"McLuhan makes this point brilliantly:
most television is good news.
The good news is the advertising.
That's what it's about, and the bad news--the dead guys or the crime--
is to get the suckers into the tent, get the emotional pitch up. . . .
It's the freak show in order to sell the snow cone."
Lewis Lapham in dialogue
'I'm just curious: how do you propose to carry on the struggle against the Disney Company?'In a discussion with journalists from public radio, Harper's Magazine Editor Lewis H. Lapham described a future in which the media are integrated ever more closely with merchandising and corporate interests.
The event, sponsored by Monitor Radio and Public Radio International at the Public Radio News Directors Inc. conference in Minneapolis, Aug. 5, 1995, picked up a thread of discussion from a Monitor-sponsored panel at the Public Radio Conference in June, in which most speakers said the press has gone overboard with cynicism. But Lapham held that reporters aren't nearly cynical enough, at least about people who wield power.
A prize-winning essayist and former newspaper reporter and editor of Harper's since 1976, Lapham has written four books and hosted two public TV series--America's Century in 1989 and Bookmark, a series on books, in 1989-91. This lightly edited transcript was originally published in Current, Aug. 28, 1995. Published with permission of Monitor Radio.
Lewis Lapham: I'm sorry I don't have the eloquence of Henry V, because I would rally the people in this room as the woebegone British Army faced with the French nobility in the form of the Disney Co., which seems, to my mind, about to take over most of our news media.
We've had a very big week, as you all know. I mean, Disney acquires ABC on Monday, and on Wednesday, Westinghouse acquires CBS, and then yesterday, the House of Representatives passes a telecommunications bill which simply exaggerates the trend. And the trend, as far as I can see, is toward monopoly--toward a single voice speaking to the American public, presenting them with a very Disney-like version of the news and of the world. And in the opposition, I don't know where the opposition is, other than public radio, a few magazines, C-SPAN. The rest of it is, as far as I can see, either silence or Peter Jennings.
What's been happening this week, historically to my mind, began to happen in the '60s. As recently as 1960, there was something called the press, there was something called literature, there was something called drama, and there was something called the movies, and they were all different. They were distinct. People brought to each one of those forms a different set of standards and expectations.
Somewhere in the middle '60s, certainly by the end of the '60s, these various forms has fused into what we now know as ''the media.'' And the media is based on personality, it's based on celebrity, and it's based on a world that never was. Most of what is presented as television news is, to me, very much like the America that you see at Epcot Center. I mean, it's Tomorrow Land or Frontier Land or War Land, or whatever they happen to be selling that week.
This was made very clear during the Oklahoma bombing incident. For a few days, the story managed to take the top few seconds on CNN away from the O.J. Simpson trial. But it was presented in a conventional form, so that the sophisticated viewer--I think most people in the United States are by now very sophisticated viewers of television. I think something like one in five Americans has actually appeared on television. It's an extraordinary number. We are a nation of talk show guests. I mean, we instinctively know how to do it. You watch the crowd scene after a catastrophe, and a girl of 12 will sound like a ball player, saying it's for the team and it's just one game at a time.
I mean, we know all of that stuff, so you can look at in the first 20 minutes after the bombing, all the rest of the narrative could almost have been inferred. You knew what the concerned journalist was going to say, standing in front of the ruins of the Murrah Building. You knew exactly what the sages in Washington were going to worry about in terms of what's become of this great country of ours, and so forth. And you knew that within three or four days, the story would have disappeared, which it did.
That is because we are now accustomed to looking at news as entertainment, as pure spectacle. If we don't have the bombing in Oklahoma City, we'll have the war in Bosnia, and if we don't have the war in Bosnia, we'll have the invasion of Haiti, and if we don't have the invasion of Haiti, we'll have a race riot in Los Angeles, and somebody will constantly come up with a new diversion.
And, in the midst of all that, how do you talk to your audience, and what is it that you try to say? I assume that that's the question that all of you address every morning. Certainly it's the one that I address at Harper's Magazine, and I'm just curious to know among the people here, how do you propose to carry on the struggle against the Disney Co.? That's my question. So, if anybody wants to get into it, here is a point to begin.
Gordon Basham, news and public affairs director, KMUW-FM, Wichita: The difference between Disney and news is that one is fantasy and one is reality, and you now have fantasy in charge of reality, if you buy that logic.
I'm just wondering if you see a relationship between the skepticism and the cynicism that the American public has toward the media and the media's perceived skepticism about everything or cynicism to some degree of everything that takes place in the news.
The joke was told yesterday that when President Clinton was with the Pope, out fishing, the President walked on water, and the Washington Post reported it as the President couldn't swim. So, I'm just wondering if you see a link between the American public's cynicism toward the media and the media's cynicism or skepticism toward events that we report.
Lewis Lapham: Okay, the skepticism toward the media is traditional. I mean, when I was a young person--even in the '40s and during World War II, a high watermark of American patriotism and so on--I was brought up on the premise that one simply did not believe what one read in the newspapers. I mean, journalism as a source of high-mindedness or the truth is pretty much a canard. In the public opinion polls, the press rates something like 28 percent or 19 percent of the public confidence. They really ought to get five, as far as I'm concerned. I approach it with a good deal of, not cynicism but skepticism.
I mean, how can you come up with the so-called truth on the kind of deadlines that newspapers work on, or that broadcasters work on? So, the press is a best guess. It's the best that can be done in the time allowed or in the space allowed.
Often, when people use the word ''cynicism,'' what they mean is either skepticism or pessimism or lack of sentimentality. It usually isn't the full-throated, dog-like hatred of human beings that is what the word means. I think the American press is very sentimental. I don't think it's cynical at all. I mean, look at what sells. What sells is People magazine or Barbara Walters or Entertainment Tonight or Oprah Winfrey or The National Enquirer or Reader's Digest. This is the American media. And all of the stories are about the little blind boy who finds God or the person who was cured of AIDS or the drunk who finds true love.
I mean this is what the American media, 90 percent of it, is like: Hollywood movies. And the combination with Disney is a match made in heaven as far as I can see. I mean, the truly cynical reporter wouldn't keep a job for 20 minutes in the present Washington.
Basham: If I could follow up on that, I bump into a lot of people who, when I ask them what they do, they tell me; and when they ask me what I do and I say I'm a journalist, they say, ''Oh, really.'' And the implication there, or perhaps the inference on my part, is: journalists are not thought very highly of because we're always reporting bad news.
I try to defend the fact that news is news--it's neither good nor bad, it is simply the news. But seemingly the perception of the American public is that we do nothing but report bad news, and I'm not sure whether that's cynicism or skepticism or what.
Lewis Lapham: The bad news is what sells the good news. In other words, the way it works, and Marshall McLuhan makes this point brilliantly in Understanding Media in 1964: most television is good news. The good news is the advertising. That's what it's about, and the bad news--the dead guys or the crime--is to get the suckers into the tent, get the emotional pitch up.
The formula works like this. In New York you start the evening news with somebody being brought out in a body bag. You know, five people have been killed in Harlem, there's a train wreck, there's a fire, there's war in Bosnia, there's the O.J. Simpson trial. That's the first five minutes, and then we go to the commercial. And the commercial is American Airlines taking you to paradise, or you're going to ride to heaven on the American Express card, if you pay your bills.
First they give you the vision of hell, which is what scares the viewer and sets up the good news, which is the advertising, which is the way the game is played. So that the idea that the media does bad news is just not true at all. It's part of the pitch. It's the freak show in order to sell the snow cone.
Michael Flaster, KPBS, San Diego: How do you reconcile the move on the Hill towards more decentralization of government and more decentralization of authority with the move these days, especially with the passage of the Telecommunications Act and these mergers, towards a more centralized media and a move towards a more rigid content control by the government, such as the V chip and some of the FCC's moves towards content control?
Lapham: I love it--the V chip. It's as if morality is a home appliance. Pretty soon they'll put in machines that will break down your adulterous thoughts. I think the government or the Republicans or the Gingrichs of the world--Gramm and Buchanan and the Christian Coalition--are seeking freedom for property on the one hand and oppression of people on the other hand, so that they can deregulate the airlines, create monopolies out of the communications industries, make it possible to make genuinely serious amounts of money by polluting the environment or cutting down the trees and poisoning the rivers.
They had a measure in one of the bills last week, they didn't have to inspect meat anymore, right? So, all of this is freedom for capital, and it follows the trend of privatization that's been taking place--it's consistent with GATT, it's consistent with NAFTA. And on the other hand, more and more control of behavior: no smoking, no violent images on the television, and so forth. The subtraction of civil rights that's been going on for the last 15 years, if you added it all up, it's truly impressive.
You can be stopped and searched without a warrant; just because you look suspicious in an airport, you might be carrying dope. Your boat can be searched, your house--all without warrants in the name of the war against drugs or in the name of Christian charity or something. So, it simply means that money is more important than people. All freedom and power to money, and as little freedom and power to people as possible.
Dale Harrison, news director, Northwest Public Radio, Pullman, Wash.: Can you comment on what's referred to as the Information Superhighway, the Internet, the Web sites--all of the ways of bypassing the mainstream media and all of the other filtered means of communications, where folks can form their own interest groups? How does that affect or make irrelevant what happens to the mainstream media? I mean, so what if the big guys own everything, if I can get my little group of people together on the Net, can't we just kind of bypass that?
Lapham: Yes, we can, and the big guys are going to be wanting to shut down those possibilities as quickly as they can. They're starting already with the notion of trying to regulate pornography on the Internet. The big guys have no interest in the Internet at all unless they can control it, and there are several bills in Congress.
It's like the American West in the first 50 years, after the Civil War, full of odd characters and mountain men and trappers and people of very eccentric views expressing themselves very freely. And then once capital begins to settle the West after the Civil War, it becomes railroads. The individual--the cowboys--are gone in 20 years. In 1890, almost all of the Western lands are owned by large corporations.
It's the same kind of thing today. There are present-day robber barons. The equivalents of the railroad guys in the late 19th century are people like John Malone or Ray Smith or Michael Eisner. If we still had the cruel and cynical press that we believe we have but don't--I mean, Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly--they'd have had cartoons of Malone, Eisner, Murphy dressed like pigs. There would have been these little pig-feet trotters, and they'd have been very fat and they'd have had radio stations coming out . . .
Remember, even a year ago, there was some talk about interactive, about how you get to talk back to your television set. That's gone. I mean, it depends how they set up the system. If they build the system with a certain kind of circuitry, you're never going to be able to talk back to your cable. They don't want you to talk, they want to sell you things.
They know who you are, of course. Particularly when you can connect it to a telephone company and they have your telephone records, they will know a great deal about you as a consumer, which is what they're interested in. They're not interested in you as a citizen, they're interested in you as a consumer.
So, okay, this is the technique: the movie starts and it says, ''Paramount Pictures presents . . .'' and then a light starts flickering on the left side of the screen, and you can hit your menu, you can hit your controller, whatever that is, stop the picture, and an announcement will come up and say, ''You're about to see this wonderful movie, wouldn't you like something to eat?'' And you'll say, okay, and push the next button, which will give you a list of the restaurants within a circle of about, in New York, eight square blocks. And then you can pick Chinese, pizza, whatever. You order on the phone and it goes to your cable bill, or you can order with the controller, as far as I know.
Okay, the food's on the way. The drink's on the way. We go back to the movie, and so we're two scenes into the movie or three scenes into the movie, and the light comes on again, right? And you stop and they say, ''Do you want Demi Moore's dress?'' ''Do you want Michael Douglas' haircut?'' ''Do you want the horse?'' ''Do you want the dog?'' ''Do you want the chair?'' Anything in this picture is for sale, and you do the same sort of thing; you go through the menus and they give you the circle of stores that are prepared to deliver, even in the dead of night. So, that's not very interactive.
The next thing they've got, they're set up so that you can bet, again with your cable bill, up until 15 seconds before face off, tip off, kick off, whatever it is. You can bet just like you order a movie in a hotel room, right? And they let that one go through, and the Disney Co. literally will own most people in America.
Even a year ago magazines like Wired, the hip information-highway magazines, we were talking a lot about the interactive, and it's gone. It's gone as far as cable is concerned; that's out of the question.
The Malones of the world were not interested in that, just the way the railroad guys weren't interested in it or the oil people with the pipelines. Some of that is still alive and well on the Internet, but the question is, how long is it going to be permitted? I would hope forever, but I think you'll begin to see speeches about terrible moral fiber of America is being torn apart by computer hackers. They'll have a whole alphabet of chips.
Sam Fleming, news director, WBUR-FM, Boston: Are you optimistic at any level about the media's ability to win back the confidence of the American public? And will we ever see a time where public policy is debated in the way that we sometimes we get, although it's rare?
It was brought out yesterday that, I think, the first debate of the presidential campaign between Clinton and Bush had higher ratings than the World Series that night. And I think we all know that at times, the public is engaged and interested in talking about the country's problems and is aware of them at a gut level; and yet they like to read People magazine and don't want to bother with public policy. And I'm just wondering if you have any optimism, and especially in light of what's happened in the last week, that the media can come back and do a responsible job without feeling so much pressure to entertain and do whatever they do to sell soap.
Lapham: Well, I have a lot of hope on individual levels. I mean, when you say ''the media,'' no, I don't have any hope. I mean, because ''the media'' implies large corporations that don't have any interest in that. But I think Rush Limbaugh appeared out of nowhere, whenever it is, 10 years ago, and now has an audience of 20 million. I mean, I agree that he's a liar and a clown, but--imagine my defending Limbaugh!--but they do talk about public policy.
You're right, people are interested in it, and how to capture their attention is our problem, I think. I mean, it's not a problem that the Gannett newspapers are concerned about. It's not a problem that Malone is concerned about, but it's a problem that we should be concerned about. It's certainly the problem I'm concerned about, and I assume it's a problem that everybody in this room is concerned about. So, then it becomes a matter of skill, talent, courage, all of those good old American virtues.
It's a tough problem, and I do think that we're going through a period in the country where we had for many, 40, years, we had the Cold War to define ourselves. We could say, well, we're not Russians, we're not communists, and we had an enemy of large and grotesque and malevolent size and force and so forth. Now remove the Cold War, remove the international communist conspiracy, remove the reasons to be constantly terrified of the nuclear weapons, and Americans begin asking themselves all kinds of interesting questions.
I mean, I think there's been turmoil and argument going on here since 1989 or '90, when the Berlin Wall came down. And the early forms of it are taking resentment. It's expressed itself as, ''wait a minute, America was supposed to be better than this,'' and that's what Perot ran on in '92--the attack on Washington, the attack on why are they spending so much money?, why are they driving around in limousines?, what happened to the American dream?, why don't we have any money?, and so on.
The questions have become increasingly angry, passionate. The reactionary right has capitalized on this. The vision of the reactionary right is very clear. It's a safe suburb surrounded by a high wall and private police force and a beautiful golf course and lots of speeches about American initiative, and the rich know what to do with money and the poor don't. I mean, the argument about welfare is absurd. First of all, the amount of money that's given to the poor in this country is very small compared to the amount of money that's given to the defense industries and the farmers and people just being able to take deductions on their mortgages. The real gifts in this country are given to the middle class and the affluent.
But the notion that somehow money in the hands of the poor corrupts them, but money in the hands of the rich enobles them is, on it's face, foolish. The vision on the right is clear. They have an idea of what they want America to look like, and it is like a well-defended suburb with a lot of rules about how high you can grow your trees and what color you can paint your garage and what names you can give your dog, and so on.
I'm not making this up; and the people on the left--there isn't any left anymore--but the people of a more liberal turn of mind have yet to articulate what it is that they're working toward, what is it that you want?, what do you believe in?, what do you see? There's no vision among the Democrats, and there really hasn't been for 20 years as far as I can see. So, if we don't mount a counter--you can't beat something with nothing. And the right makes fun of people like me and properly so because--what are we going toward? What do we want? I'm sorry: last question.
Larry Abramson, NPR: I'm really sort of baffled to hear your description of all of these choices being forced down the throats of Americans, when I think many of us can relate personal experiences of parents who more or less refuse to turn off the television and more or refuse to turn off the violence that's coming into their house, that a lot of the choices that you're talking about really do boil down to personal choices that people continue to make over and over again in favor of the nefarious entities that you're describing, whether it's Disney or Westinghouse.
Right now, the basic fact is, the American people have such a surfeit of information available to them, whether you think these are good or bad sources of information. Forgetting about online services, I can get the New York Times in any city in this country. When I was growing up, that was never true. It's true of many other newspapers. The number of local non-stop news channels--New York One, Washington Channel Eight--it's really quite stunning. And I have to wonder whether the logic that you're pushing here really isn't telling people that, well, the big guys are going to push all of these choices down our throat and we don't really have any choice, so there's really nothing to do, whether the thinking that you're representing here doesn't inspire a kind of passivity rather than saying that individual choice really is important and people should seize that choice.
Lapham: No, I'm sorry I've given a false impression. Yes, of course you have a lot of choice, and you have to be active about it. The advertising business does work, Disneyland does work. So, it is a formidable force. In order to combat it, in order to say, ''I won't have a television in the house'' or ''you can't look at that show'' or ''I choose not to believe what I read in the New York Times and instead I will believe what I read in The Nation or The Progressive or Harper's Magazine, requires an act of intelligence and an act of decision. And I agree with you, that's our only hope.
I mean, that's what I'm counting on. That's what I count on as the editor of Harper's Magazine. That's what I assume the news directors in this room count on, but it's a minority. It's a minority that's under increasing attack, I think. I utterly agree with your hope and faith in the individual act of refusal or however you want to define it. I just think that those kinds of people and those kinds of acts have to be encouraged. Thank you very much.
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