UNCHECKED:

The Media and Medievalism (Robert D. Kaplan, December 2004, Policy Review)

As this is an age in which we are bombarded by messages that tell us what to buy and what to think, when one dissects the real elements of power — who has it and, more important during a time of rapid change, who increasingly has it — one is left to conclude bleakly: Ours is not an age of democracy, or an age of terrorism, but an age of mass media, without which the current strain of terrorism would be toothless in any case.

Like the priests of ancient Egypt, the rhetoricians of ancient Greece and Rome, and the theologians of medieval Europe, the media represent a class of bright and ambitious people whose social and economic stature gives them the influence to undermine political authority. Like those prior groups, the media have authentic political power — terrifically magnified by technology — without the bureaucratic accountability that often accompanies it, so that they are never culpable for what they advocate. If, for example, what a particular commentator has recommended turns out badly, the permanent megaphone he wields over the crowd allows him to explain away his position — if not in one article or television appearance, then over several — before changing the subject amid the roaring onrush of new events. Presidents, even if voters ignore their blunders, are at least responsible to history; journalists rarely are. This freedom is key to their irresponsible power.

There is nothing irresponsible per se about publishing one’s opinions. In fact, government would be worse off with no pundits than with too many of them. Pundits, in one form or another, have always had a role to play in free societies. But the ongoing centralization of major media outlets, the magnification of the media’s influence through various electronic means and satellite printing, and the increasing intensity of the viewing experience in an age of big, flat television screens has created a new realm of authority akin to the emergence of a superpower with similarly profound geopolitical consequences.

Were Fox News, say, to make a tonal adjustment in its coverage, if only for the pecuniary motive of stealing some liberal viewers from CNN, or were the New York Times to retire one or two of its columnists for the sake of a less wearisome and screechy op-ed page, the ramifications would be not only journalistic but political as well, and sufficient perhaps to affect the outcome of a future close election.

But the media are not agents of the decentralization of authority, which implies a healthy and orderly transformation of sorts. Rather, they are agents of the weakening of it. The very cynical compromises politicians increasingly need to make in a media-driven environment further immobilize them. Politicians are weaker than ever; journalists, stronger. To be regularly mouthing opinions on television is to be, as they say, accomplished: To be an assistant or deputy assistant secretary of state, defense, agriculture, or commerce — jobs requiring much higher levels of expertise and stress management — means often to slip into oblivion, at a significantly lower salary. A journalist friend who had been a presidential speechwriter agreed that were a successful journalist to accept a typical assistant or deputy assistant secretary’s slot, it would be as though he had gone missing for four years.

The medieval age was tyrannized by a demand for spiritual perfectionism, making it hard to accomplish anything practical. Truth, Erasmus cautioned, had to be concealed under a cloak of piety; Machiavelli wondered whether any government could remain useful if it actually practiced the morality it preached.1 Today the global media make demands on generals and civilian policymakers that require a category of perfectionism with which medieval authorities would have been familiar. Investigative journalists may often perform laudatory service, but they have also become the grand inquisitors of the age, shattering reputations built up over a lifetime with the exposure of just a few sordid details. When the staff of a show like 60 Minutes decides which stories to pursue and which to leave half-finished on the cutting room floor, the destiny of any number of people is quietly being determined. That is actual and not virtual authority, however responsibly it may be employed: more authority, often, than any congressman or senator has. And as the editorial tastes of the tabloids dissolve into those of the mainstream media, the pace of character destruction quickens.

The media clerisy flatter themselves on inheriting the early twentieth-century muckraking tradition of investigative journalism. But investigative journalism is, both chronologically and philosophically, just as much a legacy of the 1960s youth rebellion, in which, as Samuel Huntington wrote in his greatest book, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1981), “the arrogance of power was superceded by the arrogance of morality.” As secrecy became synonymous with evil in the late 1960s, exposure was elevated from a mere technique to a principle.

In The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (2002), the academic Philip Bobbitt builds on this notion. He observes that, “In the market-state, the media have begun to act in direct competition with the government of the day.” The media “are more nimble than bureaucrats hampered by procedural rules,” even as they are “protected in many countries by statutes and constitutional amendments.” He adds that the “critical function of the media in the market-state is similar to that of the political parties of the Left in the nation-state.” Bobbitt is not here calling the media left-wing. For all one knows, he may believe that they have become, in certain quarters, dangerously right-wing. No, Bobbitt leads one on the path of a different insight: that the essential role of the left has always been to question and expose authority. For it has been the left’s very fear of authority that makes it uncomfortable with the concept of leadership. People on the left rarely write books about leadership and taking charge: That is the domain of business and military types. Leaders must choose, and because even right choices may produce imperfect outcomes, there will always be much to criticize — and to expose. Thus, left-wing journals can be brilliant even as they are ultimately irresponsible. And so, as the nation-state slowly dies and market forces sideline the old left in the wake of communism’s defeat, its function must be assumed by a new historical actor.

To the extent that the left is still vibrant, I am suggesting that it has mutated into something else. If what used to be known as the Communist International has any rough contemporary equivalent, it is the global media. The global media’s demand for peace and justice, which flows subliminally like an intravenous solution through its reporting, is — much like the Communist International’s rousing demand for workers’ rights — moralistic rather than moral. Peace and justice are such general and self-evident principles that it is enough merely to invoke them. Any and all toxic substances can flourish within them, or manipulate them, provided that the proper rhetoric is adopted. For moralizers these principles are a question of manners, not of substance. To wit, Kofi Annan can never be wrong.

Still, cnn — and in particular, cnn International — cannot be defined simply as a left-wing network. Look at the latter’s exotic female anchors, so chic and exquisitely made-up. Rosa Luxemburg never looked like that. cnn International is a global cosmopolitan network, just as Fox News is an old-fashioned nation-state network gaudied up by the latest technology (and because the meatloaf world of the old nation-state will remain feisty for a few decades yet, Fox has hit a gold mine2). Global cosmopolitanism is a world of multiple passport holders and others whose business and income give them easy access to many countries even as they have less and less of a stake in any particular one of them. Just as journalists are not bureaucratically accountable for their views — disseminated with all the power brought to bear by new technology — global cosmopolitans are increasingly unaccountable to geographical space, or to a specific government, or even to fellow voters. Their friends and acquaintances are spread throughout the planet, and with less of a stake in geography, they are dull to pleas of national interest even as they are alive to those of “humanity.” That is to say, they represent the well-worried. As Somerset Maugham remarked in The Moon and Sixpence (1919), moral indignation always contains an element of self-satisfaction.

The principal weapon of the global media, as of any media, is exposure. After all, there will be always be something reproachable to expose in even the best-functioning governments and bureaucracies, as such organizations are by nature supremely imperfect. Of course, too much exposure can immobilize government, but if you don’t have a concrete stake in any particular place, that shouldn’t matter. The very fact of exposure — and the moral satisfaction that derives from it — is, pace Canetti, pleasurable.

Exposure is the particular terrain of the investigative journalist. It is the investigative journalist who has inherited the mantle of the old left, whatever the ideological proclivities of individual practitioners of the trade. The investigative journalist is never interested in the 90 per cent of activities that are going right, nor especially in the 10 per cent that are going wrong, but only in the 1 per cent that are morally reprehensible. Because he always seems to define even the most heroic institutions by their worst iniquities, his target is authority itself. Disclaimers notwithstanding, he is the soul of the left incarnate.

When every major domestic policy decision or military operation is characterized on the basis of its worst flaws, leaders become increasingly risk averse, for they know that anything even vaguely heroic, simply by definition, must masquerade as failure until such time as there is no electoral benefit to be gained from it.

All of this raises an obvious question: if the press has become an unfettered power unto itself rather than a helpful check on the State then hasn't that portion of the 1st Amendment which protects the press outlived its usefulness?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 14, 2004 5:31 AM