If you want to understand the Presidential Election of 2020, you really ought to read a book published in 2008. James Bowman, Media Madness The Corruption of Our Political Culture.
(Bowman writes a monthly column on the media for the New Criterion, which is also always well worth reading.)
The thesis is in the title: The Media are Mad, not angry mad, but the type of madness that produces “the real arrogance of assuming that no other belief is possible without the assumption of the believer’s lunacy, imbecility, viciousness, corruption, or some combination of all four to explain it.”
Start with the myth of objectivity: “You speak, as it were, from no point of view….In other words, you speak with the voice of God. To believe this is the very essence of media madness, and it is to eliminate the need for fairness. It is only when bias is acknowledged that fairness becomes a consideration.”
Add to that the Culture of Emotionalism, which puts feelings at the center of attention. “The perfection of the passio-centric universe is our celebrity culture, so it is not surprising that the media’s coverage of everything more and more tends to resemble their coverage of celebrities.”
Remember: this was written in 2008.
Move on to the manufacturing of reality: “You might almost say that reality, as the media-mad are accustomed to using the term, can be defined as what the administration does not (officially, at any rate) believe. Therefore, when the media say that the administration…is out of touch with reality, it is a tautology. This is to say that by the terms under which the media culture has become established, it is the administration’s job to be out of touch with reality just as it is the media’s job to point the fact out to us.”
It just gets better from there. Once we have established the nature of the media’s madness, what follows all fits into a whole. Why the obsession with scandal? “The media’s assumption that it is the job of government to hide things and their job to find them out thus allows them to cooperate in the charade by which even those things supposedly creditable to the government are hidden from the public so that the media can triumphantly expose them to the world like a magician displaying the rabbit or the quarter or the hard-boiled egg that he himself has hidden. Scandal and hype therefore become much more than any individual case of wrongdoing or the hyperbole with which it is blown out of proportion. They become a way of media life.”
The same with the endless obsession with finding the root causes and the use of celebrities as experts. It is all just a part of this bizarre self-made world in which members of the media know the truth and there is no possibility that a rational, thoughtful person disagrees with that truth. In that world, the job of the media is no longer to report or analyze or whatever. The job of the media is to endlessly preen.
And that is undoubtedly part of the reason why over the years I lost interest in The News. I can no longer stand TV news. My wife still occasionally watches it, and I sometimes make it for a whole 5 minutes before wandering off to TV-less parts of the house. It is also why I no longer care about the immediate News Cycle—it is amazing how much of what is reported as “news” is totally irrelevant two days after the fact. If it doesn’t matter in 48 hours, did it ever really matter? In that case, why did it get so much attention at the time?
What does the future hold for the media? If you like calm, reasoned debate between people who disagree but still respect one another, then it is not going to be pretty. FOX and MSNBC are the future of News. Pick your view and then pick your media outlets which will dutifully confirm your view.
Media Madness is no longer a unique thing—we’ll just have to start calling it Human Madness.
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