Long-time New Criterion media critic, TAS
movie reviewer, and culture maven James Bowman has at last followed
up Honor, A History, his seminally brilliant,
epically cartographic exploration of the concept of honor and how
its ghost haunts our post-honor society, with a slim yet endlessly
engaging volume on perhaps the most ostentatious offshoots of that
declining society: the modern mass media. The book, part of
Encounter
Books’ wonderful “Brief Encounters” series, is entitled
Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political
Culture. Bowman was kind enough to submit recently to a
TAS interrogation.
TAS: For those who have yet to read the
book, give us a thumbnail sketch of what constitutes “media
madness.”
James Bowman: The kernel — or “nut-graph” to
employ journalistic jargon — of the book is the contention that
the problem with the media culture is not bias, since we all have
that, but the astonishingly arrogant belief, implicit in much of
what they do even when not a point made explicitly, that the media
are composed of a sort of cognoscenti or illuminati of the only
people in the world who are not biased. All else flows
from that — their privileged status over the rest of us
non-“professionals” is what allows them to look down, as if from a
great height, on mere “partisans” who can’t see as far as
“objective” journalists like themselves. It is what excuses their
sensationalism and their foolish preoccupation with feelings and
their worship of celebrity. It is what ultimately lies behind their
over-valuation of intelligence and their contempt for those they
regard as less intelligent than themselves. And that, in turn, is
what motivates their attempt to moralize political differences and
so to represent any opinion other than their own as not only wrong
or mistaken but indecent and illegitimate. So this is also what
produces the well-known phenomenon of political correctness.
TAS: The “myths,” you write, “of
objectivity and professionalism (in journalism), came into
existence for commercial reasons.” Establish authority and reap the
profits, essentially. Does this at least partially account for the
non-stop PR campaign journalists constantly wage on behalf of
themselves to prove they are on a crusade for the little guy rather
than cogs in a corporate machine?
JB: Sure. But there is also their own sense of
amour propre. They are an elite, a clerical class who are
entitled to have opinions in a way that other people aren’t. Don’t
underestimate the power of their vanity or the culture’s rewards
for what represents itself as superior brainpower to keep this
going long after there ceases to be much money in it.
TAS: What are some of the other
consequences of accepting that myth of objectivity?
JB: I think it is a mistake to speak of the lie
as “accepted.” It is often asserted, but that doesn’t necessarily
mean that it is accepted except in the most superficial sense.
“Objective” is a sort of password a certain privileged class of
reporters and commentators use to gain entrance into their own
self-defined and -limited club. And if you want to gain entrance to
that club, you have to use the password. It is less clear how it
works on those who aren’t in the club. Some, no doubt, accept it —
perhaps because they aspire to membership themselves. It is not
without its prestige, you know. But I suspect that beyond its
members and aspirational members there are not many who really do
accept it. Of course, within the club it skews the perspective of
those who actually believe in their own objectivity. But then you
have to answer the question: Do the club members themselves
actually believe it, or are they just using it as the not-so-secret
code that gains them the membership they covet and therefore a
proprietary right in “the truth” or what they are pleased to call
“reality”? In any case, they don’t have to think about it much once
they are admitted to the club. From that point on they can just
take it for granted that what they think is more likely to be the
truth than what non-journalists think.
TAS: Speaking of establishing authority,
you argue, “The cheapest and easiest way to appear intelligent is
to claim to be the possessor of knowledge that is not obvious and
so is beyond the capacity of those ordinary folks who judge things
by appearances.” Thus, for example, “the only thing the [Iraq] war
couldn’t be is what the administration says it is.” Are we becoming
a nation of conspiracy theorists? Or, worse, a nation that is being
trained to think being well informed means eschewing the
obvious?
JB: Well, yes, I rather think we are
becoming a nation of conspiracy theorists — except that the “we”
is those of us in the chattering classes most susceptible to the
virus of Media Madness. In other words we are, as John Edwards
pointed out, two nations. Only they are not the rich and the poor.
Or not just the rich and the poor. For the rich, now, mostly belong
to the nation of the media mad and the poor mostly belong to those
either so out of touch with the mainstream or so stubbornly
grounded in old-fashioned common sense that they don’t buy the
intellectuals’ version of reality that is so attractive to the
upwardly mobile — and, indeed, a way to get ahead, not just in the
media but in life to some extent. In other words, what started us
down this path is the meritocracy that has come to dominate
American life in the last 60 years. If we honor intelligence above
all other qualities, then the culture will have to provide us more
and more opportunities to identify the intelligent and to
discriminate in favor of them. Obviously, those who can claim to
know what others don’t know, or only suspect, have a huge advantage
in playing that game.
TAS: Is media, then, not religion, the true
opiate of the masses?
JB: Yes, and for the same reason Marx thought
religion was: that the media encourage us to live in their fantasy
world rather than the world as it is. If we buy into the
intellectuals’ version of reality because it is more chic and an
upmarket brand for us, we are also buying into what underlies it,
which is the utopian belief that somewhere, even if no one has
discovered it yet, there is a Perfect Plan by which the world can
be organized so as to obviate most if not all the bad things that
happen to us: war, poverty, disease, etc. Some brainiac somewhere
is going to figure these things out — maybe already has, as some
of the more devoted Obamaniacs seem to want to say — and when he
does, we will worship him.
TAS: So is media madness a symptom of this
cultural ill, a cause, or are we dealing with a symbiotic
relationship here?
JB: Clearly, I think, it works both ways.
Respect for authority collapses with the collapse of the honor
culture, but the honor culture is brought down partly because it is
— or was when it still existed — an impediment to the media’s
natural impulse to publicize everything, or everything that there
might be public curiosity about….In fact there is no “outside” of
the media culture anymore. Everything is considered public property
when the media require it to be, and ordinary people have by now
just naturally come to assume that this is how it has to be. It
never occurs to anybody, it seems, momentarily caught up in some
public event, to say when the media rush up with their note pads and microphones,
“It’s none of your damn business.”
It’s obviously in their interest to be the arbiters of
everything, and the rest of us seem to have bought their argument.
That wouldn’t have happened if we still had an honor culture, but
we don’t have an honor culture partly, maybe even mostly, because
the media can now use the advantage they have gained as national
arbiters to ridicule the very idea, or else to associate it with
some bad thing like Nazism or the primitive honor cultures of the
Middle East, at every opportunity.
TAS: Do you think mainstream newspapers
would have a better shot at surviving in the new media age if any
of the authority you describe had remained?
JB: It’s an interesting question. I like the
poetic justice of the idea that it is their own reductivism about
cultural institutions which has ultimately brought down their
position as a cultural institution. But it’s pretty hard to
imagine, today, any “mainstream newspaper” that wasn’t a full
partaker in the media madness of our times. As I mention in the
book, the New York Times devoted as much coverage to the
death of Anna Nicole Smith as People or the National
Enquirer. In any case, if a newspaper tried to stand aloof
from the madness, it wouldn’t be a mainstream newspaper
anymore.
TAS: Why does the media seek to
endlessly uncover blame in public service even while fetishizing
celebrity culture?
JB: They are two sides of the same coin, two
aspects of the same process, which is the moralization of politics.
First, you take as many as you can of genuinely political
differences — that is, those which men of honor will disagree
about — and you convert them to moral matters. Oops! There is no
legitimate difference after all. There’s a right and a wrong, and
you know which side you’d better be on if you want to win the
approval of the moralizers, who are the leading lights of the media
and celebrity culture. They have already had great success in
moralizing Global Warming and other environmental issues and, at
least within the penumbra of the media culture itself which is
casting its shade ever wider over the political spectrum, there are
many more issues including the war on terror and the war in Iraq,
government-run health care, government bailouts of the improvident
and a few other matters, where debate is essentially closed.
The celebrity part of the equation comes into it because there
is a huge celebrity demand for supposedly non-controversial moral
issues that they can campaign about and so give themselves a
pseudo-heroic gravitas. The symbiosis with the media comes because
they can then cover the celebrities’ political campaigns — like Al
Gore’s Live Earth extravaganza last summer — in order to sell more
papers and advertising time, so that increases the incentive for
them to moralize what is inherently political and therefore not
moral. Celebrities, of course, love this, because it allows them to
pose as
crusaders against the forces of darkness — which is what leads
Madonna in her latest concert tour to associate John McCain with
Hitler and Robert Mugabe. Once, people who depend on other people’s
paying money to come to see them would have been more chary about
such things, but now they seem to be able to count on the public’s
giving them a pass. Oh, that’s just what rock stars do.
Having those sorts of infantile political views goes with the
job-description.
TAS: Is there any particular topic you plan
to turn your critical eye on next?
JB: Just as Media Madness follows on
from Honor, A History so, I think, the next book will
follow on from it. I want to take off from the last chapter on
moralizing politics and look into the utopian assumptions in our
popular culture that make it possible. No one has yet pointed out,
I think, the extent to which — for example — we base our
discussions of foreign and defense policy on essentially pacifist
assumptions, or our economic decision-making on the assumption that
it is the government’s function to make sure that everyone is
happy. But this kind of assuming extends far beyond the political
culture to affect our outlook on health and safety — because no
one should ever die — or sex — because (in the words of an
impotence clinic that advertises on the radio) “everyone has a
right to a healthy sex life” — or popular entertainment — which
is increasingly dominated by utopian fantasies of one sort or
another. As usual, everything comes back to honor: once the honor
culture has decayed, something has to take its place, and we find
that this is both the media-celebrity complex and a utopian
politics and foreign policy.
TAS: You end the book: “We must simply hope
that, happy in our media niches, we won’t find that we have taken
our media madness with us.” You’re a regular in the niche media
world. How hopeful are you?
JB: Not very. I’m particularly disappointed
that the relative anonymity of the blogosphere seems to have
produced a level of incivility and hyperbole and vitriol that even
the media would be ashamed of.
