Can we please stop using the phrase “the media”? It has no meaning. The media is liberal. The media is conservative. The media is to blame for ____________.
“The media” has become a kind of monolithic force exercising power over us, its helpless victims. That is evident in the now standard singular form it takes in our speech (media used to be plural, remember? One medium, many media.).
We can’t begin to address any of the problems we perceive in the media until we break out of this tendency to conceptualize it as some great singular force with power of its own. Various pieces of information published via multiple forms of media are produced and consumed by individual people with public and private agendas and complex influences. It is about as useful to talk about “the media” as it is to tackle to problems of “today’s society.”
Doctoral student and mother of two blogs about academia, motherhood, and the many intersections of the two.
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4 comments:
While Harrogate is sympathetic to your sensical plea to get past labels and have real discussion, he would humbly point out that for all its show of heterogeniety the national polyglot of television and print "media" actually finds itself owned by a rather tiny cabal of corporate interests.
For example, check out your numbers on Clearchannel or Viacom, two companies that own more outlets, across the country coast to coast, than you can shake a stick at. &c.
All of which is to say that in Harrogate's view, the "media" in this country is much more of a concentrated voice than your post implies. Call it a monolithically "conservative" voice or a "liberal" voice and you get it wrong. Call it only interested in what sells no matter what the cost, and you get it right.
Which corporate dominance does excellently reflect the Rethuglican Party which is after all this country's Majority Party. Jesus gets lots of lip service but at the end of the day here it's Mammon or bust, and always will be.
Witness the Orgy with which all media outlets run up War as soon as a President starts talking about it. Harrogate is convinced that in the _Seventeen_ Magazine, most 2001-2002 Issues made multiple references to "WMD's." It was all so exciting, so profitable, this business of going to war.
Witness too the constant cross-media Cult of the Missing White Woman: but rarely a squeak regarding the homeless, who really don't get anyone stirred up (they're not very sexy, after all).
I wholeheartedly agree!
Harrogate makes a good point, and I concede that there are massive conglomerates with perhaps more unified goals than I have suggested (although I am not certain that such a massive business entity can be said to have a uniform agenda). But "what sells" is another one of those frequently used phrases that need to be complicated. Why does it sell? Who, as anon asks, is buying? Are the consumers creating the demand that media producers fill in response? Or are do they buy because they have been influenced by media images and messages that convince them that they should want it? These questions are still too big to do much good. I am irritated lately with some particular issues that are way oversimplified and leave no room for useful discussion.
Harrogate, too, dislikes the tendency in us all to try and encapsulate really complicated stuff with a label or catch phrase. Indeed, he sees Sarah on that one, and raises her a Mick Foley-autographed flannel shirt.
Discussions like this need to be fruitful and multiply; actually, Harrogate thinks it perfectly suited for a blog devoted to questions of academia and parenthood. The specter of "the media" greatly impacts both of these sites, as all know.
If the question of "what sells" hits right at the twinned heart of politics and literary studies (as Harrogate believes it does), then it is doubly worth considering in terms of raising a child. Our little bitty children are not too far from indoctrination into consumer culture: some might argue they already are. What that means is a great question.
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