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On the basic un-truth of The Media and the postmodernism of it all... 
11.07.2005, 7:47 PM
I am going to try to choke down some of the very good readings everyone has been sharing--I'm afraid I currently have a dumb stare going in terms of what I'd like you to read, but it will come to me. Or rather I'll plumb the depths of my readers. But in a class last week, I had what was to me a telling anecdote. We were discussing Joan Didion's "Insider Baseball," which is about the 1988 Presidential campaign. A 22-year-old student (a quite astute young woman) described it as a "historical" essay that in its day revealed great truths--but now, she said, we all know that media is staged, and that people go to blogs for real information.
Aside from the sting of learning that an essay published in 1988 (when I was well into my first career) is "historical," I was fascinated to re-read that essay through my fellow student's eyes. It seems to relate to what we're talking about in ways I can't yet fully articulate. However, I could bring it back full circle and say that if to Didion all narrative is ultimately sentimental and the real truth lies outside those lines, perhaps with the vast array of reportage and writing and emerging genres new technologies enable, we'll learn how to live in a world with a plurality of narratives, the sum of which becomes the anti-narrative truth. But that's awfully deep for late Monday afternoon.
Posted by kgschneider at November 7, 2005 7:47 PM
Comments
I'm so glad to hear people are still assigning "Insider Baseball." I've loved that essay for so long, and at the time when I first read it, I had a friend working as a spin doctor at the Democratic Convention (the one where Clinton was so long-winded, back when I was still in Arkansas).
The neatest thing about it was when, for several years, I was able to get my friend in to talk to the classes at the same time I assigned Didion's essay. He talked very frankly about the nuts and bolts of how they did it, a wonderful complement to the essay. Didion's essay was one of the things that sent me more fully into teaching and away from journalism, because so many journalists seemed to be falling for the spin, even back then. Now I'm back after all that time away, and there's just no comparison to the spinners now. It is at a completely different level, and I'm sure all PR textbooks will have to be completely rewritten post-Rove as well.
My biggest complaint about U.S. journalism is that the prescriptions of "objectivity" and balance are reduced to simplistic formulas, very nearly mechanistic, deterministic. The PR industry not only recognizes this, I believe it does everything it can to foster such an environment, because mechanistic, story-balancing formulas can be manipulated with great sophistication.
Sure, with any mechanism, it functions largely as a button to be pushed, but that's easy, too easy. I think we are seeing now multi-layered button-pushing, where the press not only gets stroked and counter-stroked by image-managers, but also events are "created" (think of the Rove's alleged bugging of his own office in that Texas campaign) for the sole purpose of providing a reverse spin or a reaction to them.
Chris
Posted by: Chris Boese at November 9, 2005 1:13 AM
Not only that, but many people now believe events are created, so real events seem staged...
Posted by: K.G. Schneider at November 10, 2005 6:19 PM