Fabricated Trends: The Dark Secret of Sensationalism
Colin Lee
Television and Electronic Culture: Networks
All writing is slanted. Newspaper features are slanted. Poetry and fiction are slanted. History texts are slanted. The words of dictionary entries are carefully chosen according to conscious or unconscious cultural and political motivation. Philosophers have motives. René Déscartes probably didn't say, "I think therefore I am," because it looked good on a sewing sampler, nor was it likely a propagandistic lie to allow him to make a power grab against a monarch, but he had motives. The important thing to realize is that much of what writing and news reporting means to a culture is its slant—its motivated choice of words and connotations. No one wants to read or write a paper without adjectives in which every verb is an insecure usage of the verb, "to be." After all, journalists have an old adage, "There are no new stories, only new reporters"(Blundell, 1986).
Professor Noam Chomsky was in a unique position as an MIT linguistics professor to notice this inherent hidden motivation in our language when he wrote Manufacturing Consent, the most controversial and widely respected work on the political posturing of the mass news media. He argued that there are five filters to the news media which cause cultural elites to dominate the media while marginalizing dissidents: "size, ownership, and profit orientation," "the advertising license to do business," "sourcing mass media news," "flak and the enforcers," and "anti-communism as a control mechanism"(Chomsky, 1988). Online news media space is no more a free press for the countercultural individual than print or electromagnetic spectrum news media space. It's just limited in different ways. I would like to disprove the misconception that the on-line alternative press has any greater opportunity to place in doubt the mass news media's claims of objectivity. In doing so, I'd first like to discuss the limitations of online media, then I'll explain the concept of fabricated trends in journalism with examples, and finally, I'd like to cite examples of attempts to invalidate fabricated trends in the online alternative press along with why they don't factor into the world picture.
To quote another cynical adage, "Any man can have freedom of the press in America so long as he owns his own printing press." Suddenly, the computer comes along and everyone believes that one's Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer has the potential to become the New York Times. Flyering takes off like never before. The 'zine culture has its ten minutes of fame and then everyone hunkers down to watch the evening news on a station owned by Disney, GE, or AOL Time/Warner, logs on to internet backbone owned by MCI Worldcom, and is constantly bombarded by advertising and opinions recycled en masse from the Associated Press. People predicted that the old utilities and media would give way to the new, but instead we see state utility monopolies buying up all the broadband and old media buying out the new and the list of corporations shortens daily.
When I was in high school, I first joined forums on the internet in dreams of achieving vast, political, argumentative on-line celebrity. The American Cyber-Dream is to become an overnight success as an e-zine author. Everyone wishes to have a fan club drooling over one's latest phrases. People whisper of Salon, Wired, Matt Drudge, or Slashdot as if reporting and interpreting the news on the global interconnected networks were somehow a meritocracy free from all the limitations of print and spectrum.
However, these examples of successful online news media ventures are not without clear failure. Salon's stock price has been so low that rumors abound of a buyout, Wired was bought out when it was doing poorly, and Matt Drudge got hired and fired by ABC. Of those four, only Slashdot, a magazine produced by the technological elite, may hold out for a while to takeover by traditional news media.
Robert McChesney sees this manifest destiny of the Web as a huge money-losing attempt to fight for the survival of broadcast profiteering media in the new digital age. As he cites in his essay,
The great fear for the media firms is that the Web will breed a new generation of commercial competitors who take advantage of the medium's relatively minuscule production and distribution costs. And its greatest fear is that the broadband Web will lead an entirely new media regime that makes the corporate media giants irrelevant and obsolete... [However,] as Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin has put it, it is "not clear where you make money on it"(Landler,1998:9); but even if the Web takes a long time to develop as a commercial medium, it is already taking up some of the time that people formerly devoted to traditional media (Richtel, 1998)... Most of the Web activities of the traditional media have been money losers and some have been outright disasters. As one media executive puts it, in Internet business, "losses appear to be the key to the future" (Wolff, 1998:18)... This is one of the distinguishing characteristics of media firms as they approach the World Wide Web in comparison to entrepreneurs who want to use the Web to become media content providers: the media firms have a long time frame in mind, and very deep pockets; they simply cannot afford to abandon ship(2000,24-25).
This old media takeover of new media is highly germane to journalistic integrity, objectivity, and avoiding sacrificing all ethics for profit. Since the Fifties, the National Association of Broadcasters have successfully lobbied to change the rules of the Federal Communications Commission to remove all sense of public responsibility in favor of pure profit motive. This destroyed the journalistic integrity of broadcast news, according to Walter Cronkite,
[The concentration of media ownership] is playing a big part in [the journalistic integrity of broadcast news] in this sense, in my happy days there, the ownership of the three networks was still in the family hands of those who had founded the radio networks and moved into television. These men had learned the responsibility of their networks and their own stations, at the hands of the congressmen who put together the Federal Communications Act. They were there at that time. They knew, they learned from the congressmen themselves, what their responsibility to the public was going to be. As you know, in the Federal Communications Act for renewal of station licenses, which comes every couple of years - I forget what it is right now, they've changed it - anybody can challenge a license and the station has to justify the fact that it has served the public good in its community. That means fair, honest news reporting. These fellows knew that. The present management are business people, entertainment people. They have absolutely no or very little comprehension, although I think it's their responsibility. They will make the point that with all the cable channels, there are plenty of voices out there and they can pretty well do what they want, which is make their news departments profit centers. And as profit centers today, as opposed to the prestige item that news used to be with these old owners, it makes a difference. That is accounting for the news departments having to water down their serious news in favor of running vacuous news or vacuous items that are no news at all(Ward, 2000).
When
editorials are so fluidly tossed in the middle of "hard news"
and advertisements and comedian commentary, people will trust almost
everything as news. It has nothing to do with TV being inherently
lowbrow and everything to do with the juxtaposition of fact, fiction,
opinion, and advertising. They tell you what they're going to tell
you, tell you it, and then tell you what they told you with
advertising and editorials interspersed so that the story never gets
in-depth and the viewers are in a constant state of suspended
disbelief. They don't even know what's being done to them.
Trend
journalism, which I prefer to refer to as fabricated trends, is one
of the darkest secrets of media sensationalism. Consider
Columbine. Prior to the school shootings in Columbine, the
Associated Press collected a history of school shootings in the last
year and dressed it up as a trend. In fact, including Columbine,
there were seven "shootings" that the AP wished to draw
attention to. In all seven cases, the shooters were white boys. In
one case, there were no shots fired and nobody killed nor injured.
In that one case, a white boy had merely come to school with a
handgun. Apparently, this didn't strike many people as odd, since
national hysteria was rampant throughout the entire debacle.
However, in inner-city schools such as those near the Chicago
projects, handguns are so common that metal detectors seem trivial
and shots are often fired near to the schools in gang wars. I can't
say that the nine months prior to Columbine were ordinary among white
male youth murders, but I can say that overall murder rates by youths
had been dropping steadily prior to the school shootings "trend."
Evidence would indicate that the trend of school shootings was
largely fabricated by the AP to create news. Columbine was, in part,
a copycat of the media's own false reporting of true events.
The
AP passes the buck to Hollywood. This seems strange, but not
surprising. There would seem to be some overlap in the industries,
but certainly not enough that Disney would need to worry about its
own self-censorship. Perhaps the best evidence of fabricated trends
is to look back on the AP fabricated trend one year earlier. How
many people still remember the national crisis of black church
burnings? Now, looking back on federal statistics, it would
surprisingly appear that that year had been a normal year for church
burnings. Michael Fumento points to Michael Kelly's work in his
article, "From 'the evidence to date,' Kelly concluded, the true
picture of black-church fires is less clear, and less apocalyptic,
than what the public has been led to believe. . . . Some of the
black-church fires were accidents. Racism is strongly indicated in
fewer than half of the black-church fires investigated to date. Other
motives include mental instability, concealment of theft, and
vandalism." If we accept the statistics and that some of the
burnings were entirely "acts of god," then sensationalism
in the media would appear to be much more creative fact-telling than
hype(Fumento, 1996).
Feminist author, Susan Faludi, writes of the
phenomenon she refers to as trend journalism in her book,
[The
trend story] professes to offer "news" of changing mores,
yet prescribes more than it observes. Claiming to mirror public
sentiment, its reflections of the human landscapes are strangely
depopulated. Pretending to take the public's pulse, it monitors
only its own heartbeat—and its advertisers'. Trend
journalism attains authority not through actual reporting but
through the power of repetition. Said enough times, anything can
be seen as true. A trend in one publication sets off a chain
reaction, as the rest of the media scrambles to get the story, too.
The lightning speed at which these messages spread has less to do
with the accuracy of the trend than with journalists' propensity to
repeat one another. And repetition became especially hard to avoid
in the '80s, as the "independent" press fell into very
few corporate hands(1991, p.79).
One could do worse than to
view fabricated trends in the media as merely very credible
advertising for political and cultural mores and action. David
Ogilvy once made the observation that ad agencies will make ads that
look like ads, but people prefer to read that which "looks"
like news. He then urges advertisers to emulate the news and the
forms therein. Broadcast news has taken this to the next step, which
is to actually report ads as news in many cases. Pfizer's Viagra is
an excellent example. When the media is reporting the efficacy of a
drug, it is in no way different from the less believed claims of the
advertising in between television shows.
Fabricated trends has
also destroyed the infallibility of experts, which is good. However,
it has gone ever farther to lead to the demise of epistemology, which
is damaging to our culture and leads to the backlash against
intellectualism. In the mass TV media, one notices more and more how
real experts are actually replaced by people on the street and late
night comedians whose clips were co-opted to replace real
commentary.
In Susan Faludi's Backlash, she discusses how
trend stories never quote the groups they are about. Rather, trend
stories would tend to quote a dean's list of experts with political
agendas: psychologists, sociologists, doctors, and scientists. It is
this reliance upon these traditional figures of truth and knowledge
to expouse evidence supporting the beliefs of the media's elite which
creates a betrayal that leads to the distrust of intellectuals. The
media can then quote this distrust as needed to refute scientific
arguments presenting hard evidence.
I'd like to mention what I
believe to be an even more extreme example from my personal
experience than Faludi's falsely-alleged "bra-burning."
Hacker conferences have existed around the nation since about the
beginning of the Nineties, but the media has been slow to "discover"
them. If anything is obvious territory for sensationalizing these
days, these conferences are. If computer scientists have anyone to
thank for this reputation, it's John Markoff of the New York Times
who quit his job to make millions writing fairy tales about one
nuisance to the corporations by the name of Kevin Mitnick, the first
so-called "cyberterrorist."
I went to such a conference
this summer by the name of Rootfest, in spite of the fear of silly
accusations of impropriety in my field that have prevented my
attendance in previous years. The press, as always, had vans all
over in spite of the meager mid-week attendance. There were quite a
few interesting experts at this year's conference including Adam
Beberg, founding member of distributed.net and international expert
on distributed systems, Brenno DeWinter (of the DeWinter security
firm in the Netherlands), the US Bank security team, a firewall
expert from Checkpoint and others. One has to ask why the St. Paul
Pioneer Press reporter didn't interview one of these intelligent and
respected people and instead chose to interview a pack of sixteen
year-old boys sitting in the back of the room, showing off their
expensive Dell computers, who didn't belong at the conference.
What
was the topic of the interview, one might ask? Somehow, the reporter
caught these fools chatting about whether they were pigs because of
all the soda cans they'd left all over the table and decided that it
should convey the tone of the article. Never mind that I was there
to learn about developments in my field and was presenting my
collegiate research in "Active Response Using File
Integrity-Testing Intrusion Detection Systems" and was wearing
my SGI t-shirt and badge. WCCO (CBS) TV4 also managed to get an
interview with the individuals sponsoring the conference, but it
never aired, since it didn't meet the interviewer's obvious attempts
to spin the interview.
The fabricated trend here is obvious. The
reason for the trend would appear to be that, unlike their less
paranoid business programmer cousins, most computer security experts
are decidedly anti-corporate. One need only look so far as how few
security auditing companies choose to go public or even grow larger
than proprietorships and partnerships to realize that this is a field
that the profiteering bosses and bureaucrats can't control.
So
instead of fighting the technologists with debate over corporate
Libertarian ideals on equal footing, the corporate press chooses to
malign the computer scientists year after year by blaming every error
and misuse of technology by the public on the small technological
elite they despise. Spammers, e-mail fraud, and ATM thieves are quick
to be labeled hackers. Any crime committed using an electronic
device somehow becomes the fault of the entire computer security
field every time an article is written. Television American Express
credit card ads have even gone farther lately to label their credit
cards "geek-proof" instead of "cracker-proof" or
"hacker-proof," suggesting that the entire weary battle
over the politicized definition of the word "hacker" is
simply a ruse for media businesses to label all technological experts
as criminals. This shapes people's opinions and changes the
political discourse to exclude the opinions of the computer security
experts, who by the rules of epistemology would normally have the
most valuable opinions on electronic voting, for example.
The
security experts start to resemble Snowball of George Orwell's Animal
Farm. Constantly treated as a scapegoat by Napoleon, Snowball
chooses to run away--just like the "hackers" retreat to
their jobs and computers rather than risk being misquoted. While
computer scientists are unable to defend themselves or their beliefs
to the public, the media have target practice with them down the
barrel of trend journalism.
Coincidentally, Animal Farm
has an important message about media control, which Chomsky points
out in a recent interview,
There are some questions you don't ask, as was pointed out by George Orwell years ago. He wrote an essay, an important essay, maybe the most important one he ever wrote -- and it was not published, incidentally. It was the introduction to Animal Farm, which everybody's read in school. But you didn't read any introduction. The introduction was about censorship in England. He said, "Look, this is a satire about a totalitarian state, but we shouldn't be self-righteous -- it's not that different in free England." He said in free England there are many ways in which ideas that are unpopular will just not be able to be expressed. And he gave two ways. One, he said, is that the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. And second, he said, if you have a good education, you have internalized the fact that there are some things it just wouldn't do to say(Zupp, 2000).
A
simple, unorganized survey of American women today as to whether one
is a Feminist will raise a number of objections such as "Are you
calling me a lesbian?" or a "man-hater" or a
"bra-burner." Why are fabricated trends so effective in
affecting the views of our American culture? Charles Baron explains
how the media places their stories and fabricated trends of changing
mores on our Heideggerian "cultural map" or "world
picture that explains,"
The Times, in effect, draws for us a map of cultural acceptability. And like other maps, the Times version has its glittery centers, sprawling suburbs, outlying wilderness areas and wastelands. As the world turns, it reports on persons and events in such a way as to place them somewhere on this cultural map. The wholly admirable—celebrities, sports heroes, fashion models—typically occupy the central portions; the middling regions are given to the ordinary and the predictable; while near the margins are mapped the controversial and the eccentric. The wholly unacceptable are either not reported on at all (off the map), or, if they have somehow managed to acquire a voice and a soapbox from which to be heard, are marginalized as can best be done... Here the Times is staking a claim to objectivity, that supposedly solid foundation upon which the edifice of journalism is built... Contrary to the old saying, the facts never "speak for themselves." Someone always does it for them. A person may speak plainly of fact, but hardly any two eyewitnesses to the same event can agree on what the facts actually are. By the time journalists arrive on the scene, the facts have long since slipped away. With opinion and fact confused, the consequent reportorial distortion is inevitable. Objective truth in human affairs is an observably elusive quality and the media's casual claim to it is at best a promise and at worst a hype(2000).
Due to the Heideggerian world picture painted for us by the mass media, it becomes increasingly difficult to discredit the fabricated trends proffered by the mass media that find their way into the public consciousness. Unfortunately, the only way to completely discredit the Eighties backlash against Feminism now would be for the American people to painstakingly spread the word on the grassroots that they are Feminists, but most certainly not man-haters, bra-burners, or lesbians. The media burned in a strong message to the American world picture that this is where Feminists are.
Likewise, the fact that the fabricated trend of black church burnings that took place in 1996, just over a year prior to the trend of school shootings, has been widely discredited in the alternative press may never reach the people. The fact that the media no longer reports on the trend makes the people believe that the issue is over, but that year wasn't special. The issue, not the only problem, was racist groups and America now believes that issue has been solved when it hasn't.
What is the solution? I believe Walter Cronkite hit the head on the nail. The public should have the right to force the mass news media to either be accountable or lose their stations. With the rise of the internet, it may become more difficult than ever to do this.
Works Cited
Baron, Charles R. "Watching the Cultural Watchdog". The Grove (2000). Available online, at:
http://www.bamboogrovebooks.com/archives/articles.htm#1
Blundell, William E. The Art and Craft of Feature Writing. New York: Plume, 1986.
Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Crown Publishers, 1991.
Fumento, Michael. "Politics and Church Burnings". Commentary Magazine. October 1996. Available online, at: http://www.fumento.com/church.html
Landler, M. "From Gurus to Sitting Ducks". New York Times. January 11, 1998. sec.3, p 1,9.
McChesney, Robert. "So Much for the Magic of Technology and the Free Market". The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 2000. 5-35.
Richtel, M. "Survey Finds TV Is Major Casualty of New Surfing". New York Times. July 16, 1998. D3.
Ward, Ken Jr. "Cronkite Sees Good, Bad in News Gathering". Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail. November 26, 2000. Available online, at: http://www.sundaygazettemail.com/news/Other+News/2000112518/
Zupp, Adrian. "Who Runs America? Forty Minutes with Noam Chomsky". The Boston Phoenix. April 5, 1999. Available online, at: http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/04-05-99/boston_feature_3.html