Empires of the Blind

Once, it seemed, the focus of media was education—imparting facts, perhaps with a bit of ideology thrown in. These days, it seems, the media’s favored gaze turns to the mirror. Websites report on TV coverage, magazines report on the Internet and newspapers review television. Put otherwise, what was a well-meaning system of internal self-awareness has grown before our very eyes into the media’s sustained, unilateral conversation with itself.

Even the Nieman Report seems to have noticed. In the Spring 2001 issue, Robert Jensen reviews legendary journalist Arthur Rowse’s latest book, “Drive-By Journalism: The Assault on Your Need to Know.” Rowse, according to Jensen, bemoans the increasingly self-interested behavior of American media, which he sees as paradigmatic of the replacement of “citizen democracy” by “corporate democracy.” Nonetheless, Rowse’s proposed societal reforms all center on the media itself. “When it comes to running the country,” Jensen quotes him as saying, “there’s no power higher than the media.”

Here, Jensen and Rowse part ways. “Rowse’s prescription for improving the health of our political system primarily through media reform misses the point,” Jensen argues. “Media reform is crucial, but it has to be part of a larger social movement that addresses illegitimate structures of authority and unjust concentrations of power throughout the society, in private and public arenas.” Jensen worries that Rowse puts too much faith in journalism as both a concept and an institution.

A former journalist criticizes a practicing one, in a magazine devoted to journalism, for the latter’s “too media-centric” solution to an original diagnosis of media’s progressive solipsism, and is quoted doing so by an opinion columnist in a college newspaper. The mind boggles.

But the point is larger than this. Rowse’s media reforms may not solve all of society’s problems, but it’s clear that they could be a crucial first step. Information is fundamental to a working democracy, and that information must come as dialogue, debate and science—not mandated law. Without reliable media coverage, we can hardly claim to know what the other problems of democracy actually are. A solipsistic media—no matter how accurate—cannot claim to give its constituents working knowledge.

This self-referential gaze of the news camera has not escaped theory unnoticed. Walter Benjamin warned in 1937 that the aestheticization of politics would lead directly to war, and proposed a counter-strategy of politicizing aesthetics. But the mechanical reproducibility of which Benjamin wrote did not consist solely of such Lacanian moments-in-the-mirror as showing the masses a videotape of themselves. He was concerned more broadly that “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” The image, reproduced ad nauseum, need no longer be encountered in context; it can meet the viewer, appropriately sanitized, on the viewer’s own terms.

Likewise, when we are given facts stripped of their real-world context and replaced with an unverifiable media context, believability—and more importantly, democratic action—becomes nearly impossible. Deep in a discussion of film, Benjamin will note that the pre-recorded movie—as opposed to the live stage performance “permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor.” More importantly, it allows us to avoid becoming actors ourselves altogether.

Such practices give full weight to the notion of media as institution. As judgment is passed from a standpoint as removed from experience as it is mediated by, well, media, one worries that much cannot be seen in the mirror. The quotidian fabric of facts which is the foundation not simply for media’s actual operation but of its very claim to authority is one such. How plebian these foundational questions seem; how ordinary! Yet it is very dangerous when an institution becomes sufficiently myopic that its own cryptic doings and intricate rituals are allowed to obscure the realities which make it possible. In such cases one turns to the full range of the term “media coverage.”

When Churchill told our predecessors (on the occasion of the awarding of his honorary degree in September 1943) that the “empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” the prophetic tone was clear. But the possible danger is also obvious. Access to information and knowledge—and, more importantly, dialogue—is necessary for the possibility of democracy. If we are to act as citizens, we must be able not simply to speak but to be heard and reply as well.

By focusing on itself the media has created an elite world in which it can self-referentially debate without ever acknowledging the possibility of other voices. If newsworthiness is discussed to the exclusion of those researched facts we once called news, that rocky slope of basic oversight—and of the media’s spurious megalomania—draws ever near. But who, en route, will fault a little gazing in the mirror? In these spectacular times, image is everything.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris ’01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.