"You know all of our friends are gods
And they all tell us how to paint our face
But there's only one brush we need
It's the one that never leaves a trace..."
"Someone once said, when love is gone, there's always justice; when justice is gone, there's always force," Buckingham says to introduce 'Peacekeeper' in Boston. Even years later, the verse remains good food for thought and relevant to the world. Radical change can be problematic—look at the election—and I find myself averse to the scorched earth tone of the quote while more drawn toward the peaceable lyrics yearning to "never leave a trace."
I also find myself thinking of Edward R. Murrow's most famous oration, "This just might do nobody any good." I have some thoughts on Murrow.
Murrow was a trailblazer in reporting, for those unaware, known for his reporting during WWII, confronting Joseph McCarthy, reporting on the health risks of smoking (chain-smoking the whole time), serving in the Kennedy administration, and his famous RTNDA speech, which also inspired Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck.
And, tying back to Fleetwood Mac, I think Lindsey Buckingham is right that Murrow'd be turning over in his grave if he saw the state of the media today.
Why?
Murrow speaks to issues in the media leading to a world much like the one we see today. It might also be compared, vaguely, to the dystopia of Huxley's Brave New World.
Murrow delivered his oration in 1958, when game shows were popular and advertisers were more inclined to fund programs like these than serious news broadcasts due to fears of offending viewers. This is why Murrow points to several examples of news networks giving "a fair shake" on controversial issues, despite fear of blowback, as well as calling out the Eisenhower administration and John Foster Dulles in particular for interfering with networks' ability to report on China.
As easy as it is to think I mentioned Murrow chain-smoking through the coverage of tobacco's dangers as a joke, it's a great example of being able to process information: he sat and smoked, a coping mechanism for him that had developed into a habit, even as he heard the consequences of smoking, yes—but he acted in a social manner like a normal, functioning adult should. He did not throw a temper tantrum, he did not get up and walk out, he did not argue with the facts, and he did not ask loaded questions to try and mitigate his fears.
He did not, say, punch an election worker in the face for asking him to follow policy and remove a political hat, as this can be perceived as campaigning within a polling place, which is illegal. This is not how a well-adjusted, functioning, healthy adult behaves.
Back to TV: the trend toward easy-to-view game shows has changed over time with tastes and most recently, we're familiar with a ton of reality and game shows: every time I watch Jeopardy! there are ads for game (The Quiz With Balls) or reality (Survivor) shows for the two easiest low-cost, high-viewership product—modern bread and circuses. To quote the man himself:
Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps in color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.
But Murrow is not merely a pessimist with a problem—he provides a solution, as well.
Unfortunately, the solution he provides has not come to fruition over the last nearly seven decades, at least not on a large enough scale. Murrow suggests corporations—the largest twenty or thirty—give up some regular programming, "turn the time over to the networks and say in effect: 'This is a tiny tithe, just a little bit of our profits. On this particular night we aren't going to try to sell cigarettes or automobiles; this is merely a gesture to indicate our belief in the importance of ideas.'"
This, too might seem pessimistic, but the landscape has changed since Murrow's time. This means that the solutions he's suggested need to be modified to account—just as our successes and strides forward do. As FDR said, “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
There's more I'm unaware of than that I know, so I can only offer some rudimentary suggestions, drawing on my own experiences and studies.
The easiest solution to come to mind would be restoring and expanding the Fairness Doctrine. Today, we have a lot of cable news and it would be natural to expand it there, too. It requires both sides of an issue to be presented. Now, you might say, "Well, I see discussion panels with both sides" on whatever network, but this is not the same. John Oliver and Bill Nye do a much better job explaining this than I could, but: these are not authentic 'debates' between equal 'sides.'
Over 90% of scientists stand by climate change; a tiny minority disputes it. If you watch those panels, or follow republican talking points, you would think this is a 50/50 debate. This kind of a "debate" is a disservice as it gives discredited nonsense both a platform and credibility.
We've seen a pipeline like this before: in. 2016, a lot of old memes from /b/ became the basis for the Pizzagate, later QAnon, conspiracy. A lot of that nonsense got brought into the mainstream by Trump saying "many people are talking about it."
It confused me for a long time how people didn't recognize these old memes, something I was reminded of watching The Antisocial Network. Well, after I finished that, I decided to revisit old /b/, still reflecting on the bit in there about Trump being 4chan's candidate.
Bumped into an image I kinda chuckled and rolled my eyes at, but /b/ is still pretty much the same shithole as it was a decade and a half ago.
That was about a week ago. I only mention this because I actually just saw the image again, today, after initially posting this blog. See for yourself:
We don't want a culture so easily influenced by some random dude on 4chan trying to see if he can troll his way to a goofy headline for the lulz.
I'd also point to this phenomenal Eugene Robinson op-ed on how bizarre it is to see Trump normalized while Kamala Harris gets grilled for not going into enough policy detail. The other guys ranting about stopping imaginary wars with France and unleashing violence on his political opponents. This is the Fourth Estate dropping the ball. Big-time.
(Too bad after this, Bezos pulled WaPo's endorsement).
This isn't the only problem. Two others: the "clash between the public interest and the corporate interest" and what does it matter if that information is broadcast to a public too ignorant or uninterested to understand?
The former is tricky and can only be done piecemeal over time, which shifts more responsibility onto the public. The Fourth Estate is valuable, but it seems profits will always come before the public.
It makes sense, we learned way back in the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons that this whole, "If we give the rich enough money, they'll bless us and let the wealth trickle down!" idea doesn't tend to work out. Trickle down used to be called horse-and-sparrow for a reason: feed the horse enough oats and if he's lucky, the sparrow can pick whole ones out of its shit!
In less than a century, these ideas have almost crashed our economy (with global ramifications) three times: the Great Depression, Black Monday, and the Great Recession. Thank god we got a soft landing for the economy and inflation under Biden, because otherwise Trump's economic policies would have us facing time four—and we're still not safe from him doing that if he wins next week..
When I say Fourth Estate, I include the expansion of creative expression and freedom allowed by the internet. This can be massively beneficial, but it can be abused as well—most things are not inherently good or evil, but made so by our usage choice. A lie circles the world while the truth gets its shoes on, and Russia continues to remind us that the Firehose of Falsehood coupled with the cunning of someone like a Vladislav Surkov (oh, boy, there's a guy to talk about...) can be a real nasty combination.
This leads me away from the Fourth Estate, which I can only externally critique beyond internally attempting to provide sources for my own claims to allow others to check for themselves,* and move on to individual responsibility—well, kinda.
Critical thinking is essential.
And returning to Murrow, we have a mixture of hope and apprehenion and a warning:
I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.
From the LA Times and Washington Post withdrawing endorsements to billionaires flooding our elections with dark money, to dipshits handing out million dollar checks trying to get people to vote Trump, to candidates running on fascist platforms, we're seeing that history is not limping, it's catching up with the pace of a hundred-yard sprinter. We were warned, and should have learned, a long time ago that long term societal benefit needed to take much more precedent over short-term profit.
What's that old saying about a great society being one where old folks are happy to plant trees they'll never sit in the shade of?
And to reflect on Murrow:
This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.
Or, if we return to where we started; Murrow warns that appropriate, responsible use of television in educating rather than isolating us is "a battle for survival" in which we are letting the sword "rust in the scabbard," borrowing from Stonewall Jackson. I believe the lyrics in the track bearing his name speak to the issues Murrow saw in his time. And 'Peacekeeper' offers parallel views: one pessimistic, one more optimistic but also more uncertain.
Only creatures who are on their way
Ever poison their own well
But we still have time to hate
And there's still something we can sell
We can still clean up the mess and work toward being the brush that doesn't leave a trace rather than the creatures on our way.
—
*Elsewhere, Murrow said, "To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be creditable; to be credible we must be truthful."
**On the bright side, I unlocked the 'Very Rare' Achievement of having to take a shit in the backyard of a cheerleader a year older than me in high school. because that was where dad pointed.
Did I mention the guy's refusal to stop at a bathroom? Lots of weird stories about customers finding him with his dick out, lots of time wondering why he used the walkway to where the daycare kids were playing in the backyard instead of using the basement bathroom when he had to work on equipment in the middle of the day, and lots of time troubled by the times when he'd look through my yearbooks and class photos pointing out little girls.
—Another lighter example: I've read two biographies of HP Lovecraft. I regret tis for multiple reasons. One of them is that the first one I picked up, the author got real weird with it and tried to make an argument along the lines of Lovecraft truly believing in the eldritch monsters he wrote about, which took up alternating chapters. It was some real weird stuff. Did the research I should've done before picking it up, nope, not credible, so I did the job right and picked up Joshi's biography (and then he went and wrote a two-volume one and frankly I just really don't care for Lovecraft much).
—Another issue mentioned by Murrow: shorter segments. This is something we see in our own time. Example?
Seinfeld reruns. Why? We loosened restrictions. That's also why we see more ads targeted to children—from the eighties under Reagan, we started to see a change in TV shows. A lot of children's shows were built around toys to sell products. It's so ubiquitous today we don't even think about it.
That's advertising in programming—but another is the time allowed allocated for ads. Murrow has his own examples in his speech, but let's go back to Seinfeld. 5 minutes of a 30-minute program were allowed for ads—then it shifted to 8 minutes. Shows no longer run 25 minute, generally, they're 22-23. Check Hulu or Netflix next time. So, to account for his, broadcast reruns of Seinfeld speed it up, a bit like playing a podcast at 1.5x speed, to cram in those extra few minutes of ads and profit.
Even weirder, because of some weird-ass legalese, Trump's antisemitic shitheel supporter Steve Bannon somehow made [makes?] money off Seinfeld residuals, which is something that makes me vomit in my mouth a little every time I think of an antisemitic piece of shit making money off Jewish people.
If anyone remembers my older post on Jane Mayer's Dark Money, Robert Mercer is Steve Bannon's billionaire owner, the guy with toy trains who doesn't believe human life has intrinsic value, only how much $$$ you have.
—Another common logical fallacy to keep an eye out for: Argument From Authority.
—This is too long already, but I'm reminded of an article I read in English 102 about growing wealth disparity and social mobility (at least for us poors) leading to a significant number of Americans no longer believing in the idea of "work hard to get ahead" (and who can blame 'em? I was drilled on that as a kid as my dad used me for borderline slave labor; it didn't teach me hard work, i taught me that even your own family'll fuck you over for the right price, so why would you trust a nameless, faceless corporation?); instead, a significant number of people viewed success as dependent on winning the lottery, a big lawsuit, or big on a game show. In the last decade since I read it, I'd be surprised if this hasn't continued to grow, though I'm assuming one would slot many 'Influencer' jobs as somewhere between the first and third.
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