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Tragedy, Media and Marketing
Magazine and newspaper critics -- like Liebling, Mencken and I.F. Stone -- once wrote bitingly and insightfully about the greed, hypocrisy and warped values of the people who ran conventional news organizations, and about how those traits affected media coverage. This criticism gave us some context with which to grasp and comprehend what we were reading and seeing. But as media became increasingly corporatized in the 80s and 90s, such critics vanished. Media criticism turned into celebrity journalism, with a growing focus on media moguls and TV superstars. Even greedy capitalists like Bill Gates were fawned over by the toughest reporters and critics, when they should have been paying more attention to his business practices.
Every now and then, however, an old and new media issue pops up. It's disingenuous for media gasbags to wonder why the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart from Salt Lake City gets tides of media hype while the kidnapping of 7-year-old Alexis Patterson from Milwaukee gets so little. We know why. The answer has been the same for years now, and only gets more clear with each corporate acquisition of a media property: modern media is about making money, and that depends entirely on selecting stories that entertain, titillate, blow up or confront.
Last week, CNN devoted a whole program to the mysterious process by which some tragedies -- the Death of Di to name one -- get staggering amounts of media coverage, while others -- like Mother Teresa's death the same week -- merit relatively little. CNN's high-minded panelists debated whether racism was the issue: Smart is a rich white kid, Alexis Patterson is poor and black. Is there a double standard? Others suggested Smart's parents were understandably working to promote media coverage, to involve more people in searching for their daughter. But this dichotomous coverage is familiar to Net veterans. Kevin Mitnick got as much media coverage in our time as Al Capone, even though he never killed anybody. Hacking gets vastly more media attention than assault or robbery, cyber-porn more than the newsstand kind. Media are always selective about what makes them hysterical.
It was striking to realize that none of CNN's panelists came close to the simple truth: media are market-driven, not idea-substance-or-content driven. Even the once-staid weekly newsmagazines are as likely as not to have movie stars on their covers, despite the number of important stories worthy of coverage. Cable channels, newspapers and newsmagazines cater to wealthy people -- no matter what color -- because those are the consumers advertisers want to reach. To some degree, this has always been true. But as more media have been taken over by massive corporations like AOL Time-Warner, Disney and General Electric, the process has vastly accelerated. News gets marketed just like cereal. Numbers rule. Ratings shape not only news coverage, but our very perceptions of the news. Such companies don't decide not to cover Alexis Patterson because she's poor and black. Profoundly pragmatic and opportunistic, they'd be happy to exploit blacks as well as whites, if the demographics worked. They don't cover Alexis Patterson's abduction because poor viewers in Milwaukee or elsewhere have nothing to do with ratings, ad revenue or profit margins. Blonde kids from wealthy families in Salt Lake City do.
Even so-called serious media like the New York Times and Washington Post are market-driven, focused increasingly on high-end consumer products spawned by digital technology, and on entertainment and controversy. The Times runs several weekly sections brazenly aimed at affluent second home buyers, wine connoisseurs and other high-end consumers. Stories about redecorating million-dollar cottages don't appear because they're newsworthy, but because they draw readers with money, thus advertisers with revenue.
The Elizabeth Smarts of the world will always trump the Alexis Pattersons. Modern media online or off, aren't steered by editors and producers making moral and creative judgments, but by business conglomerates, lawyers, analysts and market researchers. Their sole imperative: generate controversy (a la Monica Lewinsky), select stories that draw the most desirable readers and generate the greatest profits. This principle is evident in media coverage of computing and software as well, and has been for years. Stories about the Net invariably center on marketing -- what will make the most money, or what might be of interest to frightened and confused parents, rather than what is significant. Look how much coverage child pornography online gets, and how little coverage there is of truly revolutionary techno-stories, from gene mapping to AI. And most Americans have never even heard of open source, let alone had the chance to consider it's many implications. Intellectual property and copyright laws have been re-written, thanks to digital technology, yet these stories get sporadic and incomplete coverage.
Media debates about story judgment and ethics are often this hypocritical and disingenuous, mostly because critics and panelists aren't really free to speak the truth -- moral media died decades ago. From Princess Di to terrorism to kidnapping, stories grow in a hyper-information environment, one which promotes argument and hysteria and, increasingly, filters out the lives of poor, ordinary, or non-marketable people. Modern media takes stories and filters them through an increasingly sophisticated marketing machine.Online, blogs and small sites are freer than conventional journalists to set a broader agenda, but their audiences remain small and fragmented.
Thus, there's no mystery about why Elizabeth Smart's kidnapping gets so much more attention than that of other kids. The only mystery is how long it will take the media -- and more importantly, the public -- to understand and acknowledge the reality of their own new, intensely corporate, value system.
Hacking gets almost no coverage in the mainstream media outside of the 8 second blurb about some devastating email virus every now and then.
The Mitnick story makes no ripples when two airplanes crash into each other over Germany and American bombs mistakenly take out a wedding party instead of our bearded foes.
The news and hype around hackers that you speak of is only visible in dark reaches of the Net like ZDNet and Slashdot. CNN, MSNBC, and the other Major internet news outlets relegate these stories to the Technology page where they rightly belong.
I have been pwned because my
Do you live in Milwaukee? Have you ever been to Milwaukee? Do you realize that for the past two months (or however long she's been missing) it's been on the news almost every day in Milwaukee? There are flyers in most local businesses with her picture. There are tons of things in the paper.
I live in Mexico. I have never heard before about the Alexis Patterson kidnapping. Yet when I watch CNN, there's a lot of stories about the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping. And I have to (somewhat painfully) agree with Jon Katz about this one.
The Big Media tends to take one story and latch on to it, and squeeze it for all the money it can get. It's either that, or the Smarts have been paying afwully huge amounts of money to buy airtime in several media channels and newspapers and such.
It's not like the O.J. murder trial or the Blake murder trial. They're famous people, so more people know them and want to know what's going on with those cases. In the Smart case, they're taking someone unknown and making her famous. And it's not "the people" deciding it. It's the studio execs. It's Ted Turner. It's people with a desire to earn more money through selling advertisement to more viewers.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Not to be off-topic - and let me stress that I'm not a Katz basher - but I got pretty much sick of this article right away. Why? Lets say I stopped reading right about here:
"Even greedy capitalists like Bill Gates..."
It seems that capitalism is wrong in america these days. Nobody is preaching socialism, but everybody is dissing capitalism. Yes, Bill Gates is a capitalist. But come to think of it, so am I. And so are almost all Americans. The real problem with Bill Gates is not that he's a capitalist, and not that he controls a monopoly (let me remind you that having a monopoly is not illegal), but that he illegaly uses his monopoly.
Just because Bill Gates was successful doesn't make him an eeeeevil greedy capitalist. Mind you, he's given billions to charities.
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http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
Well, I live outside Milwaukee and this media junkie hasn't heard word one about Ms. Patterson's kidnapping. I also live outside Salt Lake and the airwaves are filled with Ms. Smart's story. What Katz says in this case is spot on.
I wish people such as yourself would stop and think before posting a knee-jerk anti-Katz response. Sometimes he does say stuff that's worthwhile and this is one of those times.
That is all.
Moral media isn't dead. You just have to look harder for it.
Now that the Sept 11th jingoism has died down and it's starting to be a non-terminal offence to express discontent versus the powers that be, you're starting to see the creepings of independent thought show up even in CNN. Up here in Canada, CTV's been doing it for a while. But even then there's a huge under-reporting of stories that would knock the comfort zone of the average person.
The basic problem is this -- any media outlet is a slave to the mandate of its publisher. This isn't really new, it's as old as newspapers themselves (it used to be that if you wanted to be a politician it was a shrewd move to found your own newspaper). So, if you've got nothing but biased media out there, the only way to really inform yourself is to (a) check up on all the biases and try to develop your own conclusions from them, and (b) realize that there's no substitute for actually being at the scene of the event, or at the very least talking to someone who is.
People who critique the media as having a bias often make the mistake of trying to sound like it's forced upon them, when really, you can choose to go out and find different information from a different source. Some options include:
ZNet
The Guardian
The Independent
Le Monde Diplomatique (English version here)
Tom Tommorow
It also helps in times of conflict to go to the media outlets or websites of your political enemies to see what they're saying. It's amazing how they often take as gospel a premise that is completely different from your own. It's also amazing how often the exact same coercive techniques are used by both sides. Makes you wonder if there are average citizens over there are pissed off at their media as much as some of us are at ours.
By the way, I know I went off on a bit of a tangent, but if you click on any of the links above you'll see minimal coverage of the Elizabeth Smart case. There might be a story in there at some point to tell everyone how it all turns out, but nothing like the usual CNN sensationalism. The point is, if you don't like your media, don't go back to it -- go elsewhere. It's not like we have battered wife syndrome or something.
(or maybe we do???)
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Teach logic, critical thinking and statistical reasoning in schools. Teach about traditional propaganda techniques and the ways that biased sources distort truth -- not only by outright lies or mere fudging, but by the selection or omission of information. In other words, lead them to rational, analytical modes of thinking rather than the mere absorbtion of emotionally manipulative tripe that gets served as "news" these days, especially on TV.
Oh, and support media watchdogs like Spinsanity and their ilk -- groups that care about correctness, rather than transparently carrying out political vendettas.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
"Media debates about story judgment and ethics are often this hypocritical and disingenuous, mostly because critics and panelists aren't really free to speak the truth -- moral media died decades ago"
Personally, I find it hilarious when people talk about the 'liberal left-wing' media. The primary news sources for 99.9% of Americans are owned by a scant handful of interests. Hell, one company now owns over three quarters of all the radio stations in the US! And these owners have a number of traits in common: f$cking wealthy, believe in the status quo (hey, they got where they are within the system ... so don't see any need to change it), and, most disturbing, are taking more and more of an active interest in leaning on (or dumping) reporters who dare to question things.
Politics is still fair game. It's almost entirely rhetoric, the two parties almost always work out a compromise ... and, just like the media owners, virtually all politicos come from f$cking wealthy parents (the gentleman in the White House as an example). And both parties are far, far to the right of the average American as a consequence.
OTOH, any reporter who tried to give Nader serious coverage ran into some real problems ... geez, we had reporters threatened here in the middle of nowhere (aka Des Moines (although, to be fair, they consider themselves the moral starting point of the Republicans))
For a really scary example, take those two 'reporters' who were captured in Iraq. Due to travel, got to see the stories both in Canada and the US. The Canadian news (government station) talked about their easily established links to the CIA and Military Intelligence, and showed photos of the 'road' where they crossed the border ... deep trench, rolls of barbed wire on both sides, and signs (in multiple languages, including English) saying 'Don't cross, Iraqi border'. On the US side, nothing. Well, they were 'innocent victims' who 'accidentally' wandered into Iraq. The media in the US has become self-censoring, the joy of any abusive government.
And think about the coverage anyone who questions the current 'War on Terrorism' gets ... either little or none, or is savagely attacked for being unpatriotic.
It's funny, I was thinking about this subject during my morning quality reading time (john) - there was an article about a U Illinois media prof. who complains about how media is run as big-business and that's inherently opposed to the spirit of the first ammendment. He cited the lack of dailys in NYC (down from 9 in the 1940's) and the inability of any small publisher (think Zine) to reach a wide audience.
I mean, first off, NY has at 2 free weeklies, the post and the times (radically different styles) and that new conservative-funded rag (I forget the name) so there are 5 papers running there. Considering the rise of TV and general displacement of print media down to 5 from 9 isn't so bad.
Secondly, and more importantly, it's kind of blaming the messenger isn't it? I mean, other news is available to us, obviously, even if it's not spoon-fed from the checkout line. If people aren't reading/watching it, it's because they don't want to. I blame the quality, the timber if you will, of the Average American much more than I do the Media Giants. If you think they're all brainwashed by Murdoch then you're taking away free choice and postulating a rat-in-the-maze/pavlovian world (which I sort-of don't think is how things really are). If you accept that we have choice, and you can't deny the choice exists, then we must conclude that people WANT to read about rich white mormon girls. WHY don't Zines thrive? WHY don't people look to indymedia.org or whatever for their news? Because they simply don't want to.
I know there are other factors, but the fact that Americans (in particular) don't fit in to the image we'd like them to (of free-thinking, compassionate, caring folks who want to know the Truth) we can't say it's Media's fault. It's our fault. Americans.
closed minded is as closed minded does