Interesting article from Salon.com, an excerpt from a book by Michael Massing: We are the Thought Police. It suggests that Orwell’s dark future is enabled not by oppressive totalitarian control of the media message, but by the audience’s reluctance to engage with certain kinds of challenging messages:
In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, the American people have become their own thought police, purging the news of unwanted and unwelcome features with an efficiency that government censors and military flacks can only envy.
It’s a great article and worthy of serious consideration, but I don’t entirely buy it. I think, first and foremost, that the role of the media-audience is not a static and passive one. The audience as discussed by Massing sounds challenge-avoidant and change-resistant. The desire to avoid challenge leads to the desire to avoid information; fair enough, this is quite a dramatic formulation but there’s a lot about it that makes sense.
Massing seems to be arguing that the audience cannot change in any fundamental way; that they will always switch channels to watch the cat being rescued from the tree rather than the horrors unfolding in their war.
If I’m reading this excerpt right and he is arguing this, then I think he’s wrong; in fact, I think that’s precisely where the top-down control via the media takes place. A responsible media that was intent on serving the public rather than on advertising revenue would continue to play an unpleasant war, slowly acclimatising the audience to the kind of content it wishes to share. Audience tastes can change. If the media stuck with this message, it would slowly become more and more acceptable.
However, there is no incentive for mainstream journalism to take such a road at present. The audience that exists now is not acclimatised and there is little money to be made in changing this. So the same cycle perpetuates – the media plays it safe, and the populace rests easy with the same old mythology.
Anyway, go read the article, it’s great and anything that references Orwell intelligently earns brownie points from me.
Also good from Salon: a short article about the US-Iran belligerence:
The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. Let’s repeat that. The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America’s political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost exactly the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq….
Hey Morgue,
Interesting thoughts. I disagree with the top-down media control model that you imply. While proponents such as Chomsky would have you believe that the Media is manipulated by a select few, it is rarely the case – especially in the West.
However, your comments on advertising do ring true.
There are some cases of such top-down media (Fox comes to mind) – but as you identify, the general audience is not passive in its viewing. I’m not sure of what media studies you have done, so I don’t know if I’m repeating stuff you already know – but when I was studying media, we were taught a lot about the actual structure of a media conglomerate and shown exactly why the media can’t be completely controlled.
I’m a bit rusty on the details – but it has to do with the idea of hegemonies and active audiences. I’ll do some digging around my notes, but there is a classic case from Europe (I think) where a government tried to use the media to manipulate the populace in a manner similar to top-down models. It ended up starting a revolution instead because the populace became frustrated with the media bias.
I don’t believe everyone avoids unpleasant news – if anything, they seem to thrive on it. People like to talk about what they would do. In my experience, it facilitates classic “water cooler” talk. Even when people say things like “I’m not interested in it” – they often follow the news religiously. Building up their own interpretations of the news.
And this is the thing – we are not passive observers as a species. By the very act of observing media we interact with it in very personal ways – and this can mean that while demographically we might get one set of information, a conversation with random individuals from the same demographic will reveal widely different interpretations that reach the same conclusion.
But I’m blathering a bit now. 🙂 I’ll put it on my list of things to dig around for along with that report from my brother. 🙂
Hey Conan – you’re right, of course, in pointing out that media can’t really be top-down controlled (at least not without a massive state apparatus a la Stalinist Russia). I wasn’t thinking very clearly as I wrote this entry, but what I was reaching for was a kind of ‘accidental control from the media producers’, where ordinary business decisions by media managers lead to certain kinds of content being avoided and other kinds being celebrated; this in turn structures what people experience. ‘Top down control’ is a pretty crappy phrase for what is a much more complex process.
Your example of Fox News is an appropriate illustration of this, actually. The Republican party distributes its talking points to Fox news producers and these talking points are then propagated through its content. That is top-down control – but it is also an exceptional case, and not the way media is done in the Western world.
I haven’t done any formal media studies, actually, just lots of casual reading and discussion with people involved in media. Would be keen to expand on this reading with any relevant info you throw my way. You’re threatening to become my new library…
LOL
Well my brother Henley covered the politics of media a lot more than I did. I focused on analyticals – so I’m a lot more hands on theory than he is.
But there are some very good books to read, I’ll go digging through my notes and post up a list. 🙂
I think you’re right, though, about how normal business decisions can manufacture a kind of big brother situation – the thing is that who instigates it becomes muddy. Is it the consumer for making the advertisers push the news a certain way? Or is it the news manufacturing interest in products?
In the States there is more of a advertisers controlling the people kind of paradigm – but here in New Zealand, TV execs are ruthlessly at the mercy of the viewers. Ever wonder why so many reality tv shows are made. I once ended up talking with the head of local content, and I questioned her about it. Ends up it’s because the polls showed that more NZers watched Reality TV than local drama! Thus, she wanted to put more local drama on, and the govt wanted her to. But the people weren’t watching, so advertisers wouldn’t advertise. To make money, they HAD to have the show people would watch!
Crazy.
To clarify it was the head of local content at TVNZ, and that was about 8-9 years ago. 🙂
My first thought on reading your summary was of the world portrayed in David Brin’s novel /Earth/, where there is pervasive use of filtering technology to give customized news feeds. However, the filtering technology is mandated to occasionally present opposing viewpoints to the user’s comfortable world view, to avoid exactly that problem; self censorship of the uncomfortable or inconvenient leading to ignorance.
Michael – sounds intriguing. I wonder how people would see such mandated counterpoint programming? As an interference, or something necessary? And I wonder how thoroughly the counterpoint perspective would be co-opted by the media? c.f. Chomsky’s classic example of Vietnam, how the media debate became “Vietnam was a noble attempt but strategically inept” vs. “Vietnam was a noble attempt and strategically sound just not pursued fully enough”, both of which share a premise that is not up for debate…