- Seven Deadly Stupidities
- Posts
- Trusting the Media
Trusting the Media
The media is the right arm of anarchy. – Dan Brown
This is the introduction to our posts on Trusting the Media, one of the the Seven Deadly Stupidities
Daniel Boorstin was the author of The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. A pseudo- event is a man-made construct. Boorstin coined the term for things like “grand openings” and “press conferences.” News was meant to be reported, why create an event (or more properly, a pseudo-event) by inviting people to a hotel conference room, offering food and drink, and engaging in discussion about the “news” being released?
Boorstin had another killer concept in The Image: We have evolved from a society that admired people for their accomplishments (eg, explorers and scientists) to one that admires people simply because they are well-known (eg, a celebrity). He coined the term “well-knownness.” For the most part, celebrities are known for their well-knownness, not for achievements or contributions to society.
From The Image:
"We can fabricate fame, we can at will (though usually at considerable expense) make a man or a woman well known; but we cannot make him or her great. In a now almost forgotten sense, all heroes are self made…
The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name…
Boorstin wrote this more than 60 years ago.
Almost everything Boorstin has to say in The Image is applicable to today’s world of celebrity-journalists and the way determining the truth is so distorted. We live in a world in which a TMZ reporter telling us about what a television personality was wearing in the airport earns more than the heart surgeon who literally holds life in her hands every day.
The Kardashians are famously famous – as many have quipped -- for being famous.
Over the last few decades, the news media have morphed into entertainment companies, and the entertainment they sell is conflict and confrontation. Those who own or control the media are on a full-time quest to push their own interests or, obviously, push for ratings. The facts and the truth are important, but not central to these goals.
Sometimes reporting incorrect information (usually sensational) keeps a story alive when the reporter or journalist gets to do a mea culpa and make herself part of the story.
The reporter remaining objective and staying out of the story once was one of the guiding principles of journalism. Not anymore. In the 1970s, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson introduced the world to “new journalism,” originally a fringe movement that placed the writer in the middle of the story and made it, ultimately, about him or her. That kind of reporting has since become the norm, and the “celebrity-journalist” is a new and growing category. They get the ratings and the big paychecks for creating controversy, stirring things up, and distorting the view of the truth. It is almost impossible to distinguish between entertainment and news today.
A few stats from Louis Menand in the New Yorker sum up the problem:
Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, seventy-two per cent of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, the figure is thirty-four per cent. Among Republicans, it’s fourteen per cent. Menand New Yorker
See all posts on Trusting the Media.
Reply