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The medium's temptations
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Aggressive, intrusive and pervasive television has also made inroads into intellectual and academic space. This is not only taking its toll on intellectualism but also giving the medium a vain sense of power over intellectuals, writes SASHI KUMAR, in the last of his three-part article.
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AP
The U.S. has pursued supremacy in the information sector as a conscious plank of its foreign policy.
IN a post-Cold War unipolar world, the so-called globalisation of the information sector is tantamount to the accession and celebration of an Americanised worldview, which incorporates regional variants to the extent that they subscribe to the larger scheme of things. The process by which that larger scheme is forged in the United States has been described in the path-breaking work by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, tellingly titled Manufacturing Consent. There is in the U.S., the authors argue, an implicit nexus between the mainstream media and the administration in `manufacturing' consent on crucial matters of war and foreign policy, which safeguards the American-centric global agenda. They point out that the U.S. media invariably subscribe to a `propaganda model', which is arrived at through a series of news "filters". There are five such definitive filters: (1) size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit orientation of the dominant mass media firms; (2) advertising as the primary source of income; (3) the dependence of the media on information provided by the government, business and `experts' funded by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) anti-communism as a national religion and control mechanism. The acquisitions and mergers that mark the telecommunications industry, Hollywoodisation that has virtually killed or subsumed every other cinema in the world, the neo-colonial drive by the U.S. into new information markets (south and south-east Asia and China) all point to an all round American ascendancy in the information age. From Truman to Bush, the U.S. has pursued supremacy in the information sector as a conscious plank of its foreign policy, spending over three trillion dollars since World War II to achieve this.
Today, in the aftermath of the iniquitous and shameful invasion of Iraq by the Coalition of the Willing — the label `Coalition of the Killing' is, of course, more appropriate — we are left stunned by another spectacle of death and destruction (TV screens gave us a ring-side view of this gladiatorial display by the U.S., the U.K. and their disparate gang of flunkies. What, however, we will eventually not be able to get over is the alacrity with which the dubious category of "embedded journalists" became complicit in the war game. The soldiers in uniform were almost sedate compared to these embedded eager beavers in fatigues from CNN or BBC and their counterparts at the studio end, who let their excitement run amuck, throwing all norms of credible, not to mention unbiased or even handed, reporting to the desert winds. They were as breathless about the Bedouin tribes they passed in the desert as about the false claims about the taking of Basra or Um Qasr, in take one itself). Faced with competing and conflicting versions — because there were alternative versions like A1 Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV for a change — they were glib in putting out constructs that explained their misreporting in the first instance: It's not that Basra was not or could not be taken, but there were Baathist elements holding out, using the people as human shield; it's not that the people did not want to hail the invaders as liberators, but they were wary after the previous 1991 experience when after such a demonstration of support, the U.S. forces left, and left them high and dry to face the wrath of the regime; but now that Saddam has been ousted and they have the run of the place why are the crowds chanting that the U.S. troops go home? Because, you must understand, they have had a miserable life all these years of sanctions and deprivation; it takes time to get them used to democracy... Through this charade every appearance of Saddam Hussein, whether in Iraqi TV or in a Baghdad neighbourhood as instantly and invariably suspect until the prolonged absence of any categoric rejection by Pentagon would evoke a half-hearted suggestion that it could indeed be Saddam and not his dupe. Every appearance of the BBC reporter in Baghdad was with the reminder to us by the studio anchor that his movements and his report are monitored by the Iraqi authorities; on the other hand we were never told that the embedded journalists had undertaken to follow a list of over 50 rules, set out by the coalition army, in their reporting. As the invasion progressed the camaraderie between the officers in uniform and the embedded media mongers became demonstrably more and more infectious in the official briefings and short field interviews, so much so that you often had Brigadiers or Generals suggesting that such and such a development or achievement for the invading forces would be "a good news story", and the reporter nodding in agreement. The montages and signature tunes that herald each fresh bulletin or special report of the invasion on CNN and BBC have the flourish of conquest; what follows furthers that mood. After the dust settles in Iraq, a bout of frank media bashing seems very much in order. Shooting the messenger is, no doubt, an unpardonable crime from the media point of view. But when the messenger begins to shoot from the hip?
One can, of course, turn the whole argument around and ask why one should expect CNN or BBC to be any different in times of war than the Indian or Pakistani media and their respective coverages of, say, the Kargil war. After all, American and British troops in Iraq are pretty much their boys on the war front. Why do we assume supra-national objectivity by the western media when our own approach has always been intensely nationalistic? Indeed the hoary tradition and legacy of the Indian press we cherish is its nationalistic beginnings and the role it played in the independence movement. Post independence, we have continued to equate the journalistic calling as the call of the nation, unmindful of whose call it actually turns out to be. Come globalisation, and we are suddenly confused. The nation state, we are told, is dead in the era of Direct Broadcast Satellite communications, because these satellite signals do not respect geographical boundaries. But, by a sleight of hand, the American state is the only nation state around. Its preoccupations become the obsession of the media in the rest of the world. This process is abetted by the fact that news sources and footage for television privilege the American way of life over the rest. Thus, in a process of fatuous tailism, O. J. Simpson and Monika Lewinsky become prime time obsessions for days on end as much in India as in the U.S., even as pathetically malnourished children in Somalia or elsewhere in Africa, or starvation deaths in Andhra or Orissa in our own country move out of the headlines and eventually out of the news altogether during the same period.
The recent emergence of the Gulf-based satellite TV channel, A1 Jazeera, as an alternative voice at odds with such an orchestrated media and the arm twisting that goes on behind the scenes to bring it in step with the rest have raised a whole set of new and interesting issues the media manipulation machinery in the U.S. is working overtime to tackle. Robert McChesney in his study (also co-authored with Edward Herman) points to the appropriation of the global media by some three or four dozen large transnational corporations through a spate of acquisitions, mergers and joint ventures and the creation of oligopolisitc markets. In another work, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, McChesney works the theme of the converse relationship between the prosperity of the media and the prospect of democracy in the U.S. in a context where the hypercommercialised content limits the ability of Americans to act as informed citizens. Ben Bagdikian, in his classic study The Media Monopoly, shows how the 10 top American corporations control almost everything we see, hear and read so that the U.S., in addition to its self-arrogated role of policing the world, casts itself as a centralised corporate "ministry of information" not unlike many totalitarian dictatorships.
The breathless tempo of television journalism tends to make it largely an unremitting succession of conditioned reflexes with little time or space for fresh thought or a logical chain of reasoning. The tyranny of sound bites reduces it to a language game that cannot handle complex or difficult concepts. Todd Gitlin cites a study done by Kiku Asdotto in 1998 showing that the average weekly sound bite on U.S. TV networks from a Presidential candidate shrank from 42.3 seconds in 1968 to 9.8 seconds in 1988 and to 7.8 seconds in 2000. A major media reform in the public interest advocated by Ben Bagdikian is the mandatory provision of prime time opportunity to local and national candidates standing for elections with fifteen minute minimums to avoid slick sound bites with little content. Viewers conditioned by mainstreaming messages also tend to take the sting out of political debates. In a study of televised political rallies in Italy in the 1960s, Umberto Eco shows how, in an attempt to package proposals suitably for the average TV viewer, the representative of the Communist Party ended up saying pretty much the same things as the campaigner of the rival Christian Democratic Party. The differences between the two all but disappeared as each tried to be as reassuring and neutral as possible.
Much of the discourse on television and the media seems to assume with Francis Fukuyama (in his latest book The Great Disruption) that the transition into the `information society' has already been made and the tenets of the new post-industrial age are operative. In this new economy, observes Fukuyama, "services increasingly displace manufacturing as a source of wealth. Instead of working in a steel mill or an automobile factory, the typical worker in an information society has a job in a bank, software firm, restaurant, university or social service agency. The role of information and intelligence, embodied in both people and increasingly smart machines, becomes pervasive and mental labour tends to replace physical labour". The Fukuyama characterisation of modern society in terms of a Great Disruption brings to a head a schematic train of thought that emphasises rupture rather than continuity in history, put forth by futurist writers like Alvin Toffler who, through a series of works since the 1970s, pushed the idea of a "Third Wave' of computer-suing societies replacing the earlier industrial age, just as the industrial age itself displaced the preceding agricultural era.
Daniel Bell suggested in 1973 that, with the emergence of a new white-collar work force, the old industrial system is behind us; while the MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte propagated his dizzy vision of a digitally-taped-and-determined world. All this new-fangled post-industrial school of thought utilises, as Dan Schiller (1996) points out, "its exceptionalist premise (the uniqueness of `information' and its production) to invoke a comprehensive but undemonstrable historical rupture, and therefore to draw back decisively from the predominating social relations of production and into schematic and false models of social development. `Information' itself was given an aura of objectivity".
Aggressive, intrusive and pervasive television has also made inroads into intellectual and academic space in a manner that is taking its toll on intellectualism on the one hand, and giving the medium a vain sense of power over intellectuals on the other. As Jacques Derrida warns, "What certain academics should be warned against is the `temptation of the media'. What I mean by this is not the normal desire to address a wider public, because there can be in tht desire an authentically democratic and legitimate political concern. On the contrary, I call temptation of the media the compulsion to misuse the privilege of public declaration in a social space that extends far beyond the normal circuits of intellectual discussion. Such misuse constitutes a breach of confidence, an abuse of authority — in a word, an abuse of power".
When academics seek, or accept, the imprimatur of intellectualism outside of their community or peer group, especially from television which can quick-fix fast-thinking and glib `thinkers' in the course of a single chat show, not only is the domain of original thought and serious study compromised, but their moral stature and power to move against the current is rendered vulnerable. This media-induced heteronomy (or loss of autonomy by being subject to external influence) is explained by Pierre Bordieu thus: "A good historian is some one good historians call a good historian. But heteronomy.. begins when some one who is not recognised as a historian (a historian who talks on television on history, for instance) gives an opinion about historians — and is listened to." He cites the study by Gisele Sapiro of the French literary field during the Occupation which shows that "the more people are recognised by their peers, and are therefore rich in specific capital, the more likely they are to resist. Conversely the more heteronomous they are in their literary practices, meaning down to market criteria, the more inclined they are to collaborate". Bourdieu concludes that such individuals "constitute the Trojan horse through which heteronomy — that is the laws of the market and economy — is brought into the field". Noam Chomsky has also pondered on this issue of the appropriation of intellectuals, by the mass media as an agent of the state. "The media," he says, "can turn to academic experts to provide the perspective that is required by the centres of power, and the university system is sufficiently obedient to external power so that appropriate experts will generally be available to lend the prestige of scholarship to the narrow range of opinion permitted broad expression". Academia must engage with the media selectively and on its own terms. That, or as Andy Warhol predicted, in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.
(Concluded)
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