by consensus. By determining the means of production of social institutions like the media, the ruling class’s ideology can be propagated to the working class so they may adopt as their own, a “common sense” view of the world as it is and should be. I don't really see that dynamic as a problem since, given the data, people can make the decision to buy in or not. Cultural hegemony is negotiable. Of course it is a problem when you have a bunch of boneheads negotiating but that's a topic for another entry.
So, the ruling class who own the media outlets influence the way the 'news' is disseminated. The 'look' of the newsroom sets, the characteristics of the talking heads, the music, the advertising and every detail of the presentation is carefully designed to make palpable the product. The more alluring the product, the more advertising revenues. McLuhan pointed out that the medium has the potential to affect society as much as the content it delivers. What we have here these days is a failure to communicate. Content is subordinated by the medium. What takes precedence over the message is it's style of delivery. The spectacle, the disaster, the scandal, or the polemic are genres that operate in news broadcasts as in feature films. The actual content is unimportant. You can remove Leonardo and the boat from Titanic and plug in Nicole, some kangaroos and call it Australia. News seems to operate in the same manner these days. Soap must be sold.
The problem is, the content lacks substance and order. Major world news events get short shrift when Britney crashes her car or the president has a hotdog. We can't under those circumstances form any kind of consensus or pose any viable negotiation for hegemony. Obama said it best "What’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial,".
SCORPAIN!
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