Recently I've been watching documentaries by loyal BBC
employee and all around adept documenter Adam Curtis. His voice soothes like every story he tells
were a bedtime story, and he has the patience of 8000 Terracotta soldiers. I am amazed at his ability to provide quality
factual programming while somehow avoiding censorship.
His best known work is Century of the Self, a 4 part journey
following the effect of psychoanalysis on consumer culture and world politics. In my next few posts I'm hoping to tie
some of the ideas of his documentary with other pieces of things I've
found. What I've been focused on mostly
on the role of the media, what it is and what it actually is doing. Curtis points out very early in the first few
minutes Freud's (love him or hate him, this is important) deduction that
information was driving human behavior in indirect ways, at an emotional and
almost animalistic level. His nephew Ed
Bernays used this information to create market consulting and eventually focus
groups, finding out what people's unconscious ideas were relating to objects,
and then giving people what they wanted but didn't realize it was what they
wanted, in the form of consumer products like cigarettes and cake mix. The idea is that you play to people's
irrational emotions, because they knew what the people they were targeting
wanted and presented the product as a means to get what it is they really
wanted. This is important for
understanding advertising, to begin with, but related and also important is
that the news media plays to irrational emotions, too, and there is no reason
they wouldn't use similar tactics.
But what would be the media's end goal? To sell more papers? Print barely exists any more, and although
many institutional news sources have complained about steep drop in newspaper
revenue, somehow they manage to scrape by and carry on their messages. I'm used to the media never ever telling me
anything critical about the media, because maybe that does not sell as many
papers, and so I was surprised when I found this article written by Neil
Macdonald on CBC news (June 6, 2013). As
the CBC correspondent in Washington, he wrote an article here discussing his
confusion around media coverage in the United States, the fact that the
American army sexual assault scandal received little or no coverage, while the
IRS scandal is getting constant priority coverage by all the major American
media outlets.
Even though the media does enjoy referring to news (as
referring to news coverage of the news or the media talking about the media)
and sporadically commentating on the effect the media has, in a general way, it
is rare that someone talks about what it means in the broader context, let
alone as problematic. In the end, Neil
asserts the media does not cover it because American's aren't interested in the
story. He surmises the reason American's
are not interested is because it is somehow communicated to their society as a
whole not to be interested, not to care, it is embarrassing. The IRS story is only embarrassing for some
people, problems in the military is embarrassing for all Americans. But is anyone outside of America concerned
either? The American army is huge and
has exerted a massive influence as long as the country existed. Nobody seems to indicate that they care about
the news story, nationally or internationally, and I suppose it will be gone
rather quickly.
In Century of the Self, Curtis states that the position of
democracy in America became one where they want to maintain the current
relations of power, and they could do it by stimulating the psychological lives
of the public (ie war on communism), that is, stimulating particular emotions,
the same "irrational self" that was being used to convince the
advertisement-viewing public to buy products they don't need. Only by this application, the emotions
invoked can sell people on the decisions of the president so it can do what it
wants to do.
A faction of Americans
want to believe Obama ordered the IRS to destroy his enemies. I have not been able to see any of the news
footage on the military rape charges or the IRS scandal, but if we apply the
ideas in Century of the Self, then we can clear Neil Macdonald's confusion
through the explanation that the emotions invoked by the media are perhaps
apathy while covering the military court coverage, and invoking strong
bipartisan emotions like anger for the anti-Obama camp and maybe even some
other emotions for people that still like Obama.
Neil ends his articles drawing some poignant conclusions, all
the while having no idea why this is being done. Maybe he is savvy enough to know the answers
but not be the one to break kafabe. "Even the media doesn't believe what they
are saying... they don't believe their own claims... Those of us who try to do
our job properly are just dupes." I
can't tell if the last statement is a cynical joke or if he honestly believes the
existence of pure journalism in mainstream media. My guess would be he likes his job and wants
to keep it.
On the internet, sometimes the most popular people are quite often people who, by consensus, are annoying, stupid, or straight up ridiculous. This is not constrained just to the internet, nor is it anything new (for reference see: Howard Stern, Alex Jones, or the collective media concept "TMZ"). Like other more easily recognizable forms of consumption, the internet simply facilitates the desire to watch a train wreck from a safe distance. Of course not only does the internet make it happen, but it happens faster and more effortlessly, so you can fit this entertainment in more easily in between going to work, sleeping and masturbating. 