Misunderstanding Media

We all swim the torrent.

Jesse Walker from the August/September 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Other times, he wanders out of the forest altogether, especially when he forgets the book's purpose and slips into writing about the media's content after all. "Since conservatives tend to be more Manichean than liberals, and more zealous about their politics," he declares, "conservatives play better on the air, and so, for commercial reasons, television and talk radio will be disproportionately right-wing." Such gross generalizations undermine themselves: For evidence that the left can be just as Manichean as the right, one need look no further than that very quote.

A final question: Why is this book packaged as something it clearly is not intended to be? I've already mentioned its dire subtitle. Its even more frantic jacket advertises a polemic about "distraction and inattention," "celebrity cults, paranoia, and irony," "disposable emotions and casual commitments," and how "the media torrent...threatens to make democracy a sideshow."

The answer, I suppose, is that the publisher feels there is more of a market for that sort of book than for the one Gitlin has actually written. The country is filled with people who fret that political declarations have been gradually compressed into seven-second soundbites without stopping to consider whether the longer versions had much content either; people who wail about the ways the media distract us without asking, with Gitlin, "Distraction from what?"; and people who view the media as an evil monolith, rather than a mixture of good elements, bad elements, and themselves.

Our illusions about the media are almost as interesting as the media themselves. Not that that's surprising -- after all, they're part of the media too.