Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

And feel we are in the know. Feeling that something is true (or not) is our (the listener’s) choice, à la Colbert’s “truthiness,” which has a foothold in the media. Truthiness requires our (the listener’s) active participation.

As we drive along, personalizing and participating in the media, we can communicate in real time with like-minded individuals around the world and find or even create our own club. Sharing seeming intimacy with strangers appears to provide enormous psychological payoff. And that “intimacy” becomes our primary “truth.” The quest for “truth” and belonging then edges out the desire for objectivity.

In fact, those who advocate for old-fashioned objective news may be considered dinosaurs, or hopelessly naïve. 16 Objectivity has practically become a dirty word, no matter one’s political leanings. Almost everyone has an agenda. The now-famous Glenn Greenwald, who helped break some of the most important stories of the new decade, including the leaks about the NSA by the contractor Edward Snowden, appears to consider himself a journalist/activist. As he told the New York Times : “All activists are not journalists, but all real journalists are activists.” 17

As we opt for belonging to a “community” over objective news, our worldviews are shaped in ways never before possible. We also sort ourselves into information silos, some of which could scarcely be more divergent from each other. And while these silos may not connect with each other—each silo is an entity unto itself—within the silo, individuals connect in every which way.

Add to this emerging norm of manufactured resemblance the necessity of “connecting”—part of the simulacra equation. We must look like we are connecting personally—not only with “friends” far and wide, but with (heretofore) public figures, now privatized to our personal likes. We want our news providers to connect with us personally —and “connect” they do, whether it is a Facebook friend who fancies him/herself a news authority or a respected print journalist who sends out links to his articles on Twitter and Facebook and also tweets about his/her “tastes” and divulges (carefully crafted) details about his/her personal life.

A small sample includes New York Times political reporter Nicholas Confessore (with nearly 45,000 Twitter followers), who alternates wonkish tweets about income inequality with zingers about the Super Bowl halftime show. Or his colleague in the media department David Carr (nearly 450,000 followers). Then there is Jeff Elder, technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal (101,000 followers) and Chris Cillizza, political reporter for the Washington Post (200,000 followers), whose feed he calls “The Fix.” Cillizza has another Twitter feed (now largely inactive) called “The Hyper Fix.” This hyper-Chris Cillizza feed directs newshounds back to his more work-oriented feed by saying “Follow him @the fix for a more mellow, but still personal feed.” 18

We want our leaders to connect with us personally too—to skip the guy in the middle and talk to us directly. We “like” President Obama’s Facebook page, and get the message right from the horse’s mouth, along with his fondness for jazz and classic films like Casablanca. While we know these exclusive communiqués are likely crafted by brand-polishing twenty-somethings, we put up with the genre because we crave displays of sincerity, not unlike in the new-style porn.

When we receive a message “From Michelle Obama” shortly before Thanksgiving 2013 saying “I want to talk to your family. From my family to yours, Janine,” we know that the First Lady’s “authenticity” is manufactured.

This “authenticity” may be transparent. But there is a lot of fake authenticity in the media that is much more difficult to see through. Many, if not most, of us lack the depth of experience to figure out what is fabricated and what is not. In the golden age of “transparency,” there’s a dearth of information about where the information comes from and what agendas might be behind it.

As we, both creators and consumers of news, concentrate on the simulacra—on news as performance rather than as content—we move farther away from living in the brick-and-mortar world and closer to the virtual one.

Yet this personalization and obsession with performance (as in acting) has a profound influence on what is deemed real and what policymakers act on. For even when something is not true—it is merely “truthy,” as Colbert might say—when enough people believe or engage in it, this “truthiness” can and does have real and huge consequences in the real world. The prime example is the rush to war in Iraq after 9/11, based on the faulty assumption that there were weapons of mass destruction there—a decision based on “truthiness” (as well as classic propaganda) if there ever was one.

Meanwhile, we are surely missing out on key stories—stories that are not just stories but can tank our livelihoods, health, and security. We are lucky to know what we know about the NSA story. We know what we know (and we can have little idea what we don’t know) only because of the whims of one leaker (Edward Snowden) who didn’t trust traditional media and a few journalists (namely journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras) who were dogged enough to pursue the story. One would have hoped that stories as crucial as the NSA spying and the machinations that led to the 2008 financial crisis could have been unearthed by a robust media before so much damage was done. And we are ill prepared to spot the next financial crisis.

But we have substantially ditched the objective middleman (read: journalists), substituting nonobjective performers for them, even as they might parade as objective. When was the last time Americans heard about the “Fourth Estate”—that free press so crucial to democratic civilization that was supposed to be a bulwark against the powerful? It used to be that we got our news from a reporter or news organization that stood between us and, say, a powerful politician or a cash-flush corporation. That reporter gathered and helped interpret the news. S/he belonged to a profession steeped in a public-sector ethos. And, despite the shortcomings of the media as in any profession (some bad apples, poor judgment, and occasional incompetence), there was at least some expectation that the journalist would investigate and report the story with some modicum of objectivity and mindfulness of the public interest.

Instead, today, we are faced with sorting through simulacra—from downright falsehoods to appearances that detract us from less-sexy realities. This is no easy feat. That is because, while the objective middleman is passé, there is no shortage of accountability-challenged middlemen to take their place.

Short-Term Performing: Exploiting Television

The emphasis on performing, as in theater, has become au courant in the public sphere, as cultural analysts have shown, and as noted throughout this book. 19Today’s “professional performance culture,” as Boyer and Yurchak call it, is reminiscent of the kind of performance that communist societies took to an art form. 20But the pressure to make things look good right here and right now often results in the production of simulacra at the expense of truth and underlying realities—and we, unlike our communist forebears who became adept at reading between the lines, are short on the skills necessary to see through it.

Much of today’s media reality began with the rise of 24-hour cable networks. This was a new stage on which power brokers of all sorts could now perform to many and varied audiences.

In the United States, one of the most damaging series of performances played out on the new financial news outlets, most notably CNBC.