What makes Sammy (and Tweety and Howie) run?
Tue Apr 15, 2008 at 04:01:30 PM PDT
The newspapers and the mags and rags and television shows take up a caricature, and digest its gruesome exaggerations. Then they regurgitate them to us--as a mother penguin to her chicks--as fact, whose sour effect can be argued, but not their correctness.
And we groan. Why is so much of the "news" the reporter’s opinion of how the public’s opinion, as abstracted by the reporter, will be affected by the abstracted collective opinion of reporters? "What do you think, Howard, about what is being thought about what we think people might be thinking?"
The news has abandoned the world out there, the world that comes to us through observation. The news is left only with what is in the "newspeople's" heads: opinions and judgments, and opinions and judgments about opinions and judgments. But there is no there, there, no longer any object in the world presented as foundation for the opinion.
What happened?
How does a reporter’s perception of a candidate’s perceived slight to some abstract group qualify as news, when the candidate’s stated positions do not?
Well, remember this. These reporters? They all want to be commentators, more than anything. Commentators, not reporters. And why? Because that’s where the money is.
And you know, people who think money will do everything will often do anything to get it.
Reporters know that the big money people in news have not gained nor do they keep their positions by being foolishly devoted to anything but their own advancement. And they know, too, that advancement depends on how well the floor wax sells, or the computers, or the laxatives, the products which interrupt the "news" six times an hour. And selling means entertainment.
And in news, entertainment means gossip.
The successful American gossip must possess the sanctimonious certainty of the guardian of the Great Middle, that comfortable paregoric narrative region of North America in which virtuous sedative assumptions lay striving to rest, so we can all live contented alongside Lennie and his rabbits.
These great highly paid gossips possess a fine Puritan grace: the quality of never being wrong. It is, in fact, impious to think otherwise, for God has crowned their good from sea to shining sea, as witnessed by their large salaries and by effortless confidence with which they enforce the ghastly notion that ideals are so banal as to be attainable.
It is frightening, sometimes, to watch people whispering to one another over amplified microphones the latest, the hottest rumors. It is chilling to view people who have never permitted themselves to entertain a single humble virtue—except where humility could serve to advertise their virtue in circumstances where having been seen to possess virtue might be advantageous.
But entertainment is, after all, frightening. It is chilling.
Does anyone believe that if the news could present the story of contestants on "Survivor" being killed, it would not bring the highest ratings ever? Does anyone believe if it was discovered that the producers of "Survivor" had arranged for those killings to gain ratings, that the story would get even higher ratings? And so on, and on, and on?
What has happened? A Ponzi scheme of news, like the Ponzi scheme of derivatives and collateralized debt obligations that fueled then collapsed the credit markets. Ratings built on the ratings that were built on ratings invented by those who profited by the ratings.
Don’t look for it to change, until someone figures out how to make a buck selling ratings short. Or until we all decide we have important work to do, and this is just distracting us from it.
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