The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger
provides this coverage of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s blast at the media for sometimes operating as a "feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits." According to Henninger:
In my experience, no subject triggers longer conversations around the U.S. now than "the media." People are fascinated by what's happening to newspapers, the role of cable TV and, of course, the Web. . .
Deep wells of energy are emptied daily in political or professional life now, says Mr. Blair, "coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity. At points it literally overwhelms. . . .Any public service leader . . . will tell you not that they mind the criticism, but they have become totally demoralized by the completely unbalanced nature of it." . . .
Tony Blair seems to believe the media has become mostly melodrama: "Things, people, issues, stories, are all black and white. Life's usual grays are almost entirely absent. 'Some good, some bad'; 'some things going right, some going wrong.' These are concepts alien to much of today's reporting. It is a triumph or a disaster. A problem is a crisis. A setback is a policy in tatters."
He attributes this change to the decline of what we call "straight" reporting and the rise of analysis or commentary in news columns, which most newspaper people will acknowledge, arguing that readers get straight news today from the Web. . . commentary on the news has become "more important than the news itself." . . .Comment, [Blair] says, "is a perfectly respectable part of journalism, but it is supposed to be separate. Opinion and fact should be clearly divisible. The truth is a large part of the media today, not merely elides the two, but does so now as a matter of course. It is routine."
Mr. Blair claims that the "relationship" between the media and public life is "damaged" and "requires repair." The damage, he says, "saps the country's confidence and self-belief; it undermines its assessment of itself, its institutions; it reduces our capacity to take the right decisions."
The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger provides this coverage of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s blast at the media for sometimes operating as a "feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits." According to Henninger:
1 comment:
Dick Baker says:
Blair describes the media as operating as a "feral beast." Fair enough, certainly from the perspective of his recent experience. However, I do not agree with his inference that the media somehow has "gone wild" (which I believe is the basic meaning of "feral") and deviated from what is or should be their normal mode of operation.
I would rather liken the media to sharks, who attack and tear their victims to shreds because "that is what sharks do." This is instinctual rather than immoral or a decline from (former) more tame behavior.
One can extend this analogy in several directions. Different shark varieties have different preferences in their feeding patterns, and many are no more dangerous (at least to humans) than any other sea creature. Further, sharks of all sorts do not always attack, but generally only do so when they are hungry and see a likely target -- or when there is blood in the water. And yes, some run in packs and engage in feeding frenzies, especially in those cases when there is blood in the water. Finally, there are some plain rogues who behave like our image of Great Whites, attacking just for the sake of attacking rather than necessarily from hunger. Those images collectively describe much of media behavior, especially that of the electronic media and including those covering politics. But in all cases, this is what "sharks do" - and without doing it they and their species would not survive.
All this is familiar. But we can also recall that one of the ways man has learned to deal with sharks, especially the rogues, is to search out those who have tasted human blood and discipline them with extreme prejudice. Naturally I would not recommend that exact remedy for offending members of the media, but an aware public could always cut off the food supply of these types by not buying or paying attention to their product.
However, it is equally true that this latter, ultimately desirable development would only come about when enough members of the public -- or at a minimum enough of the opinion-shaping class - recognize the problem and determine to respond. And alas, despite your blog and some other voices, for the present this seems an unlikely prospect, once more demonstrating the astuteness of Pogo's famous diagnosis of who the enemy really is.
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