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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The Media and Medievalism By Robert D. Kaplan |
| 2005-11-09 |
| In light of the current media techniques and the burning in France this article from Dec-Jan 2004 Policy Review needs to be revisited. "The most blatant tyranny is the one which asks the most blatant questions." so begins this very good opinion piece. [..] 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. [..] |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #1 Bad link. the quoted part comes very close to my favorite part, which goes something like - thus, the media doesn't report on the 90% that's good, or even the 9% that's bad, but focuses on the 1% that's morally reprehensible. In essence, he says the media is to the 21st century what the medieval inquisition was to the 16th century - in search of perfection, and will accept nothing less. Fits with the witch hunts, does it not? |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-11-09 16:06 |