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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
Something I've been kicking around for a while, and I'm neither pro nor against, so I'm wondering if anyone would like to think this through with me, is the idea of strict rules (either from the govt or some trade organization) regarding what can and can't be called 'news'. If i make my orange juice from concentrate, i have to tell people. If i manufacture my sparkling wine in brooklyn, i can't call it champagne. Perhaps there's a public good in someone saying, "it's not news if it's for-profit", or "it's not news if there's any commercials", or something like that.
It doesn't solve the problem, but it does highlight the phenomenon. Anyone?
god is just pretend.
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.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
His point was not that there was no media coverage, but that for Alexis it was very localized, while for Elizabeth Smart it was highly covered nationally.
Oh, and by the way, how did you find out about Alexis Patterson? Doing an internet search about missing kids in the recent past and running across some media coverage of the story
You make a valid point, but if you go over to CNN.com, and look on the front page, I can find all of the info I want for the Smart kidnapping. That is the coverage issues he is referring to.
Random Musings
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.
While this article is very true, what else can we do? Do we give control of the news media to the government? Not in my lifetime, I hope. We criticize other governments, ie. Cuba and Afghanistan for filtering news and distributing the propaganda they want their citizens to hear. Do we want to be subject to this more than we already are?
Do we make news organizations strictly non-profit groups? Would this work in the T.V. and radio markets? If the stations were making no money running news, would they bother, or just re-run Seinfeld episodes so we could hear about "nothing". Easier to do in the print and internet larket, but still not easy. Those entities need to make enough money to keep the presses running and the data lines live.
In the end, news as a free market entity means that we can all get it. If it weren't for advertisers in a newspaper, the cover price would be quite significantly more than $.50 or so. It may be manipulated by corporate America to a certain extent, but it is also flowing with idealistic people that want to tell us something. Until we can come up with a cheap system that doesn't need sponsorship or government intervention, this might be the best system on the planet.
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...
Put down the crack pipe.
Regarding the Afghan wedding, there's been coverage at least on CBS, NBC, BBC, New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC, and undoubtably others but I don't have the time to monitor that many more news sources than I already do. MCI Worldcom has been a similarly large story, including pointless short interviews with just-laid-off ex-employees (Gee, they're frustrated. What the hell did the reporters expect?).
And that "story" regarding Clinton is even more absurd, considering that the Fed. government doesn't have the power to cap base salaries.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
My 5-year-old daughter was abducted by my ex-wife over 2 months ago. I have sole custody, and my ex has some pretty serious mental health problems. Sabrina is in a dangerous situation.
The media is not very interested because she's with her mother. That's not sensational enough. Obviously they don't know the history.
Please mod me up, and please visit my website: FindSabrina.org
Please help find my missing daughter: FindSabrina.org
The girl in Milwaukee vanished while out of the house. Sadly, that happens all the time. A story in the same vein was the Molly Bish story two years ago - a teenager was snatched right after being dropped off for her summer job as a lifeguard outside of Boston. it got big play in New England, nowhere near as much nationally.
The Smart story strikes a vein that makes it especially newsworthy. She was taken from her house in the middle of the night. To have someone stolen in your own home like that strikes a nerve in virtually everyone.
Whenever I hear a "vanished child" story, regardless of the details it bugs me. But my wife and I just had our first child a little while ago (ask gorbie, he's seen the pics). The Smart story is the kind of thing that creates a primal fear in every parent. The home is supposed to be the one place that's secure. When it's not, that, sadly, makes it more newsworthy. I don't relate to what happened to Alexis Patterson the way I relate to Elizabeth Smart. It's not because Alexis is black, or because she's from an inner city. It's because I have a home, and I have a child. And one of the biggest fears I can imagine is waking up in the middle of the night to find your child missing and a window open.
To get much scarier than that, you'd need to be living a Steven King novel.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
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've never said anything, JonKatz, about your unwarranted rantings, but this is too far. Oh, and by the way, how did you find out about Alexis Patterson? Doing an internet search about missing kids in the recent past and running across some media coverage of the story?
Err...I don't live in Milwaukee. I haven't the slightest clue who Alexis Patterson is, or rather I didn't until she was referenced in this article. This is the first that I've heard of her or her abduction.
Neither do I live in Salt Lake City. I live in Ohio. I've heard of Elizabeth Smart. I not only know who she is, I can tell you exactly what she looks like and what she was wearing when she was abducted. I can tell you what her abductor was reportedly wearing the night of the abduction.
Not only that, I can name each of Elizabeth's siblings, her parents, and even her uncle. I can tell you what suburb of Salt Lake City they live in. I can tell the name of the handyman who has done construction work for the family and is now a chief suspect. I can tell you what he was paid for his work. I can tell you what kind of car the handyman drives. I can tell you that the handyman lives in a mobile home nextdoor to his in-laws who also live in a mobile home. I can tell you that he has pet cats.
I can tell you that Elizabeth's younger sister has told two different stories of what happened the night that Elizabeth disappeared. I can tell you that there was a statewide search during which someone claims to have seen a suspect matching the abductor's description acting strangely in a wooded ravine area, but that further investigation turned up nothing. I can tell you that police have investigated false sightings of Elizabeth as far away as Texas, and that there was also a nationwide manhunt for a material witness who was found after a week in a hospital in the eastern US.
I have no interest whatsoever in either of these abduction cases. The chances of me ever needing to use any of this information is so far beyond miniscule as to be laughable, but it has all been imprinted in my head, and I don't even watch the news that much.
Milwaukee may be saturated with news of the abduction of Alexis Patterson, but that saturation doesn't even touch the surface of the nationwide saturation of news regarding Elizabeth Smart. This is in addition to the local saturation in Salt Lake City that I'm sure is every bit as bad as that in Milwaukee. Your post is seriously off base when considering the vast difference in the scale of media hype.
"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