WHERE'S THE BEEF?
12 November 2003

When did journalism become an attempt to gauge the palate of the reader? When did newspapers and broadcasters begin using "readability" and "watchability" as keystones in the arc of their reporting? Even a few short years ago, we saw a routine push for more reasonable behavior, whenever there was criticism of, say, the president. But POTUS then was being accused of sexual indiscretions, and of experiencing shame and embarrassment at the revelation of those indiscretions. That's watchable; that's readable; that's the stuff that cable programming is made on. So, it was broadcast and printed, ad nauseum. A criminal probe revolved around whether or not he had lied under oath. That was examined in far less detail, though the historical significance was far greater, even at the level of the connotation of the word "is".

Now, however, our President is being accused of misrepresenting misinterpreted intelligence, an interpretation in turn of usually scant evidence, and of relaying dubious claims about exotic dangers, for partisan gain. He's being accused of coziness with corporate criminals and of using public time and public funding to engineer pro-business task forces that work against the public interest. Accordingly, the newsrooms appear to assume that nobody wants to know the details of what goes on behind these particular closed doors. Men in suits, not adorned by young women in various states of undress, are boring, and so a scandal involving men in suits meeting with other men in suits, talking about whether or not other similar men in suits should be allowed to join the conversation, are not of interest to the infotainment media. Such stuffy boardroom intrigues do not a romance novel make. One gets the impression that if the headlines can't be printed in bulging gold-embossed script, they won't be headlines, and that's that!

So it seems. But is everything as it seems? Is it ever?

Maybe these newsies have a point; maybe this stuff isn't news at all, because it looks as if it won't be news. Maybe the beef of today's reporting is in the assumptions, not the content: the key assumption is that no reasonable pundit (made healthfully cynical by a cursory reading of Machiavelli) can justify a prediction that this Attorney General will investigate this President, much less permit someone else to. And so, there's no scoop, no thread to follow, no future to cast one's nets into, and so no audience to garner from coverage. This commercial recourse to the old claim of realpolitik just might carry some meaning in its distended midsection: if it's not going to happen, then it can't be news. But what if that's the news: that it's not going to happen?

Shouldn't serious crimes against the national security community (like the alleged leaking of a secret agent's name, to further a campaign of revenge and intimidation) be prosecuted? Shouldn't they be the focus of the most rhetorically securitarian administration of recent times? But the tenor of the mainstream media seems to be a collective So what? We don't think the People will care, and therefore neither will we. But the fact is, there's a story there, an unresolved, unrelenting if well-hidden series of facts, and the Executive branch has the tools to discover who did what, and why, and who knew.

Does the press have so much freedom that it can choose to shirk its primary function: that of holding to account those individuals placed in public office by the will of the People? Are we now swamped by a media morass which views every possible audience as a minimally varied collection of infantile hedonists, unable to think beyond the most candied pith? The Nation points out, in a subtitle to the article "Who's Afraid of Dennis Kucinich" in its October 27, 2003, issue, that "The press seems to think Kucinich isn't serious precisely because he's serious." There is a crisis of news programming, a deficiency in journalistic choices, which seems to stem from this assumption that thought and media must be only minimally intertwined.

The Kucinich campaign is calling for policy changes which are rooted in the promise of the Constitution, but which require some knowledge of complicated social trends and statistics, if one is to truly understand their necessity. Beneath the surface, this is the case with most campaigns, and one can argue the fine points, argue the methods and the ideology, but the imbalance between flash and substance is the root of media impertinence and the reason that money has such a large influence over political campaigns. The specific modus operandi which employs thoughtful, careful study, planning and a rhetoric respectful of the voters' intellect, is often downgraded by a sweeping media sense of irony which elevates the playful, the cliché and the plastic, above the substantial, the precise and the useful.

The energy assigned at present to coverage of the 2004 election is gaining momentum. One might even admire the restraint of editors in not waving one flag or another too bravely, too early, but there is a deeper, less obvious restraint: today's media does not probe sufficiently the issue of its own capacity for truth-telling. In many cases, we are offered only quotes and the relay of press-releases, instead of reporting which is the product of thorough research and erudite, informed analysis. That kind of restraint hinders the ability of the media to relay actual truth or to portray fact in an authentic and relevant light.

In the final analysis, it must be said that all artifice is artificial, and so all media are vulnerable to distraction, and to misrepresentation both of fact and of circumstance. Anything assembled or invented, conveyed through media of any kind, is a synthetic entity, and so survives by a breath of pretense and consent. The question that should be asked is whether our media culture has become hyper-synthetic, more interested in its own artifice than in the meaning it is capable of conveying.

The answer to such a question says a great deal about the audience, the public, this We the People that we would like to be. It says that too often we wage a de facto boycott against the brilliant, in favor of teh half-baked; that too often we set aside the necessary and tend to the superficial; that too often we are exhausted by our world before we even set our contemplative gaze on it.

The media have subsumed the question of the President's electoral legitimacy (a major issue for millions of Americans and a sticking point in global public opinion) in a flurry of details about his intentions, his quirks and his "approval ratings". But might all this simply be the marketplace well at work, in its most democratic way, as media executives proudly proclaim?

There are questions of legitimacy, and of authenticity, throughout the fabric of our daily lives, embedded in each small decision or inkling of opinion. It is often said that students should not be embarrassed to ask questions, to reveal their uncertainties, that there are no stupid questions. The lesson is not that every question is worth the time, but rather that everything matters. In a broad sense, every detail of social interaction reverberates in every other detail. This is the logic of the marketplace as model and of the press as agent and barometer of a free people. It is for this reason, with an understanding of the social ramifications of every small conceptual activity of the human intellect, that our press enjoys such a prominent role in the defense of our liberties. But the necessary freedom of the press means that method cannot be legislated, that there can be no specific control on the angle or the content of coverage.

This is a good thing, because it honors and protects the rights of individuals to judge for themselves what to think about the "official story" as published by the major news sources. The difficulty arises when fact and circumstance converge to create an incentive for media distraction or for deliberately vague reporting. The effect of such a market climate can be that the quality of information being delivered directly to the public can deteriorate significantly. There is no recourse for this phenomenon, other than in the very choice of one's media sources. By opting for sources which continually eschew vital journalistic endeavors in exchange for fluff, gossip and uninformed banter, we heighten the likelihood that a larger percentage of our media sources will adopt such a style. When this occurs, we find ourselves lacking a large amount of information which is vital for the full and informed exercise of our individual privileges as citizens.

Whether reading about the election, about film, about rampant partisanship or the importance of a new scooter, remember to ask Where's the beef? and What does this writing do for me? Everything matters. [s]