Quote Of The Day – Media Outrage
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Media, Quotes
“If you want to be angry about something, get pissed at a media culture that goes beserk about bonuses one week and forgets all about them the next. And be worried, quite worried, about a society for whom anger is a form of entertainment.”
- Joe Klein in his latest column
Here’s the thing, we’re all guilty of a bit of populist rage from time to time, but we’re the bloggers. Anger is what drives most of us. Maybe not those necessarily in the moderate blogosphere, but I don’t think it’s any surprise why people started blogging in the first place.
But since when was the media driving that rage instead of the other way around? It seems like more and more we’re seeing a shift from responsible reporting to barking pundits. Am I alone in feeling this way?
Klein with more…
There is a real crisis out there. It has existed for a while. It has been spreading slowly as factory after factory has shut down, as the gap between rich and poor ballooned, as the rich found ways to get richer betting on exotic financial instruments with all the economic substance of a roulette wheel, as the middle class found it harder to pay for college, for health care, for gasoline.But most of the anger we see and hear comes from people who are paid to be angry, on cue, on cable television–as opposed to people with actual grievacnes. Suddenly, the White House press corps goes barking mad over the AIG Bonuses. It is said that the bonuses are an aspect of the bust that the “public” can understand; in truth, the bonuses are an aspect of the bust that reporters can understand. Suddenly, the Obama Administration has a “crisis.” The President has to go on television and act as if he’s angry, even though he knows these bonuses are the tiniest outcropping of outrageousness. (I mean, AIG insured mortgage-backed instruments that any qualified CPA could have seen were as solid as a soap bubble and thereby came close to bringing down the world’s financial system–that’s outrageous.)
As I said before, if this is truly how the media continues to act, we’re screwed. Because if this is what they think is responsible journalism, all the oxygen will be sucked out of the debate when something stupid like the AIG bonuses comes up. That will be the focal point instead of the actual problem at hand.
Moving on…
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March 24th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Part of it happened when the walls between the business office and the news room were torn down. But the section of time that I don’t understand is how intelligent international reporting started happening on CNN in the 80s and the complete crap we see now. I wasn’t interested in the news until I could watch something more interesting than the goofy local guys. And it sure seems like everyone was dying to be CNN and they all followed suit. But at some point all that broke down. I can’t stand CNN any more or really any broadcast news stations.
Certainly the soft pitches and non-coverage of some news that occurred during the aftermath of 9/11 are part of what broke down my interest, but even before that I could see cracks forming.
March 24th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
There is no news anymore. TV journalism was, at its best, simply reading the newspapers first two paragraphs.
Newspapers are dying all over the country so all the TV journalists can do now is stand infront of a building somewhere and frown. But even print journalism has been dying for decades.
Stories became something to put between the ads, 30 years ago, the advertisers were dying to be next to news because people cared to read the news.
At one time, I thought apathy was the worst thing that could happen, but I was wrong. The deep, ugly partisanship driven by the political parties made news and truth immaterial; now all that matters is political allegiance. Discourse has been traded in for shouting matches.
March 24th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
I find it particularly honorable that President Obama didn’t take advantage of this “scandal” to fan the flames of outrage, thereby deflecting attention away from the misdeeds of his own congressional colleagues, like Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid.
Kudos, Mr. President, for rising above the fold.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
I agree with the post, with Klein, and the above three comments.
March 24th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
We, and I include myself, have to take some responsibility for our consumption of the news. It is access to our eyes that the media is selling and we fail to turn away from the worthless, the petty, and the insignificant. I try to avoid it by turning it off, but it is addictive. We can point the finger at the media, but exists because of the market we created for it.
The solution? I’ve had difficulty with that. Remove the rhetoric, discuss rationally, understand the context?
March 25th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Personally, I find anger to be a crappy and unreliable fuel for critical thinking, so I try to avoid it.
I struggle to account for why it is that people are attracted to button-pushing showmen masquerading as journalists. It has not surprised me for a very long time, but it continues to amaze me. Perhaps what accounts for this preference is that it’s so much easier to get mad and blame someone else than to work to construct a coherent model of an issue that incorporates the many details and variables. Yeah, that sounds right.
Most folks really don’t notice it when they are being manipulated by anger salesmen like Limbaugh, Dobbs, Colter, Moore, and so on and so on. Folks simply enjoy the release that comes from being told it’s not their fault, it’s the fault of some group of folks that are different from them. I still have not determined whether it’s more frightening to think that people like Dobbs and Colter et al are sincere, or insincere.
The blurring of the line between news information and entertainment has been going on for many years, and now infotainment is the rule. We have not, in my opinion, been well-served as a nation by this. But taken as whole, it’s hard to argue that we are not getting what we deserve, since so many of us choose to pay heed to these various cheap rage peddlers. What’s really ironic is that there’s a post up above detailing that Obama’s recent press conference was boring.
As a society, we have shown ourselves to be anti-thinking, anti-consideration, anti-hard-choices. We like simple-sounding ideas that make us feel good. We WANT people to tell us that the path ahead is clear, simple, and easy if only we are willing to designate a demon class of some type.
It’s depressing to think about.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Well, well. A good post (thanx, Justin) about an important topic – the worthlessness of our national media outlets- and we finally get full agreement on something!
I stopped watching CNN during the past election covrage, MSNBC was always too left leaning for me, and nobody here even bothers mentioning the hack-job at FOX News. I Tivo the public TV Newshour and Charlie Rose, the Sunday Talk shows, and pretty much browse Bloomberg when I can on a daily basis. I gave up on CNBC too, as the Daily Show does a better round-up of the financial news stories after all and with a bit of humor too.
So it’s still up to the print media – even though it’s online, it’s still newspaper reporters doing the stories – and, of course, Donklephant and our own discourse that we’ll have to depend on. Scary, isn’t it :-)
March 25th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
I don’t know if people are angry enough. They all seem pretty docile to me. What exactly is wrong with being angry at outrageous and undeserved bonuses? I’ve heard it said it’s a distraction. I say it’s part of the larger issue, maybe even at the heart of it. The out-of-control culture of greed, corruption, and sense of entitlement that has grown since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and introduction of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. It’s a fantastic introduction to all those larger issues and should be used as such. As for Joe Klein, don’t get me started…
March 25th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
NPR
March 25th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
The mainstream media outlets over television are hopeless…
March 25th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
[...] P.S. Anger as entertainment. [...]
March 25th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
NPR? They fired a good reporter back in 2001 to ingratiate themselves with the Bush administration and get good embeds in the upcoming war. They put ‘experts’ on who are paid shills for the Pentagon.
March 26th, 2009 at 1:48 am
BLOG SPAM BLOG SPAM MY NAME IS JUSTIN P GARDNER AND I LINKJACK CONTENT AND THEN SLAP ADSENSE ON IT AND GET PISSY ON REDDIT WHEN THEY CATCH ME
go on, delete this comment.
March 26th, 2009 at 1:52 am
Didn’t news service literally start in the market place or people-filled spaces with elevated spots where a town crier screams at the top of his lungs who did what or what is going to happen? I guess with the advent of raw information online (sans the online version of corporate news broadcast), news has really evolved into something that towns have criers once again, but this time the level of news service is more person to person or person to small group until it becomes viral and it ends up becoming person to a wide online community. News service is on a transition just as it was during the advent of print publications and radio and television.
March 26th, 2009 at 9:54 am
@die – Thanks for making everybody aware of what a bad person I am. But maybe you should spend a little less time on reddit and a little more time working on your social skills. After all, do you really want to be this guy?
@BenG – That is a scary thought!
March 26th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Let’s start with the newspapers.
Maybe they wouldn’t all be going broke if they would’ve printed NEWS instead of drivel, and if they would have put NEWS on the front page, and if the NEWS had been current, and if the NEWS had been honest news and not propaganda, and if the NEWS when it were (at least somewhat) honest were not buried in the back pages, and if the NEWS would have printed folks letters to the editor that were of different political opinions than the NEWS, and if the NEWS wasn’t full of advertizing, and if the NEWS had a good comics page instead of all the crappy strips that we HATE, and if… You get the picture.
As for TV news… Uh, ditto.