The Media Has No Message (Time of Monsters, Part 1)

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

–Antonio Gramsci

The source for the quote that’s giving this series its name, Antonio Gramsci.

2020 is the Time of Monsters. It seems that every month has brought a new horror to us, whether it is the specter of a new war, a whole continent on fire, a global pandemic and the domestic mismanagement thereof, or rioting and uprising brought on by the murder of a black man by the police. We live in a time of monsters.

But, as I have mentioned before, the etymology of “monster” is related to the Latin for “to show” or “to reveal”. These horrors we’re seeing are decidedly not new: they have always been here, but we are only now being made aware of them.

What I am hoping to do in this piece, and in related ones, is offer a sort of incomplete bestiary of the monstrosities that we are seeing.

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Before I begin, let me remind you that there are still some bail funds that need some donations dropped in.

And it’s not exactly local to us here in KC, but I would like to plug Bellingcat as a good news source. They’re a bit limited at the moment, but I wanted to start off with a bit of positivity about the news media because I’m going to spend so much time talking about how terrible they are.

Also, please note, there is an image taken from Grant Morrison’s The Filth later on, depicting a bit of body horror. Please be forewarned.

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One of the things that frustrates me most about arguing with right-wing types on the internet is that they constantly refer to “the media” as a single cohesive entity with an agenda – that agenda being some vaguely-defined New World Order thing (which hits #7 on Umberto Eco’s list of traits on “Ur-Fascism”, the worst bingo card in history.) However, as with a lot of things that I feel when talking to Libertarians, they’re not focusing on the wrong thing, necessarily, they’re just using the worst tools to analyze it.

Because, you see, “the media” isn’t a single entity with a cohesive ideology, but if you take the time to think about it, there are perverse incentives at work that lead to a certain flocking behavior among the actors in that arena.

Watch this twice. The first time on mute.

Let’s take a recent example: I’ve commented, over the past month or so, about the recent protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. I want you to take a moment to watch a clip twice. The first time, I want you to watch it with the sound off.

This clip comes from KSHB, an NBC affiliate in Kansas City. It shows the police response to a protest that I’ve referenced several times. In other coverage, the various stations in Kansas City – and from what I’ve seen, in national news and in other local news stations – the narrative promoted has been largely in favor of the police: there has been little time given to entertain the stance that, perhaps the police were pouring fuel on the fire. Perhaps what we were witnessing was a riot of a very particular type: a police riot. The police, fearing that the people now understood that a police precinct could be captured and burnt to the ground, decided to wage a counter-insurgency campaign of their own. Foucault’s Boomerang swung back, returned to defend white supremacy..

I challenge you, look at coverage of the protests that turned ugly: watch it twice, the first time with the sound off. Ask yourself what you see. I find it hard to believe that anyone would think the police weren’t acting as footsoldiers of oppression.

What this suggests to me is that the police and the media are on the same side – and I use “the media” here as a shorthand, because I emphasize, there is no centralized control: there are, of course, reporters and commentators who are going against the grain on this, but there is a widespread narrative being pushed that the protesters are generally good and law-abiding, and the rioters are evil and destructive: and that the protesters appear during the day and the rioters appear at night (because admitting that they are the same people might lead viewers to question what caused the transition, and think that perhaps people being teargassed shouldn’t be expected to remain calm. Even if you view the riots as an evil act, you would have to embrace nuance. After all, you probably wouldn’t approve of someone forcibly administering the drug to Doctor Jekyll that made him transform into Mister Hyde.)

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Let’s consider something else: stories that are inconvenient or not sensational do not remain in the zeitgeist. The coverage of the protests has died down because the police have been reined in and the violence has stopped. This is an example of something that is not sensational: the protests are ongoing, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it to watch the news.

Even Steven Hawking hung out with that guy.

Inconvenient things also disappear. It’s become a meme, but the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein was wanted by a lot of people, but the story is dead in the water. He had a cache of blackmail material on titans of industry, politics, and culture. Where did that go? Is everyone we considered important in the nineties and aughts a pedophile? Are we seriously not going to talk about this?

Apparently not.

Let’s look at something inconvenient but not sensational, though. The Panama and Paradise Papers disappeared from the popular consciousness almost as soon as they were mentioned, despite the fact that they were incontrovertible proof that the wealthy were siphoning capital off and squirreling it away in offshore accounts. They were a massive trove of evidence of widespread wrongdoing, but they were forced out of the news.

Is there a conspiracy?

I strongly doubt it.

What I believe, though, is that there are interlocking mechanisms of perverse incentives that lead to conspiracy-like behavior. Every major news outlet has an owner, or a parent company which has its own owner (or another parent company. It’s a rat’s nest.) While they have a certain degree of autonomy, something that I always tell my students is to check for funding information when evaluating a new source: no one does anything to intentionally damage their own cash flow.

I still need to read this, but I would imagine it’s related.

All of these corporations, thus, have an incentive to force boring-but-important stories from the headlines (because they make money off of advertising revenue,) because they need to capture market share, and truth doesn’t do that so well as spectacle. They also have an incentive to sit on stories that may be damaging to their bottom line (anyone who disagrees with this assessment is encouraged to send me evidence that the opposite has happened. I would love to be proven wrong.)

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There’s also the effect this has on the viewer. I’ve been focusing so much on the wrongdoing of the broadcaster that I have yet to look at the effects on the viewer. What does the news do to you, the reader, the viewer, the “consumer”?

(Yes, I’m citing news sources about the negative effect of the news, I’m aware of the irony.)

A lot of ink has been spilled and a small thunderstorm worth of bits exist about this topic. I would contend that a lot of the news – especially the 24-hour news cycle – makes people effectively less intelligent. Consider: with these perverse incentives in play, can they be trusted to tell you tell you anything materially useful about your surroundings? They are trying to extract from you, the viewer, your attention: and attention is a finite resource.

The media! (Image taken from Grant Morrison’s The Filth, drawn by Chris Weston and Gary Erskine.)

The “media”, if it wants anything, wants as much of your attention as it can effectively extract for the lowest investment possible. More than any conspiracy theory about bad actors, more than any lie about modifying people’s behavior, more than anything else, this should be recognized as the root of the problem.

This is not to say that there’s not possibly other problems with the situation: but any assessment of the situation without recognizing that this is what the machine in question was designed to do. A thing is what it does. The media is an attention-capture-apparatus.

If it can, it will capture your attention completely, and from your attention, it will make its masters rich.

It will do this by telling you that the world is full of terrors. It will keep you from shoving it away by ignoring the wrongdoing of those who pull the levers.

The only thing you can actually trust it to do is keep the situation stable so it can continue to work.

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I’m too poisoned by postmodern irony; I can’t use this series title and not reference Conan the Barbarian or similar.

Not to get all Jungian about things, but we have stories about times-of-monsters in the past. We have complex mythologies about this sort of thing. But something that occurs to me is that a time of monsters reveals things that were always there, and it’s tempting to let the sudden revelation make you feel despair.

How can we fight this? You might ask.

I encourage you to rethink things. You shouldn’t feel despair: you should feel joy.

Now that you can see the monster, you can kill it.

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What do I think should be done?

I don’t know, I’m an English teacher.

First thought, don’t actually kill anyone. Kill the system. I’m using that to dovetail with the language that seems the best fit with my assessment of the modern day (this isn’t incitement.)

I will say that I would abolish 24-hour news broadcasts. I think they’re harmful.

Also, I will say, that perhaps examining the way that journalistic outlets work would be a good idea. Let’s consider an alternative to the privately-owned newspaper. Replicating many of the tools developed by ProPublica. What if, in the course of defunding the police, a citizen journalist project was started up: an office with some writers but mostly a robust support staff, and citizens could pitch and write their articles for the paper, where they would be fact-checked and edited.

To maintain independence, elect a board of commissioners, the same way you elect a school board, and these people have oversight of the whole operation. In addition, fund it out of the city budget with a factional percentage of the budget cut from police departments.

This would be a start – treating information as a utility to which all are entitled, instead of something that can be privately owned. By creating a new organization, accountable to the public, without the profit motive at the heart of its operation, people could finally base their decisions on actual information.

Wouldn’t that be something?

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