Let’s Not Exactly, But Establish Something Equivalent To Say We Did...

 

I recently had the thrill of an epiphany marking the circle of history, a moment in media time that might have only best been appreciated by the likes of Marshall McLuhan or maybe Andy Warhol over sixty years ago.  It was in real time, and it really happened. The atmosphere around me almost turned sixteen-millimeter black-and-white.

Hearing some predictable little bullet interview with some self-proclaimed startup-business sage, amongst his top recommended ingredients necessary for the successful startup, he cited in passing the importance of having a published book. When the interviewer began asking about the type and nature of the book, and how thorough its content need be, the subject flatly denounced its significance.  His response was that the book’s existence, it’s handsome jacket and its retail existence on Amazon was all that was relevant on the startup interview frontier. The man’s own alleged multi-million-dollar success was nothing to sneeze at.  Although I’ve not acquired and read it, his own book must be one hell of a read.

With no disrespect to the business sage-author in that teensy little interview maybe no one heard but me in that avant-garde fly-on-the-wall moment, that glistening molecule of the irony of our society commenting on itself, the fellow interviewed was no less than the oracle at Delphi, the Greek chorus, stating very much simply what is our accepted media culture. It was the un-fakest news I’d heard in a very long time.

Watchdogs are pronouncedly all over the place. While we need them now more than ever with regard to personal products, environmental, food, medicine and the like, there really isn’t too much time and attention available to police, apprehend or shut down the theoretic or occupational liars that build their so-called credibility on those light, pliable, good looking blocks of painted styrofoam.  Though our culture is way more litigious now in a world of precarious credibility, buyers are expected to be even more wary and won’t get too much legal sympathy for their romantic inclinations of belief.

The bottom line is, if it looks good, do it.  Fewer and fewer today will bear even the intent to question one’s props.  We are existing in a world predicated more and more by the minute on presentation.  If the success of a blind date rests on how you look when you show up at first sighting in that restaurant lobby, multiply that exponentially with regard to an investor meeting or even a corporate interview, and you know what’s what.

Naturally, you won’t get that far or any further if you don’t know the respective “ropes”. But you’re meeting with people grading you not on what got you to the meeting, but on what you can impress them, and potentially others with, at face value.  A fake book is obviously a great start.

How did our culture arrive at one, business and otherwise, where “fake” is in too many ways tacitly acceptable..?  It seemed over one hundred years ago that no one took that irreverent, underground business known as the “moving pictures” to task for its handsome but fictional representation of wars or train robberies. Sixty or seventy years hence, when local and even network TV news divisions fell under fire for their “live-on-the-scene” captures that sometimes were not all they purported to be, the upheaval remained mostly within industry confines, viewers on the whole remaining untraumatized, and generally numb to a relatively accepted finite level of credibility within the media circus.

I won’t soon forget the week that something revolutionary called the Cable News Network, a creation of that Atlanta TV mogul Ted Turner got unveiled.  My mom and I were not rich enough to afford cable TV in 1980, but we did acquire the TV Guide with the gatefold listings for Premiere Week.  All of twelve, and already a heritage TV viewer, I was fascinated.  How much newscasting can they really churn out for twenty-four hours…..constantly..??  My mom offered that maybe they’ll have to start inventing news.  A prophet, she was.

It's not so much about “all the news that’s fit to print”, or abundance with the lack thereof anymore.  Maybe it used to be.  In times since that handsome reprimand, we’ve shifted focus to another criteria.

There may be less human operation in media now, and more “AI”, to any extent. But the audiences reached by these processed foods are in fact real humans, and make no mistake about it, audiences catch on.  If the object of the ball game drifts from accuracy and credibility to entertainment value, they will quickly understand, and grade accordingly. 

And entertainment value, as News Patriarchs of Milleniums Past once in their decline feared, and demonic creatures like Network’s Diana Christensen implored, is now, in a world drowning in available media, the only pliable and measurable value to anything.  Even information.  Even the relevant kind.

It’s the relevant part that actually for the first time ever begins to cause a problem. It reached some affecting levels when the whole COVID thing happened.  Naturally, there are many who question what a lack of spread in the existing media would have done to temper what became a psychotic scare.  Unfortunately, that one’s too big to untangle.  But it does question the fearful corporate-government manipulation of the media we see and hear.  All of it.

That whole odyssey has only served to further our more intelligent awareness of the eroding accountability of the available media.  There’s exponentially more of it now.  And inversely less of it on the whole can be taken seriously.

So who’s to blame for this..?  Corporate interests..? Government..? The late, great Ted Turner…? William Randolph Hearst..?  Rupert Murdoch..?

Maybe we need to harken back to that profound truth once quoted by the late, great Edward R. Murrow during that crisis known as the McCarthy Era.

In unveiling the veneer of the Senator, Murrow stated that maybe the greatest wound inflicted upon us Americans is the ones we inflicted upon ourselves, our false beliefs and fears, ones we submitted to in our embrace of cathartic ignorance.

Could today’s angered cry of “fake news” be the pain of a self-inflicted wound..?

Every day, a new website is built.  A new domain is approved and bought.  A new “news feed”, a new podcast.  A new book comes out, on line or on kindle. 

Some of these are actually at some point read or listened to by someone.  Some, like this little piece on this little blog, will be posted by the writer and read by no one.  But it sure does look handsome.

We don’t open newspapers anymore, we log on and scroll.  And those scrolls are no longer the elite product of hired writers, columnists and trusted scribes.  Podcasts, those available presentations that are reviving the medium our great grandparents knew as ”radio”, are now this very commonly approachable venue that does not require employment by a news or program director.  One need not meet with the likes of Frank Stanton or Ed Murrow to become one’s own Elmer Davis.  Just buy your equipment, voice your tirade, and upload..!  And now we can share and share alike.  We may have grown up in a world where our elders would growl at that idiot, Howard K Smith at the end of his ABC News editorial each night.  But in the adage of “if you think you can do better…”, the complaining ends and the doing begins..! Isn’t this what America is really all about..?!?

In some ways, perhaps it is. And too many of us are having a good time cooking and serving to even worry about who’s sampling our offerings in what is an overcooked buffet table at the most gluttenous event ever. We are obese with publicly presented matter in an egocentric world of people too entertained by the sound of their own voices and sight of their own words to even effectively share in one another’s company in one’s very own, exclusive sandbox.  I don’t really know too many people who read too many blogs or actually listen to too many podcasts. Most people are now too busy presenting their own.  And as far as successive accomplishments, if you can have the platform, do you really need the credibility…?

Less than fifty years ago saw the harvests of talk-show satire on TV. Programs like TVTV and Fernwood 2-Night consisted wholly of the pretend wallpaper predicated on the jokefulness of how easily credible any of that guff could sound. Today, that very guff is the real thing.  Not only do we know it  We’re buying it.  Guff is great, and you’ve got to admire the presentation..! Heck, I know the guy who did that podcast..!  No more six degrees of separation.  We all know these people.  What more credibility do you need..??

A musician I knew years ago once talked of the night he played with his twelve-piece band in a club one night where “there were more people on stage than in the audience”. And in his opinion, they gave the show of a lifetime.  On the once-presaged information superhighway now, there are many such presentations.  The real gift of it all is being the lucky patron in that club, that intelligent, alert, appreciative audience of one, who doesn’t really care how real it is, how credible it is, or even how long or short it is.  That one patron just wants a damn good show.  I hope one day, one quiet night, I’ll get to be that very patron.  In a world so full of it, it’s the best one can wish for.

 

-Noah F.