Left Center Left

It’s Media Bias day among my favorite liberal pundits. Here’s Paul Krugman:

…front-page coverage of the 2000 debates emphasized not what the candidates said but their “body language.” After the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Mr. Gore’s sighs, but nothing about Mr. Bush’s lies. And even the fact-checking pieces “buried inside the newspaper” were, as Mr. Clymer delicately puts it, “constrained by an effort to balance one candidate’s big mistakes” - that is, Mr. Bush’s lies - “against the other’s minor errors.”

The result of this emphasis on the candidates’ acting skills rather than their substance was that after a few days, Mr. Bush’s defeat in the debate had been spun into a victory.

Then Josh Marshall:

… But the antic nature of these taunts doesn’t mean they won’t be effective. They’re meant to throw the other side off balance and, in a related manner, to provide grist for a catty and frivolous press corps.

… if the Democrats don’t hit the ground running with a plan in mind they’ll be overwhelmed by the GOP spin machine — no matter how many fibs the president tells or how many times he says up is down.

And Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas’ first column for the Guardian:

Gore learned this the hard way, as he faced a campaign of character assassination pushed by the right and abetted by a lazy-to-hostile press corps: Gore said he was the inspiration for Love Story. Gore invented the Internet. Gore exaggerated. Gore was boring. Of course, all of this criticism was flat-out wrong or grossly out of proportion to the alleged infraction, but it didn’t matter: the media landscape offered no respite. In the US, talk radio was and remains a bastion of rightwing lunacy. Television coverage had become an extension of the Republican party, not just because of the influence of Fox News, but because conservatives had “worked the refs” so diligently that mainstream media outlets piled on their conservative “pundits” lest they be accused of “liberal bias”.

I don’t disagree with their analysis as far as it goes. And I, too, want more substantive policy coverage than television and even print journalism has a habit of giving. But I can’t help but see an odd tendency at play here: we realize that the mass media is influencial enough to merit discussion, but we don’t have a sufficient intellectual model of how the mass media actually matches and shapes the political opinions of its consumers. Or else, these models aren’t popularized enough. It’s like the liberal critique (which I more or less share, mind you) is no more advanced than a chapter from a tattered C. Wright Mills book or even than A Face in the Crowd.

Which sent me to my bookshelf to dust off my Baudrillard books. For something in Krugman in particularly made me wonder, what if the established journalists are onto something?

What if they knew that presenting policy issues would still be met with a populace that makes its political decisions, if not on surface, than at least on politics as they’re filtered through surface? I’m reminded, in fact, of Baudrillard’s essay on “The Masses.” (in Selected Writings). For Baudrillard (surprise), the masses are the quintessential simulacrum - in a televised age they exist not as a politically mobilizable class but rather as the residual directee of an endless flow of one-way mass “communication”. They enter into political discussion, but only as virtual artifact (opinion poll, “man on the street” interview, pundit demographic class) already consituted as mass mediation. Facing this fake-not-quite-fake invocation of the “people”, Baudrillard tries to turn the model of communication on its head.

I would no longer interpret the forced silence of the masses in the mass media. I would no longer see in it a sign of passivity and alienation, but to the contrary an original strategy, an orginal response in the form of a challenge; and on the basis of this reversal I suggest to you a vision of things which is no longer optimistic or pessimistic, but ironic and antagonistic…..

Obviously there is a paradox in the inextricable entanglement of the masses and the media: is it the media that neutralize maeaning and that produce the ‘formless’ (or informed) mass; or is it the mass which victoriously resists the media by diverting or by absorbing without reply all the messages which they produce? Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence done to meaning? Is it the media that fascinate the masses, or is it the masses who divert the media into showmanship?

Yes, Baudrillard talks in florid metaphor and in hyperbole, and his argument veers toward unreconstructed elitism. But note, too, the assumptions underpinning the liberal writers quoted at the top; they state or imply that the media has great manipulative power of “the people’s” opinions. And they’re right, just as advertising gets people to buy things, political marketing and public relations changes people’s political behavior and dispositions. But there is a part of the bargain “the masses” exact on the consumption side.

Elsewhere, in his In the Shadow of the Silent Majority, Baudrillard writes, “The law that is imposed on us is the law of confusion of categories. Everything is sexual. Everything is political. Everything is aesthetic. All at once… Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all other categories.

Say what you will about Baudrillard, but I can’t think of a better summation of the problematic that Bush’s flight-suit appearance presents, or of the Clint Eastwood impersonation contest that Krugman decries.