Of course, the alternative media complain about being lumped in with the infotainment industry.
I'm going to pull together a few different viewpoints here. The first is Gore speaking about his new book. This is long, and Gore can be a little dry, but it's worth checking out.
Via: VideoSift
The Columbia Journalism Review defends Gore against a recent attempt to paint him as the stiff, boring, elitist politician -- the same thing that was done in 2000.
Compounding his sins, according to Milbank [Washington Post], Gore mentioned too many historical figures: "Imagine the Iowa hog farmer cracking open "Assault on Reason," and meeting Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Lippmann, Johannes Gutenberg, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson and Marshall McLuhan -- all before finishing the introduction." Milbank--who has made a career of skewering pomposity--lets his own elitism get the better of him here; he might be surprised to find out that even an "Iowa hog farmer" might have heard of one or two of these guys. And if they haven't, well, since most people read books to learn stuff, one can assume that they picked up Gore's book for a reason.
The whole article is a brief defense of Gore from the attempts to make him a one-dimensional caricature.
On the other hand, The New York Observer defends television from Gore's attacks.
And so Al Gore blames the messenger—i.e., the media, and first and foremost, the reliably hateful medium of television: “The replacement of an easily accessible, print-based marketplace of ideas with a restricted-access, television-based realm has led to a radical transformation of the nature and operation of the marketplace of ideas in the United States.” He also suggests, leaning on some speculative-sounding research culled from former adman Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, that the act of viewing television contorts the physiology of our brains so that they become soft-pated panic centers: “The physical effects of watching trauma on television—the rise in blood pressure and heart rate—are the same as if an individual has actually experienced the traumatic event directly. Moreover, it has been documented that television can create false memories that are just as powerful as normal memories. When recalled, television-created memories have the same control over the emotional system as do real memories.”Sorry, but no. If this were “actually” the case, as Mr. Gore insists, we would all be severely traumatized by the continually broadcast footage of the World Trade Center attacks. Or permanently scarred by the compulsive broadcast of events such as “the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy ... Anna Nicole Smith’s death, embalming, and funeral plans”—the vacuously ghoulish fare Mr. Gore justly derides as symptomatic of a terminal “strangeness of our public discourse.” TV footage can be harrowing or trivializing; Mr. Gore wants it to be both at once.
There’s another problem with the well-worn claim that TV has lobotomized a once-vigorous, civically engaged citizenry: The country’s “marketplace of ideas” has always featured lots of cut-rate demagogy and lethal propaganda. From the Salem Witch trials down through the anti-Masonic party and the Ku Klux Klan, from the McCarthy era and the War on Drugs to the invasion of Iraq, we Americans have often let ourselves be ruled by spasms of hatred and ignorance while spurning the counsels of reason.
In the end, the review agrees with Gore as far as Bush and Iraq are concerned.
Finally, Lewis Black offers a humorous viewpoint, suggesting that cable news is why Americans have ADD. This is NSFW.
Via: VideoSift
I know I'm relying on you readers to have more familiarity with this topic than I have offered here. So, is it fair to blame the media, as Gore does, for the decline in the American political system? Are the various news sources in this country complicit in the current decline in democratic values?
Unfortunately, on this dial-up I cannot view the YouTube vids you offer [but I will ASAP!], but my answer to you post-ending questions is 'Hell yes the news media is to blame for the degradation of democracy and common sense in our country.'
ReplyDeleteThere are a couple of not-too-recent documentaries I've seen recently, "Why We Fight," and "Orwell Rolls in His Grave" that carry arguments I cannot rebutt.
The news no longer talks about politics, it talks about politicians. We don't try to understand political positions, we play gotcha on unimportant aspects of a campaign. The public is no longer given information, it is told what to think.
The media is the biggest lobbiest in Washington DC, with huge companies, interested in their other businesses, trying to court favor. Truth is sacraficed. EVERYBODY is spinning nowadays.
It is incredible. It is total madness.
Gore, with a nod to Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, has it right. Television, by its nature is a non-discursive medium. As Lewis Black noted, there too much distraction.
ReplyDeletePostman has this great analysis in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death where he compares current political debates to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Back in the mid 19th century, crowds would gather and listen for hours, HOURS, to political opponents debating. Questions from the audience were answered immediately and fully, by both parties. Imagine trying to sustain a seven hour debate today. Its not clear who would collapse first, the debaters or the audience. And forget about getting a sponsor!
The point is that differing modes of communication contain differing biases, and it happens that the constraints of television are biased against intelligent discourse.
I discuss these and other media ecological issues at my own blog "A Model Media Ecologist" which can be found at robertkblechman.blogspot.com
Listening to Gore discuss the book on Book TV, my sense was that he believes WE ALL bear responsibility for what the media reports, (at least in the sense that we elected the folks who have pushed the media in this direction, or given it the monopoly it seems to have), so, if this is still a democracy, when enough of us get sick of what's going on, then we'll kick the bastards out. Enough, though, of trying to pretend it's a problem that others have brought on us. Let's face it. It's US.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteBTW, Gore's book is called "The Assault on Reason." Here's a link to it at Amazon.
ReplyDeleteMark B: Having now listened to the YouTube thing, you're somewhat right; but throwing the bastards out doesn't work. The new bastards get corrupted immediately after they get in the door. We need to go about it all a little differently by orientating ourselves to truth and reason more and sounding the alarm.
I'm ambivalent toward the Lewis Black vid. While he gets to the heart of some important truths, he is also MGMing, using his own twisted distortions.
Gore is right in his gentle laser-of-truth dissection. There aren't conspiracies; it is erosion that comes from a quiet acceptance of spin that ends up everywhere and contaminates everything.