Behind the Spectacle
A slow and gentle update on news media
A famous media personality.
Why should everyone be forced to have an opinion about current events that do not directly affect them? As someone in a calmer corner of the internet known as the geminisphere so cogently argued, the expectation that everyone take a stand and voice their opinion hardly existed before the advent of social media. Or, as this geminaut puts it, ”there is an expectation that you state your allegiances, so people can know whether you're part of their tribe or not.” Well worth considering.
Why should everyone have to make statements of support or condemnation on matters they know little about? I think there is a grain of wisdom there, although it bears recalling the etymology of the word idiot, which hints at a person who doesn't care much about public life, as in politics:
ιδιότης : private person, layman, from ἴδιος, own, private.
But I'm not saying that someone who is uninformed is an idiot in the pejorative sense. If you are busy with work, research, or living a complicated life, like most of us are, there is little time left to dig into the intricacies behind current newsworthy events, even less to find out about the events that have been omitted from the regular news. It doesn't help that the media, or the spectacle as Guy Debord called it, often blurs and confuses more than it clarifies.
We have experts and influencers to think for us. Nothing is simpler than nodding along with what they say, publicly, so that there is no doubt about where you stand. In the end, the social requirement that everyone fall in line and express the same sentiment contributes to reinforcing an ideologically homogenised environment. When there are two possible opinions, each championed by fiercely opposing camps, the requirement becomes that you pick sides without vacillation and never engage in nuance. In such a scenario, refraining from chiming in with your idem, ditto, or +1 has some merit.
Then there is the question of being informed. Apparently some find it difficult to orient themselves in conflicts such as the war in Israel and Palestine – the one in Ukraine seems to be more straightforward – or issues related to science, such as global warming, or pandemics and vaccinations. Whenever scientific studies are at odds with commercial interests, there is an opportunity for the so-called merchants of doubt to come to rescue; they are all those experts for hire who try to undermine the credibility of science by emphasising uncertainties. Famous examples can be drawn from the tobacco and petroleum industries. In this post I will comment on the political conflicts, leaving the scientific debates aside.
All of us who are fortunate enough not to be in the midst of a conflict have to rely on secondary sources, the media in particular, to be informed about the conflict. And that is a big part of the problem; our mainstream media are generally not very good at explaining things in depth by providing historical perspective or including a sufficient variety of opinions. Guy Debord's Comments on the society of spectacle provides a partial accurate assessment of the state of the media. If the media stops talking about something for three days, it is as if it had never existed. News erases memory by becoming pure distraction.
Herman & Chomsky's model of five media filters, introduced in their 1980's classic Manufacturing Consent, remains helpful for understanding some of the structural problems. The ”filters” regulate what is able to become news:
Ownership. Investing in a printing press or broadcasting studio is not for everyone, meaning that only the wealthy have been able to launch media corporations. Add to that the ongoing consolidation of media companies by mergers, and the fact that AP, Reuters, and AFP between them are the almost exclusive sources whose press releases are copied verbatim in numerous newsrooms.
Advertising. Newspapers and commercial TV broadcasters finance their products mainly by advertising and cannot afford to offend the companies that buy ad space by going after them with critical reporting. Ad-blockers are great, but have you noticed something funny at youtube lately?
Sources. Journalists rely on having contacts in government and business. In a relation of mutual trust there are again limits to how critical their coverage may get.
Flak. Negative feedback about reporting by letters, phone calls, boycotting of advertised products and law-fare are some examples. It doesn't take much of it to make newsrooms nervous. Private persons can engage in flak, but imagine the efficacy of a professional calling centre who directs their ire at chosen targets.
Anti-communism used to be a thing when Herman and Chomsky wrote their book. American media had to align with the paranoid suspicion of communism. After 9/11 this was replaced by the war on terror and anti-muslim sentiments, and now, in the wake of Russia gate, it is again a variety of anti-Russian and, increasingly, anti-Chinese views that dominate the American media.
It is not the case that the mainstream media always lie, as in permanently and withouth exception. That would be quite an achievement. Sometimes they do indeed lie, or rather pass on the lies and misrepresentations of government officials, think tanks, or corporate spokespersons without questioning. The canonical example is the strenuously repeated claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the lead up to the invasion in 2003, of which no evidence ever materialised. However, often a more serious problem is all the omissions and media's one-sided coverage. Inconvenient perspectives are routinely ignored. War hawks are regularly interviewed, whereas peace activists may be seen only as they get arrested for holding up a sign saying ”stop the war.” False balance is another issue. Notoriously, for a period, climate change deniers or sceptics were automatically allotted equal time with climate scientists who actually knew what they were talking about.
There are yearly polls of public trust in media, such as the comprehensive report of the Reuters Institute. Trust is high in places like Finland (where 69 % ”trust most news most of the time” – are they naïve or is Helsingin Sanomat a damn good paper?), Portugal (58 % trust), and the Scandinavian countries, whereas it is currently lowest in Greece (19 %). Hungary, France, and the US have low trust in media as well, and US has often been at the bottom. One reason for the low trust, Reuters suggest, is media criticism and political polarisation with consequences including harassment and verbal abuse of journalists. The Reuters report also deliberates on the phenomenon of news avoidance. Some news consumers don't accept constantly being exposed to depressing images and stories, things we can do nothing about, or things that are too hard to understand. And the constantly rolling 24/7 news cycle, encouraging us never to miss a story, leaves us no wiser. It provides a shallow coverage, often sensationalist but without context, perfectly upholding the spectacle. The Reuters report worries about the youth getting their news via tiktok, but fails to mention what may be far more serious, such as the prosecution against Julian Assange which risks setting a precedence that would give any government green light to jail journalists of any nation for reporting things not to their liking.
It would be wrong to attribute the low media trust to the imbecility of the public, as if they would regain trust after some pedagogical demonstration of the perils of fake news. To a very large extent the media itself is responsible for its bad esteem. However, it is crucial to note that the question posed by Reuters concerns trust in media in general, not any particular news outlets. Hence, such media polls might indicate something about the perception of big corporate and public service media, while not necessarily reflecting the trust in independent media. With the spread of the internet since the 1990's many independent news sites have been founded, because the first filter of expensive investments is no longer such a great hurdle. Now, everyone with a computer and internet access can become a citizen journalist or a blogger. In parallel, some journalists working in corporate media have found it impossible to get their perspectives across in the news papers or TV shows they work for, and those who nevertheless have tried have been fired or relegated to unfulfilling routine tasks. For a few examples, I could mention Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, and Katie Halper. When highly accredited journalists such as these find themselves unemployed, they typically continue publishing their reporting on other platforms that allow a broader range of views. Sometimes it means that they reach a larger audience, as Sy Hersch recently noticed.
With an increasing number of independent journalists capable of nuanced thought and high accuracy in their reporting, coinciding with the collapsing trust in mainstream media, it is perhaps no wonder that a great concern with allegedly or truly fake news is spreading among those who stand to benefit economically or ideologically from the big corporate media. The fear of fake news has engendered a sprouting and profitable fact checking business. Now, the threat against independent media comes in various shapes, such as the manipulation of search algorithms – and although google isn't the only search engine around many still think it is; in their Project Owl of 2017 they adjusted search rankings in such a way as to adversely affect many independent news sites. Another threat comes from the fact checkers who have the power to slap a red label on any site they do not like. I suspect that most fact checkers do their work with the best of intentions, but if you look at their funding and ownership structure they often turn out to have some dubious ties to powerful think tanks, intelligence agencies, or corporations. Really troublesome or too successful independent journalists then face threats of smear campaigns, de-platforming and de-financialisation – first and foremost, witness the plight of Julian Assange, but recall also what happened to Craig Murray or Russel Brand. Furthermore, there is the so-called censorship industrial complex which influences social media in various ways.
Two conflicts
Leading up to the war in Ukraine, public opinion consolidated towards a strong solidarity with Ukraine, coincident with what can only be described as a skewed picture, full of omissions in Western mainstream media of important historical background such as NATO’s eastward expansion which in Russia is perceived as an existential threat, and the 2014 coup in Ukraine. Everyone is familiar with the mainstream version of the events: nothing much important happened before Russia, out of the blue, decided to invade in February 2022. A fuller account of these events has been often provided by independent media and by scholars and public figures such as John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Douglas McGregor, and Jeffrey Sachs. No matter how much the US/NATO conglomerate tries to dismiss those accounts as Russian propaganda, theirs is the version that causes least cognitive dissonance, theirs is the narrative that seems more plausible when you slowly weigh it against the alternatives: Either that of an irrational impulse driven despot, ”Putler,” who nevertheless is coldly calculating and able to mastermind an American president, and who launches an invasion on a whim, or the equally evidence-free version that this is a first phase of a planned imperial expansion. If the Western dissidents' version can be unflinchingly labelled Russian propaganda, then it is only fair to brand the official Western version as NATO propaganda. Neutral alternatives are hard to come by. Perhaps the closest one can come to neutrality is to realise that both sides in this conflict engage in propaganda and paint the daily events in ways beneficial to themselves. The history leading up to the war makes more sense if US, NATO, and EU provocations and deceptions are taken into account, but appears as an incoherent sequence of unrelated events if you omit those facts.
With the hundred some years of conflict between Israel and Palestine, the October 7 attacks and following revenge attacks have made it hard for anyone who sympathises with the sufferings of the beleaguered part to express themselves if they live in America or certain European countries (German post WWII guilt explains their unconditional solidarity with Israel and their hard crack down on pro-Palestine demonstrations, but there has been a severe repression of free speech also in France and the UK, and not restricted to this issue). If the attacks on the freedom of thought were bad enough with the enforced unanimity about Ukraine, and before that about how to deal with that pandemic if you still remember it, now with Al Aqsa flood you cannot demonstrate on the streets, or utter your support for the wrong people, if you live in the wrong country and want to keep your job.
The attacks happened in a vacuum, we were told. But they didn't. There was a nakba, and many other horrible events and persistently intolerable living conditions, a situation that could not go on indefinitely. We must also remember that there was a holocaust; things don't happen in a vacuum. If we are not allowed to remember the occupier's transgressions and crimes, why should we remember that the occupier's ancestors historically were often the victims? Let's remember both.
What actually happened on October 7 caught Israel with surprise. The reporting of such an event is bound to be confused before all facts are known. Worse, in a conflict both sides have an interest in manipulating the way news are presented, but in this conflict the two sides have unequal access to media resources.
It is the occupier who has the command over a sophisticated media apparatus, who are better able to impose their version, and who are able to cut off the internet access of the besieged land to limit the spread of horrifying images of the savage destruction they have caused.
It is not surprising that Western mainstream media have had little to say about emerging reports of ”friendly fire” where Israeli soldiers opened fire against kibbutzes where they knew there might be civilians. Nor do we hear much about the allegedly humane treatment of the captors who kidnapped Israelis on that day.
This conflict is not so complicated or hard to understand if you take some history into account. Roughly the last hundred years provide a useful framing. There are many good sources to consult, such as Ilan Pape, Norman Finkelstein, and Gabor Maté. The land currently known as Israel and Palestine was populated by various groups of people for thousands of years. Hence it is possible to claim ancestry to the land just because ”your people” happened to live there two thousand years ago. Does it really matter? And why would it matter more than who lived there yesterday, until a settler threw out the family?
The narrowing freedom of thought following from the conflation of criticism of the state of Israel or the Zionist ideology with anti-Semitism has had notable consequences also in art institutions. Documenta in Kassel saw its selection committee resigning after they found the intellectual climate unworkable. Artforum was shaken by another scandal after an open letter which led to the clarification that the letter was not a statement of the artforum magazine, followed by the firing of the editor-in-chief and resignation of others. Many other cultural institutions have cancelled artists who have expressed their support for Palestine or called for a cease-fire.
One must thread carefully these days. Someone is always upset whatever you say or don't say. Stay safe if you can and please be kind to each other.
References
Debord, G. (1990). Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Verso.
Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. (1994). Manufacturing Consent. The Political Economy of the Mass Media. London: Vintage Books.
The quotation in the beginning of this article comes from gemini://rawtext.club/~winter/gemlog/2023/10-10.gmi, which can be accessed using any gemini client.