Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [73]
Truth and news are not the same, as James W. Carey wrote. News is a signal that something is happening. It provides, in Carey’s words, “degenerate photographs or a pseudo-reality of stereotypes. News can approximate truth only when reality is reducible to a statistical table: sports scores, stock exchange reports, births, deaths, marriages, accidents, court decisions, elections, economic transactions such as foreign trade and balance of payments.”22
“The divorce of truth from discourse and action—the instrumentalization of communication—has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda,” Carey wrote. It has also “disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is destroyed.”23
Journalists, however, unlike academics, have to intersect with the public. They write and speak to be understood. And for this reason they are more powerful and more closely monitored and controlled than other writers and speakers. The commercial media, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, are essential tools for conformity. They impart to the public a sense of self. Media tell members of the public who they are. They tell them what their aspirations should be. They promise to help them achieve these aspirations. They offer a variety of techniques, advice, and schemes that promise eventual success.
The commercial media, as Wright notes, also help citizens feel as if they are successful and have met these aspirations, even if they have not. They tend to neglect reality (they don’t run stories about how life is hard, fame and fortune elusive, hopes disappointed) and instead celebrate idealized identities—those that, in a commodity culture, revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame, and power, or at least the illusion of these things. The media, in other words, assist the commercial culture in “need creation,” prompting consumers to want things they don’t need or have never really considered wanting. And catering to these needs, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, is a very profitable business. A major part of the commercial media revolves around selling consumers images and techniques to “actualize” themselves, or offering seductive forms of escape through entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but actual news is not the predominant concern of the commercial media.
Pick up any daily newspaper. At most, fifteen percent of the content in its pages is devoted to news. The rest is devoted to ways to feel or become a success. “This,” Mills wrote, “is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain.” 24
Those who work inside commercial media outlets are acutely aware of the manipulation, even as the media publicly laud themselves for courage, honesty, and independence. This does not mean there is never any good journalism, just as the corruption within the academy does not preclude good scholarship. It means that myriad internal pressures, hidden from public view but faced every day by workers in the media world, make the production of good journalism and good scholarship very difficult. Reporters who persist in raising inconvenient questions, like academics who practice moral and independent scholarship, do not usually advance within liberal institutions.
“I’d written an article about Colgate-Palmolive having gone through a process to rebrand a type of toothpaste that they had bought in Asia that was named Darkie,” remembered former New York Times reporter Doug McGill, who