Tomgram: Engelhardt, World Without Context
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on December 15, 2015, Printed on December 15, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176081/
Winners and Losers in Our New Media Moment
Donald Trump, Mass Shootings With an Islamic Terrorist Flavor, and the Rise
of the "Spectaculection"
By Tom Engelhardt
Sometimes what matters most takes up every inch of space in the room and
somehow we still don't see it. That's how I feel about our present media
moment.
Let me put it this way: I'm a creature of habit, and one of those habits has
long been watching NBC Nightly News, previously with anchor Brian Williams
and now with Lester Holt. It's my way of getting some sense of what an
aging cohort of American news viewers (like me) learns daily about the world
-- what stories are considered important and not, and in what order, and how
presented.
Here's one thing it's hard not to notice: the line-up of stories that we
used to call the "news" seems increasingly like a thing of the past.
Remarkably often these days, the "news" is a single hyped-up story -- most
recently, the San Bernardino shootings -- reported frenetically and yet
formulaically, often in near-apocalyptic fashion. Clearly, such an approach
is meant to glue eyeballs in a situation in which viewers are eternally
restless and there are so many other screens available. This single story
approach is both relentless and remarkably repetitious because a lot of the
time next to nothing new is known about the supposedly unfolding event
(which is nonetheless presented as if our lives depended upon it). To fall
back on the anchor of Avon, it often enough seems like a tale told by a
collective idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
What this form of news certainly does is suck all the air out of the
newsroom. On some days, when one of these 24/7 events is running wild, you
could be excused, at the end of half an hour of "national news," for
thinking that nothing other than the event at screen center had happened
anywhere on Earth. And I mean nothing. Not even the weather, generally such
a favored subject of the nightly news because it offers disaster in its most
picturesquely chaotic and yet expectable form.
Above all, the 24/7, all-hands-on-deck news story obliterates context, or
rather becomes the only context of the moment. To offer the most obvious
recent example: in the days in which the San Bernardino shootings ate the
screen, most Americans would not have noticed that the fate of the planet
was being seriously discussed and negotiated in Paris by representatives of
just about every country. There was next to nothing but those shootings
available -- the exploration of the backgrounds of the two killers, their
marriage, their arsenal of weaponry, a pledge of allegiance by the wife to
ISIS, the contents of their house, what relatives and friends in Pakistan
had to say, their bank account, heart-rending tales of those killed,
testimony from survivors, and on and on. Even more than a week after the
event, it was still the lead story on NBC Nightly News evening after
evening. ("San Bernardino Shooters Discussed Jihad in 2013 Before
Engagement," "FBI Divers Search Lake Near San Bernardino Massacre for
Clues.") Viewers might be pardoned for thinking that Islamic terrorism was
indeed an apocalyptic threat for most Americans rather than the distinctly
minor one it is.
Sucking the Air Out of the Newsroom
Mass shootings, a particularly American phenomenon, seem like the perfect
story for our news moment. They are guaranteed to eat any screen and recur
so regularly, with uniquely gruesome twists, that covering them has become
formulaic. They are the equivalent of no-brainers: disturbed (or
disturbing) shooters, horrified victims, blood and guts, grim hospital
scenes, the testimony of victims, the rites around the dead, and in the case
of San Bernardino the added attraction (or repulsion) of Islamic terrorism.
Put another way, what passes for the news is often enough closer to a horror
movie in which, just around the next corner, another nightmare is readying
itself to leap out and scare you to death. Maybe it's not what you really
want to see, but once it starts, you can't take your eyes off it. And
that's the point.
Unfortunately, none of this is actually a horror movie. When these
all-too-real events loom so much larger than life and without context, they
seem to trigger panic, fear, even hysteria, and a profound sense of
endangerment in many Americans; they create, that is, a vision of how the
world works and of its dangers that bears little relationship to the place
we actually live.
Someday someone will surely figure out how to create a panic, fear, and
hysteria, or PFH, index (in a world where nothing should be without its
acronym) to measure the effects of this phenomenon. One way to gauge it in
the meantime is via opinion polls. In the week after the San Bernardino
coverage, for instance, the number of Americans who expressed satisfaction
with the way things are going in this country took a "rare" seven percentage
point nosedive, according to a Gallup poll. Similarly, a New York Times/CBS
News poll found that, in the wake of those shootings, 19% of Americans now
believed that "the threat of terrorism [is] the top issue facing the
country." Only 4% had a month earlier.
Another obvious measure, at least when it comes to mass shootings, is gun
sales. After San Bernardino and the usual apocalyptic coverage, Americans
once again flocked to gun stores to arm themselves. Sales of firearms soared
(as did the stock prices of gun makers).
Consider the irony of this. Despite the millions of Americans now
"carrying" and the many millions more with guns in their homes, I doubt that
an armed citizen has made any difference in any major mass shooting
incident. Instead, what all those weapons stored in homes ensure is further
death and tragedy-to-come, as any grasp of the true dangers of American life
would suggest: new suicides, new wife and girlfriend killings, new toddler
shootings, and of course more weaponry potentially available for new mass
shootings.
For all of this, the media now bears a certain unacknowledged
responsibility. Above all, single-event news throws our American world --
and particularly its dangers -- out of whack, while playing into irrational
fears and prejudices. It helps create news of its own in an increasingly
unbalanced country. What it doesn't offer is perspective.
Now, it's true that such 24/7 screen experiences are hardly a new
phenomenon. I remember well, for instance, the day that President Kennedy
was assassinated. I was a college student, sitting in a hole-in-the-wall
burger joint when someone stuck his head in the door and said, "The
president's been shot." And I can remember us all later gathered in
disbelief around a television set in the basement of our dorm -- there were
so many fewer screens then -- to watch that 24/7 version of the news. But
the occasions on which such things happened were so rare as to be
unforgettable.
Though different people might date the onset of our present in-your-face era
of news differently, it first made it onto my radar screen with the bizarre
spectacle of the 1994 O.J. Simpson "low-speed" car chase. It proved that,
with the right elements -- in this case, a black former Hall of Fame
football star and movie actor accused of killing his white wife -- you could
glue eyes to any kind of onscreen inanity, including cars creeping along a
highway for an hour. You could even draw viewers to "the news" from major
televised sports events. It would prove a potentially winning formula for
the onrushing world of cable news.
In purely practical terms, it's easy enough to see why the O.J. paradigm has
become such a winner and why just about every few weeks now we seem to
experience the equivalent of a Kennedy-assassination-style news experience.
After all, it's no secret that staffs in the news world, whether for
television or newspapers, have been shrinking. Watch NBC Nightly News and
sooner or later you'll be struck by the way, night after night, the
remarkably able Richard Engel, the show's "chief foreign correspondent,"
feels like almost the only foreign correspondent in town, whatever town
happens to be in the news anywhere on Earth.
Obviously, if you can focus most of your resources 24/7 on a single story,
especially one like a mass shooting where the formula for reporting it is
already well tested, it's going to be far cheaper and more efficient to
cover, and when it comes to garnering eyeballs, it's proven to "work." It
produces ratings. And in that (dare I say it) context, the difficulty of
keeping an audience in a world of endless screens, sensations, and
sensationalism is clearly a major factor in turning the news into a machine
for cranking out instant horror movies.
It's so understandable, even sensible, after a fashion. That it also helps
create a world of imbalance and delusion, and that those delusions help
disorder our world in new ways, seems beside the point. There's no need for
the media to take responsibility for any of this. It's not part of the job
or a subject that's considered in much need of discussion by... well, the
media.
Media Trumpery
And let's not forget another crucial element of this in-your-face media
environment: America's evolving 1% elections and the news landscape that now
dominates them. Once upon a time, presidential elections started with the
first primaries in the early spring of an election year, revved up with
summer party conventions, and went into high gear in the fall, ending on
November 4th, Election Day.
Now, media speculation about possible candidates for the next presidential
election starts just before that November 4th; that is, four years early.
The first "primaries," actually tryouts before clustered groups of
billionaires, take place early in the year before the election. The first
"debates" are launched as that summer ends and the first primaries take
place just after the actual election year begins. In the intense
two-year-plus, money-raising, money-squandering 2016 race to the White House
(and other federal offices) as much as $5 billion in ads (up from $3.8
billion in 2012) are expected to flicker across TV screens, as incredible
sums pour into TV stations and networks.
Election 2016 is already an eye-popping spectacle. No wonder, then, that
television news, profiting so from the expanding election season, would
anoint it as a new kind of 24/7 entertainment event. In recent years, this
decision has led to a profusion of long-before-the-first-primary "debates,"
increasingly organized by TV news departments as political food fights.
Similarly, coverage of candidates touring the country has increased as they
are goaded to offer ever more incendiary "positions" for the news cycle. In
fact, the most recent debates, particularly the Republican ones, have
garnered record audiences, larger than any recent World Series game or
National Basketball League final. Think of it as the O.J. phenomenon
triumphant. And at least one network nabob, Les Moonves of CBS News, is
openly cheering it all on. "The more they spend, the better it is for us
and: Go Donald! Keep getting out there!" he said in a call to investors.
Turn on MSNBC or Fox News or CNN these days and, even when nothing much is
happening, you can sometimes watch election "coverage" hour after
mind-bending hour. This is, of course, the perfect atmosphere for an
entertaining demagogue with endless surprises up his sleeve. Not
surprisingly, the focus these days has ceaselessly been on Donald Trump --
what he says and who denounces him and which experts debunk his latest claim
and what part of the Republican demographic remains supportive of him when
it comes to deporting Mexicans or creating a registry for American Muslims,
or shutting down mosques, or simply banning non-citizen Muslims from the
U.S.
Each Trump provocation, the reactions to it (which only stoke it further),
and the discovery that he's either lost no ground or gained some among
potential Republican primary voters represent another tiny news cycle in our
brave new media world and is analyzed as such. There can be no denying that
the Donald has a remarkably canny sense of how to up the ante and glue
cameras to himself, but far more of the focus of this moment should be on
the media, rather than him alone. He is, in a sense, the creature of the
new 24/7 media environment, the permanent campaign trail, and the
reinvention of the news cycle as a fear machine. He is the spawn of what
could be termed our new "spectaculection." He couldn't exist without it.
He is the natural-born product of a media landscape in which a single
gruesome act of Islamic State-inspired terrorism and workplace rage can
become the wallpaper for our American world. It's an environment in which
the threat, including Trump himself, is king, in which prosperity and
ratings (for the TV news) mean fear for Americans. In its own way, the
mainstream media, like the police and the populace, are arming themselves to
the teeth. Donald Trump only makes sense in such a context. His is the
extremism of our new media world, which represents the true trumpery of our
moment.
The winners of the latest version of the news and election cycle won't be
the American people or the electoral system or a deeper knowledge of how our
world works. Those winners will, however, include Washington's national
security state, which has bet its future on American fear, and the Islamic
State, for which this media environment is the royal road to a completely
irrational, even cockamamie "clash of civilizations."
In other words, the news is the news, and it couldn't be worse.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176081
Tomgram: Engelhardt, World Without Context
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on December 15, 2015, Printed on December 15, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176081/
[Note to TomDispatch Readers: Yesterday, I sent out TomDispatch's single
fundraising letter of the year to all our subscribers. It's not exactly my
favorite activity (nor could it be what subscribers look for when an email
arrives from this site). But it's a necessity. TD has no advertising and no
other way to raise funds -- and unfortunately, modest as we are, it still
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Any support you offer (only, however, if you can truly afford it!) will be
deeply appreciated. And thanks for all your wonderful emails and support in
2015. I can't tell you the difference it makes to us! Tom]
Winners and Losers in Our New Media Moment
Donald Trump, Mass Shootings With an Islamic Terrorist Flavor, and the Rise
of the "Spectaculection"
By Tom Engelhardt
Sometimes what matters most takes up every inch of space in the room and
somehow we still don't see it. That's how I feel about our present media
moment.
Let me put it this way: I'm a creature of habit, and one of those habits has
long been watching NBC Nightly News, previously with anchor Brian Williams
and now with Lester Holt. It's my way of getting some sense of what an aging
cohort of American news viewers (like me) learns daily about the world --
what stories are considered important and not, and in what order, and how
presented.
Here's one thing it's hard not to notice: the line-up of stories that we
used to call the "news" seems increasingly like a thing of the past.
Remarkably often these days, the "news" is a single hyped-up story -- most
recently, the San Bernardino shootings -- reported frenetically and yet
formulaically, often in near-apocalyptic fashion. Clearly, such an approach
is meant to glue eyeballs in a situation in which viewers are eternally
restless and there are so many other screens available. This single story
approach is both relentless and remarkably repetitious because a lot of the
time next to nothing new is known about the supposedly unfolding event
(which is nonetheless presented as if our lives depended upon it). To fall
back on the anchor of Avon, it often enough seems like a tale told by a
collective idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
What this form of news certainly does is suck all the air out of the
newsroom. On some days, when one of these 24/7 events is running wild, you
could be excused, at the end of half an hour of "national news," for
thinking that nothing other than the event at screen center had happened
anywhere on Earth. And I mean nothing. Not even the weather, generally such
a favored subject of the nightly news because it offers disaster in its most
picturesquely chaotic and yet expectable form.
Above all, the 24/7, all-hands-on-deck news story obliterates context, or
rather becomes the only context of the moment. To offer the most obvious
recent example: in the days in which the San Bernardino shootings ate the
screen, most Americans would not have noticed that the fate of the planet
was being seriously discussed and negotiated in Paris by representatives of
just about every country. There was next to nothing but those shootings
available -- the exploration of the backgrounds of the two killers, their
marriage, their arsenal of weaponry, a pledge of allegiance by the wife to
ISIS, the contents of their house, what relatives and friends in Pakistan
had to say, their bank account, heart-rending tales of those killed,
testimony from survivors, and on and on. Even more than a week after the
event, it was still the lead story on NBC Nightly News evening after
evening. ("San Bernardino Shooters Discussed Jihad in 2013 Before
Engagement," "FBI Divers Search Lake Near San Bernardino Massacre for
Clues.") Viewers might be pardoned for thinking that Islamic terrorism was
indeed an apocalyptic threat for most Americans rather than the distinctly
minor one it is.
Sucking the Air Out of the Newsroom
Mass shootings, a particularly American phenomenon, seem like the perfect
story for our news moment. They are guaranteed to eat any screen and recur
so regularly, with uniquely gruesome twists, that covering them has become
formulaic. They are the equivalent of no-brainers: disturbed (or disturbing)
shooters, horrified victims, blood and guts, grim hospital scenes, the
testimony of victims, the rites around the dead, and in the case of San
Bernardino the added attraction (or repulsion) of Islamic terrorism.
Put another way, what passes for the news is often enough closer to a horror
movie in which, just around the next corner, another nightmare is readying
itself to leap out and scare you to death. Maybe it's not what you really
want to see, but once it starts, you can't take your eyes off it. And that's
the point.
Unfortunately, none of this is actually a horror movie. When these
all-too-real events loom so much larger than life and without context, they
seem to trigger panic, fear, even hysteria, and a profound sense of
endangerment in many Americans; they create, that is, a vision of how the
world works and of its dangers that bears little relationship to the place
we actually live.
Someday someone will surely figure out how to create a panic, fear, and
hysteria, or PFH, index (in a world where nothing should be without its
acronym) to measure the effects of this phenomenon. One way to gauge it in
the meantime is via opinion polls. In the week after the San Bernardino
coverage, for instance, the number of Americans who expressed satisfaction
with the way things are going in this country took a "rare" seven percentage
point nosedive, according to a Gallup poll. Similarly, a New York Times/CBS
News poll found that, in the wake of those shootings, 19% of Americans now
believed that "the threat of terrorism [is] the top issue facing the
country." Only 4% had a month earlier.
Another obvious measure, at least when it comes to mass shootings, is gun
sales. After San Bernardino and the usual apocalyptic coverage, Americans
once again flocked to gun stores to arm themselves. Sales of firearms soared
(as did the stock prices of gun makers).
Consider the irony of this. Despite the millions of Americans now "carrying"
and the many millions more with guns in their homes, I doubt that an armed
citizen has made any difference in any major mass shooting incident.
Instead, what all those weapons stored in homes ensure is further death and
tragedy-to-come, as any grasp of the true dangers of American life would
suggest: new suicides, new wife and girlfriend killings, new toddler
shootings, and of course more weaponry potentially available for new mass
shootings.
For all of this, the media now bears a certain unacknowledged
responsibility. Above all, single-event news throws our American world --
and particularly its dangers -- out of whack, while playing into irrational
fears and prejudices. It helps create news of its own in an increasingly
unbalanced country. What it doesn't offer is perspective.
Now, it's true that such 24/7 screen experiences are hardly a new
phenomenon. I remember well, for instance, the day that President Kennedy
was assassinated. I was a college student, sitting in a hole-in-the-wall
burger joint when someone stuck his head in the door and said, "The
president's been shot." And I can remember us all later gathered in
disbelief around a television set in the basement of our dorm -- there were
so many fewer screens then -- to watch that 24/7 version of the news. But
the occasions on which such things happened were so rare as to be
unforgettable.
Though different people might date the onset of our present in-your-face era
of news differently, it first made it onto my radar screen with the bizarre
spectacle of the 1994 O.J. Simpson "low-speed" car chase. It proved that,
with the right elements -- in this case, a black former Hall of Fame
football star and movie actor accused of killing his white wife -- you could
glue eyes to any kind of onscreen inanity, including cars creeping along a
highway for an hour. You could even draw viewers to "the news" from major
televised sports events. It would prove a potentially winning formula for
the onrushing world of cable news.
In purely practical terms, it's easy enough to see why the O.J. paradigm has
become such a winner and why just about every few weeks now we seem to
experience the equivalent of a Kennedy-assassination-style news experience.
After all, it's no secret that staffs in the news world, whether for
television or newspapers, have been shrinking. Watch NBC Nightly News and
sooner or later you'll be struck by the way, night after night, the
remarkably able Richard Engel, the show's "chief foreign correspondent,"
feels like almost the only foreign correspondent in town, whatever town
happens to be in the news anywhere on Earth.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Obviously,
if you can focus most of your resources 24/7 on a single story, especially
one like a mass shooting where the formula for reporting it is already well
tested, it's going to be far cheaper and more efficient to cover, and when
it comes to garnering eyeballs, it's proven to "work." It produces ratings.
And in that (dare I say it) context, the difficulty of keeping an audience
in a world of endless screens, sensations, and sensationalism is clearly a
major factor in turning the news into a machine for cranking out instant
horror movies.
It's so understandable, even sensible, after a fashion. That it also helps
create a world of imbalance and delusion, and that those delusions help
disorder our world in new ways, seems beside the point. There's no need for
the media to take responsibility for any of this. It's not part of the job
or a subject that's considered in much need of discussion by... well, the
media.
Media Trumpery
And let's not forget another crucial element of this in-your-face media
environment: America's evolving 1% elections and the news landscape that now
dominates them. Once upon a time, presidential elections started with the
first primaries in the early spring of an election year, revved up with
summer party conventions, and went into high gear in the fall, ending on
November 4th, Election Day.
Now, media speculation about possible candidates for the next presidential
election starts just before that November 4th; that is, four years early.
The first "primaries," actually tryouts before clustered groups of
billionaires, take place early in the year before the election. The first
"debates" are launched as that summer ends and the first primaries take
place just after the actual election year begins. In the intense
two-year-plus, money-raising, money-squandering 2016 race to the White House
(and other federal offices) as much as $5
billionhttp://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/19/432759311/2016-
campaign-tv-ad-spending in ads (up from $3.8 billion in 2012) are expected
to flicker across TV screens, as incredible sums pour into TV stations and
networks.
Election 2016 is already an eye-popping spectacle. No wonder, then, that
television news, profiting so from the expanding election season, would
anoint it as a new kind of 24/7 entertainment event. In recent years, this
decision has led to a profusion of long-before-the-first-primary "debates,"
increasingly organized by TV news departments as political food fights.
Similarly, coverage of candidates touring the country has increased as they
are goaded to offer ever more incendiary "positions" for the news cycle. In
fact, the most recent debates, particularly the Republican ones, have
garnered record audiences, larger than any recent World Series game or
National Basketball League final. Think of it as the O.J. phenomenon
triumphant. And at least one network nabob, Les Moonves of CBS News, is
openly cheering it all on. "The more they spend, the better it is for us
and: Go Donald! Keep getting out there!" he said in a call to investors.
Turn on MSNBC or Fox News or CNN these days and, even when nothing much is
happening, you can sometimes watch election "coverage" hour after
mind-bending hour. This is, of course, the perfect atmosphere for an
entertaining demagogue with endless surprises up his sleeve. Not
surprisingly, the focus these days has ceaselessly been on Donald Trump --
what he says and who denounces him and which experts debunk his latest claim
and what part of the Republican demographic remains supportive of him when
it comes to deporting Mexicans or creating a registry for American Muslims,
or shutting down mosques, or simply banning non-citizen Muslims from the
U.S.
Each Trump provocation, the reactions to it (which only stoke it further),
and the discovery that he's either lost no ground or gained some among
potential Republican primary voters represent another tiny news cycle in our
brave new media world and is analyzed as such. There can be no denying that
the Donald has a remarkably canny sense of how to up the ante and glue
cameras to himself, but far more of the focus of this moment should be on
the media, rather than him alone. He is, in a sense, the creature of the new
24/7 media environment, the permanent campaign trail, and the reinvention of
the news cycle as a fear machine. He is the spawn of what could be termed
our new "spectaculection." He couldn't exist without it.
He is the natural-born product of a media landscape in which a single
gruesome act of Islamic State-inspired terrorism and workplace rage can
become the wallpaper for our American world. It's an environment in which
the threat, including Trump himself, is king, in which prosperity and
ratings (for the TV news) mean fear for Americans. In its own way, the
mainstream media, like the police and the populace, are arming themselves to
the teeth. Donald Trump only makes sense in such a context. His is the
extremism of our new media world, which represents the true trumpery of our
moment.
The winners of the latest version of the news and election cycle won't be
the American people or the electoral system or a deeper knowledge of how our
world works. Those winners will, however, include Washington's national
security state, which has bet its future on American fear, and the Islamic
State, for which this media environment is the royal road to a completely
irrational, even cockamamie "clash of civilizations."
In other words, the news is the news, and it couldn't be worse.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt
C 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176081
