In defending its devotion of immense amounts of attention, platform space, resources, to the coverage of tawdry stories the Talking Heads of the media often, explicitly or implicitly, blame the broader public.
"They made us do it!" they say--for instance, when they saturated the public consciousness with coverage of the prosecution and trial of one Orenthal James Simpson for over a year--as they reminded us after Mr. Simpson's recent passing when it became a cliché of the coverage of the event that his trial "captivated the nation."
Of course this was a lie, a lie highly characteristic of how media functionaries cognize the world in its being a lie, and a very stupid one at that by even the very low standard of intelligence prevailing among the operators of the media-industrial complex, but also in its inversion of reality in the way to which said operators are so prone. For the public didn't force them to subject it to "All O.J., All the Time" in 1994-1995. It was the news media that forced "All O.J., All the Time" on the public.
So did it go, a couple of years later, when the sickening reduction of the news to tabloid garbage escalated yet again in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. More clearly than was the case with O.J. the public was repulsed by the affair--as it demonstrated by punishing the Republican party in the mid-term election that caused them to be subjected to the sordid episode day and night, night and day, so much so as to cause some commentators to suggest that the "culture war" had peaked and the world was moving on.
Those commentators were (sadly) wrong about that, the two parties and the political tendencies they stood for too committed to culture war to give up on it, as the last quarter-century has shown us. But the public revulsion at the whole episode was very real.
Still, that never caused the media to back off or even tone down the practice, as we have been reminded time and again in the generation since--and frankly there was no reason to expect the media to do so, since it has never been the slave to public taste that its functionaries so much whine about being. The truth is that they give the public sex scandal because rather than this being demanded of them, or their misapprehension about "what the people want." And it only partly has to do with how such stuff appeals personally to a press corps consisting of people who think, act, speak the part of gossipy courtiers to "the power elite."
What matters most is the fact that, contrary to the pretensions certain currents within identity politics sex scandal is entirely unthreatening to the status quo. A scandal in the world of high finance or government procurement, in the treatment of workers or the operation of the criminal justice system, in the exposure of consumers to danger or the environment to pollution--all of these tend to involve crimes of the powerful against the public, the exposure of which crimes often proves the tip of a very large iceberg, and attention to which makes many question the status quo. (What we misleadingly call "Watergate" went way, way beyond the planting of a few listening devices.)
Because of their nature sex scandals are very, very unlikely to do that. Indeed, they tend to shore up the status quo because they divert attention from (or eliminate space for) other, more material, matters, and indeed to the extent that the public does respond to them the associated sanctimoniousness, moral panic, appeals to prejudice that in this way as in so many others show the press corps to be a pack of Julius Streichers, fan the flames of culture war, with the results this past quarter of a century has shown. This is all the more the case given that, just as the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis observed of written laws, the unwritten standards against which the conduct of sex scandal offends, like cobwebs, catch the smaller and weaker actors, but not the really big malefactors. Some movie actor or independent film producer may be ruined by even a totally baseless charge--but others in spite of a whole multitude of well-founded and well-evidenced charges go on to the highest offices in the land and keep them, not even visibly slowed down by their rake's progress through life. And so the Streichers sink their teeth into them, grateful for the excuse to cover this and not something else as they set about their bad day's work.
No comments:
Post a Comment