On The State of Media: 2008

What follows is the first in a series of attempts to transcribe in, real time, the institutions that dominate civil (and uncivil) society in the United States, in the first half of 2008. The breeze of history, it seems, has begun to stir again, as one political and social front displaces another, and so the recording must begin in earnest.


"2008 wants open-source art."


A bold statement, perhaps. And yet despite the high-minded academic attitude those of us who grew up before the internet was an afterthought (the "I still like a real newspaper" crew), in 2008 the printed word is becoming obsolete. The newspaper business, once in the most powerful position in private-sector American, is on the ropes, choking to death on slack circulation, decreasing readership, and lackluster advertising revenue. In 2008, as private liquidity deteriorates, many of the major conglomerates will find it increasingly hard to prosper in a rapidly changing market. The current stirrings at CBS, the recent News Corp. takeover, and the long-standing massacre of local radio will all continue to suffer as time marches by. You can bank on it, because everyone under the age of 15 is already better at the internet than you. You probably didn't even know it was a competition.

2008 wants open source art. Imagine what 2018 might want! To even describe the state of the media reveals how much it has changed; we must begin by redefining the term itself. No longer the static, printed, painted word; media has become an inclusive, organic, dynamic word. Media now lives up to its broadest sense: "the production of intellectual capital," or "the tangible expression of thought or feeling," or maybe even "the cultivation of human impulse." Those are now the only rules. Newspapers, magazines, television - are trying to adjust to this shift in audience personality, and trying hard. Live commenting on online editions, featured blogs like NYTimes' DotEarth and The Lede , and mini-slide show integration are only a few of the examples. These techniques are useful and entertaining, and provide excellent information. Most of them are simple and appear cleanly on the page providing ease-of-operation and a continuous aesthetic. But their success is also their failure. It's not as though readership has demanded more information from the newspaper because they can't find it themselves; in fact, the attitude is reversed. Readers demand information because they already have it. In other words, the NY Times finds itself competing with every local blogger on the internet - and with the exception of precious few stories, rarely reporting information the little guy can't.

What's more, the blogosphere and other new media outlets like YouTube, Flikr, and even Facebook now provide instant access to a thousand perspectives, not just a single account. Unlike the 20th century, 2008 has taken back the monopoly on truth. The claim to be made for newspapers, radio, and to a lesser extent, broadcast television, is that they still bear the burden of reporting only the News, capital N - that professional, unbiased, objective reporting we love to think of as a true American icon. 2008 has said both "good night" and "good luck" to that sort of thing, and instead of a single boiled down truth Americans are choosing the human mosaic instead, a digital rendering of our cultural promiscuity splattered across the internet. In the world of webcams, video phones, and the ubiquitous blog, the universality of the newspaper, once its claim to fame, becomes conformity in the minds of a multi-media, user-driven generation.

We have 3G cell phones, full featured iPhones, and a new Google interface that is likely to shift the mobile information market another 90 degrees or so. We have bandwidth auctions, the conversion to all-digital broadcast, and the are on the cusp of blanket wireless internet access. In twenty years, it is likely that every kid in the world will have instant, handheld access to the exact same information at the exact same time. Globalization has its failures, but this exponential expansion of opportunities for human-to-human contact is certainly not one of them.

The traditional media in 2008 is alive, if not well. Newspapers and radio are adjusting, slowly, but the outlook is grim. How does an American-based NYTimes compete with a global Yahoo! News? How does an independent radio station compete with internet streams, Aires, and Pandora? How does TV and film keep up with iTunes? How do small NPR stations compete with free podcasts? How does Playboy compete with YouPorn? Only time will tell, but you can be sure that tomorrow's kids won't want last second's news, let alone yesterday's paper.

The New Democracy: Government on the People, at the Cost of the People.

Get out the champagne, crack that bottle you've been holding on to, smoke that secret stash you've been saving. I figured it out. I figured out how to fix Iraq.

1). Invade the country for no reason, with no evidence, and with a wafer-thin authorization from Congress.

2). Create a Public Relations campaign the likes of which America has never seen; a propaganda circus that includes fake news, embedded censorship, and an unrelenting assault of false statements.

3). Proclaim a premature victory to rouse nationalism against the barbarians.

4). Send a whole bunch of able-bodied American men to be killed. (But try to take the poor, the brown, the uneducated, marginalized. We never liked the fuckers anyways.)

5) Award billions of dollars of military contracts to your buddies. Cuz fuck 'em, why not?

6). Try to institute a democratic, power-sharing government in a country that has never seen power-sharing, democracy, or government. Oh, and we destroyed the entire infrastructure. No more moads, policing, sewers, drinking water, airports, banking. Our bad. But hey, more contracts for your buddies.

7). When the American people find out what's going on, silence the dissenters. If the war is good against evil, only the hippies will pick evil. And remember, God Loves the Patriot Act.

8). Build a wall in the middle of Baghdad to separate the two sides. We know building walls to separate people works really well. Just look at Germany, Palestine, and Northern Ireland.

9). Fight to the death to keep the troops in Iraq, to the point of absurdity. 3,000 are already dead, what's another 500? Americans won't remember in five years anyways, right?

10). Get the hell out of dodge. Go find yourself a nice ranch in Texas. Smoke those Cubans the CIA stole from Fidel, blow that coke you extorted from the Medellin, drink that bottle of vodka you scammed from Putin and the Scotch Tony Blair gave you to let him suck you off. And while you're at it, fuck that 15 year-old virgin the bin-Ladens gave you to 'make this whole thing go away.'


What's that you say? It didn't work? Iraq is still a disaster? Well, fuck 'em. You're rich.

An Audience of One

From the start, let it be clear that any undue loss of life, no matter how small or large, is a crime and a tragedy. To force someone else to unwillingly lose their life is to rob them of their future children, their future loves, their future professions, their future hopes and aspirations - in short, the future.

So when we come face to face with death on such a large scale as the recent events at Virginia Tech, we must, absolutely, take pause to reflect upon the state of a world that allows such things to go on. We must examine the structures that support a worldview like the one that caused the death of 32 innocent students. And of course, we must grieve over the loss of a pool of human resources so wide and deep it can never be recreated. But in this reflection we must be honest about the ways of the world and try to look at the underlying causes and power structures that harbor violence within their ideological walls.

As the media coverage has rolled on, nearly ubiquitously, the solutions to problems like this have been simple: increase security, provide counseling, try to screen for disturbed youth. In short, the answer has been more guns, not less. The answer has been to increase security, not to decrease hate. The answer, American as America gets, is more and more and more instead of simply better. And as the media continues to broadcast from Virginia Tech and continues to show the manifesto tape of the killer, we are confronted with yet another truth: this is exactly what he wanted.

The shooter credits the two young men from Columbine High School as "martyrs" in his taped remarks, a sign of the increasing allegiance to violence as the means of escape from a culture of hate and degradation that follows many adolescents. What made this student so angry was the affluence and entitlement that surrounded him, the feeling of unnacceptance that comes with being a brown person in a white country, the sense that everyone around him was the recipient of a divine grace that he missed. In short, he was seduced by the great American myth of more and not better, unaware that many of the affluent and entitled students he was seeing through angry eyes were the victims of the same dissafection.

But the point here is that he had a model to follow. Columbine, as the firestarter that ignited a trend of school shootings, painted a picture of the rebels that stuck in the minds of others. All over the country, students from high school to elementary school were bombarded by the images of the two shooters in trenchcoats, enacting their revenge upon the popular, the wealthy, the entitled, the authorities. All over the country, students watched blueprints and timelines and examined every aspect of the incident, from the weapons technology to the manifesto to Marilyn Manson. And suddenly, all over the country, students who felt the same way had an example.

As we are faced with a tragedy that matches Columbine in scale, why are we doing the same things? Instead of diagramming the hallways and remarking the shooter's expert marksmanship, why are we not interviewing students who aren't letting this violence affect their lives? Why, instead of silencing the voice of violent oppression, are we giving it primetime media coverage. The end message is this: "if you feel silenced, or oppressed, or disenfranchised, and you want to do something about it, violence will give you a voice. Violence will lead the way. Violence will help you reach an audience of half a billion people." Thirty-two students later, this shooter got what he wanted all along: a voice.

By all means, we must protect ourselves. But we must do so in the manner that makes the most sense: by listening. There are other student out there who are watching and learning, others who feel the way this student did. And though there is a difference between feeling and action, that difference can be erased by a single hateful comment, a single act of ignorance or malice.

So in honor of the fallen students, and in hope for the future, turn off your television and open your eyes and ears. With an honest desire to listen and learn instead of fear and loathe, you might just stop the shooting.

Retro Gonzo

President’s Bush’s approval rating hovered steadily around a stellar 35% this morning, reflecting the lowest faith in an American leader since Richard Nixon’s end of term 24% rating, the lowest in recorded history. As the American people and their representatives on both sides of the aisle begin to voice mutual disdain for our highest authority, it’s worth taking a look back at Tricky Dick and his own fall from grace.
Writing to his editor in February, 1972, three months before the Watergate break-in and nine month prior to the biggest landslide victory in history, Hunter S. Thompson eerily captures the bizarre and surreal nature of a campaign that would become known for its seminal role in the culture of corruption, scandal, and misrepresentation that has become synonymous with American politics:

“At first I thought it was me; that I was missing all the action because I wasn’t p lugged in. but then I began reading the press wizards who are plugged in, and it didn’t take long to figure out that most of them were just filling space because their contracts said they had to write a certain amount of words every week…But they all seemed very depressed; not only about the ’72 election, but about the whole long-term future of politics and democracy in America.”

The disillusionment he speaks of rings all too clearly in the minds of pundits and citizens alike in the current political arena – one where more citizens voted against the president than for him and where the spoon-fed press corps ask scripted questions and remain to content to report from a professional distance. While the critics of this president have made themselves heard, the hamstrings of mainstream journalism have become increasingly apparent, as they were becoming to Hunter Thompson in 1972. Frustrated by the “Boys on the Bus,” as Timothy Crouse would later dub the crew of reporters assigned to the campaign, Thompson bemoans what he saw as the current mode of journalism; “ sucking up the news and then spewing it out by the ‘Five W’s’ in a package that makes perfect sense.” In hindsight, his beef becomes even more legitimate.

Perhaps the most slanderous campaign in U.S. political history, the run up the ’72 election saw Nixon’s staff revert to the political equivalent of guerilla warfare, with tactics ranging from public slander via fabricated letters to personal attacks on opponents to high school pranks including the ordering of take-out under the opposition’s name. Yet nearly all of these tactics went unreported by the mainstream media outlets, and the Nixon administration won an unprecedented 60% of the popular vote in November of 1972.
When the Watergate scandal broke in 1974, the Nixon administration fell like a house of cards, crucified by the public. But until then the media had remained content to recite instead of report, to placate instead of investigate. Hunter S. Thompson remained a glaring example; his work far from acceptable in the traditional journalistic tradition. He was personal, political, and biased. He was both loved and hated, responding to each sentiment with vigor and spunk. Despite personal opinions, what remains is a striking example of a journalist who was able not just to report the news, but to report on the news.
Despite his penchant for blunt statements, vulgar language, and drug use, what Thompson’s writing conveys is a sense of place both physical and chronological; an anchoring of historic events in the permanently relevant substance of personalities and human interactions. Lifting the veil of American politics, he dared to say what he saw in his own terms, focusing on candidates as much as issues, practice as much as results. His letters, here and elsewhere, mix cynic humor and astute observation with a rambling intensity that connotes both extreme frustration and an ardent sense of urgency.
His tone is one that seems hard to find today. For several reasons, it seems unlikely that the current administration, and perhaps any administration today, would give a journalist like Thompson the chance to get anywhere near as close to the candidates as he did. But his is the type of journalism that we may need the most as we look toward the 2008 Presidential election and beyond. Americans are faced today with a bevy of institutionally imbedded problems constantly being reinforced by the ever-wider reach of a contemporary media that finds itself intertwined with (and increasingly beholden to) big business. Mass media conglomerates and lumbering PR firms dominate what has become the business of information, and the window of opportunity for independent journalism to reach the populace is closing fast. It is Thompson’s blunt, fast combination of realism, punditry, and disdain for spin that Americans must rely upon if we are ever to organize a honest grassroots movement for political change.