I turned on the McLaughlin group, the original – “let’s all yell at the same time because my valuable opinion is better than yours” – news show, just in time to hear Pat Buchanan saying that Barack Obama doesn’t want to offer a solution to the current financial crisis because the crisis is helping his campaign. This is such a non-sequitur, from so many angles, that it’s disheartening to see PBS put on a program where participants, credentialed journalists, resort to irrational rationales to support their substantial and unabashed political bias. Such is the current landscape of commercial (and yes one example of non-commercial) media that in place of hard fact, derived by sound journalism, relatively free of intentional bias and obvious spin, we have come to accept and even enjoy endless media opinion wars where the best slant wins. How did we get to this place?
Perhaps this grows out of politics. As we generally know, the first job of a politician is to convince us, from day one, that they understand the problems at hand and know what to do about them. Rationally, if you look at the fact that many people are elected to sometimes even high public office without substantial experience, understanding, or real ability to do the jobs for which we elect them (beyond talking), then it stands to reason that what we usually are doing is electing them because we don’t really like the last schmuck we elected or the other know-nothing talker, and so hope this one will be better. So our job, the one the constitution gives us, the one we can either do well or poorly, is to take the time to examine the candidates for public office and make a sound decision based on our understanding of their understanding of the issues, and as well, their sincerity, commitment, character, etc.
Many of these aspects of a candidate can be difficult to assess, but especially the first one. This is because we, the voters, have to actually understand the issues well enough to be able to judge whether or not a candidate also does. Since we’re not experts, and the candidates are not experts, we have come, more or less, to rely on the opinion of “experts” to help us know what’s going on. In the case of the current financial (and yes economic) crisis, even the experts are befuddled and so the opinionated talking heads act as intermediaries to the experts (as if they wouldn’t) and add their own spin on top of confusing opinion, and or edit that opinion for us based on their predisposed bias. Walter Cronkite where are you now?
When I was child, back in the hippy sixties, the best journalists of the day, whether in print or on TV, did as little spin, and as much real journalism as was possible to do within the constraints of their respective medium. I suspect, and this is just my opinion here, that the post depression era, post World War Two generation had enough of a sense of truth and integrity that obviously slanted, “yellow” journalism was not only unacceptable to them, they who had scrimped and saved to send their kids through college, and they who had came together as a nation to win a war on multiple fronts (with real personal and collective sacrifices), that such media tactics would have been cause for quickly declining numbers of viewers and readers. Today, we like a good fight, especially in the news, and the more outrageous and opinionated, the better.
The conclusion I have to draw from this is that not only has media changed but that we, those who mostly watch and sometimes read the media, have changed as well.
One of the things I take as a given is that within any society, whether revolutionary America, or Nazi Germany, there is a spectrum of character and integrity in that society and that there will always be some percentage of people, larger or smaller, on either end of that spectrum, but, in general, the average usually resides with those in the middle, that is, everyone else. And so, it is this part of a society that is somewhat malleable to the extremes, and (especially in democratic countries), it is this part of society that largely defines the overall character and integrity of a society. Ghandi or Martin Luther King can sway us one way, or, given enough pressure (either through dis-information or economic hardship), Hitler and Hirohito can sway us another. One of the other things I also take as a given is that without significant constraints and balancing mechanism (separations of powers, as an example within government), some percentage of people always will pursue their own interests up to the point of significantly harming those around them, especially harming those who are more out of sight and or of different station, culture, creed, race or ethnicity. This may all sound a bit cynical, but the revolving doors of human history turn largely on these pivots.
Last night, my son was playing a video game, a nice non-violent one, “Cars”, and I heard his sharp frustration at not being able to win a particular race within that game. I asked him, “how many races have you won in other parts of the game?” He said, “all of them”, whereupon I asked him, “then don’t you think it’s OK if you lose one or two?” Since he’s ten, he didn’t answer.
In the case of present day United States, we as media “consumers” are mostly all, collectively, like ten year olds. We want to win more then we want the truth about anything that is not in line with our own tastes, previous opinions, or self-interest. We are a spoiled nation, and in that way (and I suspect others) we are not the like the generation that came before us. True, those people mostly suffered not by their own doing but at the hands of others – pre-depression era bankers and war-mongering fascist opportunists, but still they learned the lessons that came of that.
One of those lessons is that we are all in this life together and that in order to make things better we have to work together. As a nation, this is not where we have been for the last twenty plus years. Twenty years of ideological media spin has served to make Americans more polarized and divided then ever before. It may just be a coincidence that the stock market is crashing and that people may have to learn to get along more now (if they can), or it may not. The larger point is that pick your flavor of media opinion has made people less informed about the true facts behind events, and it is this obfuscation of fact (lacking real journalism), and the endless interpretations and reinterpretations from it that has divided Americans into armed camps of vastly differing opinions, camps where we can’t even discuss things because we have such divergent sets of underlying “facts” that we end up thinking each other “stupid” instead of examining our own collective stupidity.
The brainless head of that stupidity is the unspoken lessons we’ve learned, not as the “enlightened citizenry” that Thomas Jefferson envisioned (and warned us to be), but as hyper consumers in a material centered, and consumption driven society. This is where, following the abolishment of the media fairness laws (during the Reagan Administration) we now get to choose our flavor of information the way we choose a suit color, and so wear it proudly along with our flag lapel pins. Along with this comes all of the values of misinformation that we’ve grown accustomed to as consumers – promotional hype, advertising spin, mis-information, dis-information, and all other forms of special interest corporate and political propaganda that we’ve come to accept, and even value, in many other areas of American life (out of our own personal self-interest). The last holdout was our beloved, but now forgotten Walter Cronkite, and we are the poorer for our forgetting.
Since this blog is often about economics, and therefore economic policy, a highly specialized and “expert” areas of interest, it bears mention that the new media environment has shaped our views not by educating us with balanced perspectives of differing schools of thought, Friedman versus Kanes, but has, instead, given us only one side – the currently popular conservative side, the winning side, the everything goes because that’s what leads to the biggest trickle down free market side. It’s no wonder that the Republican congressional holdouts to the $700 billion bailout wanted more tax cuts as a cure for the over-speculated, junk-paper economy we’ve constructed. Meantime, the democrats, lacking any more substantial economic insights, pushed for a new deal kind of approach (more correct) but failed to resist the big banker bailout because of the potential political fallout. This is because they know what kind of conservative media spin would go with that – the kind that, given the current taxpayer bile, would hang them out to dry in the coming election.
Are Americans so childish that we believe that we can go on forever borrowing money from the rest of the world to finance our tax cut and spend government, while inept (and economically illiterate) politicians shape policy to suit financial insiders who are robbing us blind? It isn’t childish if your corporate flavor of the week media puts enough spin on it to make it sound like true freedom and democracy.
And yes, we think we know better, because we don’t like the bailout – we knew it was, and is, a pork barrel for billionaires who should take their losses – but we didn’t understand enough about their screwed up banking to talk about alternatives. If we can’t tell the politicians – who had a gun held to their head by the insider George Bush appointed to fix this mess (Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, former head of Goldman-Sachs, claiming the whole economy would collapse without it; and by the whole economy he meant the stock and bond markets that are now collapsing) – what else do we, expressed through our media, expect as a result? And so, lacking any understanding as a better course of action, they (and we by default) committed US to the insane asylum of a former banker giving big money we don’t have, to the same bankers who got us into this mess, all to try and get us out of it. What’s that old definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results
This of course can and is being shaped to fit with the unspoken neo-conservative message that “greed is good, greed (still) works” (by finding creative ways to blame liberals), because almost no one out there in new media land has a clue as to if and what the proper of limits of greed should be, or the ways in which unfettered self-interest set us up for this fall. That concept has been excluded from the discussion for a long time, and has been replaced with the (again mostly unspoken, but heavily implied) message “that you only have to worry about yourself and shouldn’t have to pay taxes for evil big government to give to lazy people.” What’s really missing from the message – the part that’s truly unspoken and truly missing from the discussion – is where do we come together in our common interest, where do we compromise for the sake of each other, and where do we limit the excesses that are built into human nature – and in what ways? At least if we had a common set of facts to form a basis of discussion, maybe we could start to look at those discarded ideas and talk about them openly.
