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Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture

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First a note: I loved the discussion of having to use plural verbs for "media" (Latin plural) but I shall use the common singular usage.

This is an important little (117 pages) book exposing the media as not wearing any clothes while believing themselves omniscient and above all taint of bias. Yet, everyone has a bias -- to deny it is not being honest. Earlier in our history one could tell a newspaper's bias at a glance -- the paper's name was the Arkansas Globe-Democrat, or the Springfield Republican. Now the New York Times claims to be totally without bias and holding the moral high ground to always be able to see and expose the hidden meaning or agenda in every action of politicians they do not like (i.e. Bush.) Bowman exposes this ridiculous contention as hyprocrisy, hyperbole and hubris, and he does it with style.

Bowman is in love with long, involved sentences, and I recommend a close, and if required, a second read. His logic is sometimes not easy to follow, but it is there and fully developed. However, he would have done well to follow Napoleon's aprocryphal practice of always giving an order to his Polish valet first and have him explain its meaning. If the valet interpreted the order correctly, then Napoleon could feel somewhat confident that his marshals would be able to understand it. Bowman could use such a valet.

The idea of "media madness" is that the media is so full of itself that it is incapable of comprehending its deficiencies. I'm reminded of a friend who lives in Berkeley, California, and believes that Berkeley politics are firmly in the middle of the road although most outside observers would characterize them as being somewhere left of Lenin. She has succumbed to the constant and comprehensive propaganda of the media and has become incapable of separating polemic from factual reporting. Unfortunately, the media, as Bowman points out, is fully emcompassed in groupthink and incapable of seeing what they are doing. They have a herd mentality in which one can always recognize a well-informed individual -- his opinion is the same as your own. Yes, Bowman uses examples and only a few, but recounting a few thousand examples as he easily could would make his thesis sleep-inducing and counter-productive.

Bowman argues that there is NO objectivity currently in the media except as interpreted as being pointed toward convincing the reader/listener of the correctness of the writer's point of view. The writer filters all data through his Hume-oriented a priori framework of knowledge (leftist, in the vast majority of cases) and produces information consistent with his own beliefs for the recipient to use in creating his. This is natural, and to hold forth that it is otherwise is not being intellectually honest. As an example, NBC reported its newsflash on Palin's selection by McCain with the statement; "How many houses will she add to McCain's number?" But, of course, NBC was just reporting objectively.

Secondly, Bowman dismisses the idea of professionalism being an aspect of journalism. He is quite correct, of course, in spite of the many "distinguished" schools of journalism in elite universities teaching writing process rather than mastery of the subject matter. The same problem exists in education schools where mastery of subject matter is excluded and held to be irrelevant. Far more important is teaching how to make up lesson plans, visual aids, and learn techniques to "understand" the students' problems. One only needs to look at Helen (I've momentarily forgotten her last name), the dean of the White House Press Corps, to put any idea of professionalism to rest.

Bowman paints the alternate reality in which the media functions with humor and style. The media's reality is not the facts or words pronounced by a subject, but what lies underneath as discovered or manufactured by the media itself. Context is only important if it supports the directional thrust of the reporter, and more often than not is ignored so that sinister conspiracies and evil intents can more easily be inferred for sensationalistic effect. After all, that's what earns a Pulitzer Prize.

The media also uses victims extensively, treating them as experts on whatever subject involves their victimhood. Does Cindy Sheehan really qualify as an expert on geo-political foreign policy by virtue of having lost a son in a war? As Bowman points out, it is "mean-spirited" to attack victims, regardless of their lack of expertise. And it is most useful to quote such individuals to express the reporter's own point of view -- then he is shielded from having to state it himself and he can hide behind his saintly "objectivity." Celebrities are likewise extremely useful, not only to make news more entertaining, but to create a herd mentality using them as opinion leaders. Almost astoundingly, this technique works, as Bowman makes clear, particularly when the symbiotic relationship between the media and celebrities (who both need each other) can be effectively hidden from view by taking unassailable moral stances.

The weakest part of the book concern the future of the media due to the impact of bloggers on the internet. Bowman appears to believe that bloggers may provide a counterpoint to the mainstream media and reduce its power to propagandize, but that remains to be seem. There is a valid argument here, but bloggers currently are simply providing information that the "professional" journalists have missed for them to seize upon and more widely disseminate. Maybe the bloggers will show the media that it is not wearing any clothes, but I doubt it.

In short, this in an important book that should be BOUGHT and READ.

Unfortunately as Napoleon said about Jomini's book exposing Napoleon's techniques of strategy and tactics; "No matter, the young officers who will read it do not command, and the generals in command will not read it." Such is life -- I doubt if anyone in the media will read this book and allow himself to be influenced by it. To do so would be to repudiate journalism as is currently practiced in the US and his own reason for existence.

Henry James spoke years ago of the "house of fiction" through whose windows writers must necessarily peer out at the visible world. James added that while these windows were of varying size and breadth, it was the duty of any conscientious writer to attempt to be "one on whom nothing is lost."

In other words, if a God-like "objectivity" is not fully granted to any writer, he is still obliged, after recognizing his angle of vision, to search out truth and be as fair to the realities he treats as possible. In attacking the oft-repeated claim by movers and shakers from our mass media to possess a complete and superhuman "objectivity", James Bowman argues most persuasively that journalists should recognize and admit they too look through vision-limiting windows at the events they report. His position here is similar to the noble one of Henry James. In acerbic, witty prose, Bowman shows in case after case that our self-described, "objective" journalists, in fact and unfortunately, look at life not even through a large living room window, but at best through a peephole. They are these days by and large ignorant of or deceptive about their own easily identifiable and widely shared biases. These include a devotion to multiculturalism, utopian fantasy, and moral equivalence, among others. Such biases are embraced with complete, uncritical dogmatism. People opposing the views of such journalists, consequently, can't be ill-informed or simply mistaken, but are deemed necessarily "wicked." Bowman's conclusion is that such practices have led to the corruption not only of the mass media and its reporters but of "our political culture" at large.

Not all readers may share Bowman's out in the open, on-the-table political views, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to assessing the value of his book. As a well-documented analysis of current "media madness," it is indispensable. In my view, it should become required reading in college composition and journalism classes.

Looking at America's cultural and political elite, it sometimes appears that this country has the stupidest smart people in the world. This, however, is an illusion. It is simply a matter of how they get their information. The so-called "main stream media" has slipped its traces to reality and woe to the gullible consumer who believes what he's told.

James Bowman calls this disconnect from reality "media madness" and, in this important work, dissects the nature, origins and future of this phenomenon. He begins by analyzing the nature of the media's claim to "objectivity." Thinkers at least as far back as Montaigne have expressed doubt about the ability to acheive objectivity, but the current cult of objectivity among journalists has morphed into something far worse.

Mr. Bowman shows how what began as a search for the "truth" has developed into both an ego trip for reporters who claim a monopoly on what the truth is and a herd mentality among them, making them unwilling and unable to buck the party line, lest they find themselves separated from the media's own unreal vision of reality.

In chapter after damning chapter, Mr. Bowman shows how the media has lost the ability to do what its consumers want it to do - report the news - and he shows why they lost that ability. He shows how the "cult of feelings" among journalists has made describing how people react to an event more important than reporting the event itself and he explains how sensationalism has rendered the media unable to determine the importance of events, by giving priority to the eye-catching over the significant.

This has led to the media's valuation of intelligence over character and common sense, a therapeutic approach to analysis and the moralization of politics. Opposition to all of this has accelerated the rise of alternate media at the expense of the main stream media.

The author is one of those rare commentators who is able to view the world through others' eyes and he understands, even as he is appalled by, the reasons why the media has taken the route it has. He writes with a wonderfully dry sense of humor, which leavens a serious topic. He also has a rare sense of intellectual responsibility. Although initially an opponent of the war in Iraq, now that the country is committed, he criticizes the outspoken opponents who have done so much to hamstring our efforts and embolden the insurgents.

Although Mr. Bowman is a man of the Right - and like any clear thinking student of the media, notes the bias of the media toward the Democratic Party - he has not written a polemic. His observations have been endorsed by Thomas Edsall, a man of the Left, but one as clear thinking as Mr. Bowman is.

And the Left should be even more concerned about the state of a media biased in their favor than the Right should be about the bias against them. Some academics have calculated that media bias costs Republicans about 5% of the votes in an election, but that is merely an incentive to campaign harder and better. A press biased in favor of the Democrats allows substandard people to rise, bad policy to gain momentum at the expense of good policy and a steady defection of truly intelligent people leaving behind the people who believe what they're told.

Recently, three events occurred all in one week which illustrate this last point. The governor of New York was forced to resign in a prostitution scandal, surprising the loyal readers of a media which had portrayed him as the great crusader against injustice, but anyone who followed his ethically deficient career without letting headlines get in the way expected just this kind of fall. Meanwhile, the Pentagon produced a report which showed that Saddam Hussein had extensive ties to terrorist organizations dating back at least to 1981, which the media promptly distorted in truly irresponsible descriptions of the report. How can Democrats shape US policy in the Middle East when the media tells them what they want to hear instead of the world as it is? Finally, David Mamet, one of the country's last serious playwrights, wrote an article explaining why he is no longer a "brain dead liberal." Thus the media tightens the noose on both the Left and their own future.

If the Times and the Post had any sense, they would give this book a prominent review and distribute it to their staffs. What do you bet that they will just choose to ignore it?

The scandal of our creeping propaganda that threatens the entire society is what the author focuses upon - that should be critical to anyone who wonders where our democracy went.

Since the advent of JFK and the publicized debate, America has gone downhill, swept away in a mass of politically advantaged clips meant to obscure if not deceive its public on personality and character of the political performers, and every issue of importance known to mankind.

A timely offering of no small measure since the airwaves and the newsprint is often owned by the same entity, and no news is not always good news. What he gets at is that if there were no corruption, America might not have any eruption at all; we could all live our small lives of peons that media is meant to and configured to ignore - as political process. And who would be the wiser? Or who would care?

Our politicians could go on shawdowboxing forever on the pretense that they are the best leaders for the nation, and then do what they have done for 50 years, use the powers of office to enrich themselves and their friends, far and wide, at public expense. An enterprising look on how it happened, and continues to happen by an author with more than enough knowledge and experience in the industry of public communication to offer the precautions of "buyer beware," and why.

Thomas Jefferson felt that news media were vital to the democracy because, since the will of the people guides government, and the people must be informed in order to steer their representatives' policies, the news must provide that information and do so accurately. Later, after being the subject of scandal mongering, Jefferson bemoaned the degraded state of the biased media. Bowman seems to agree, but contributes to the misinforming of the public by not being more even-handed in his criticisms and viewing his subject through Red State-colored glasses.

James Bowman's book is useful if you are a conservative looking to affirm your misguided notions about the media's being liberal. However, although the author has legitimate criticisms about the media--their over-valuing of emotion, their claims of objectivity in the face of bias--the value of his observations is undermined by his own bias and his lack of fair treatment of both sides despite his expressed desire for fairness.

Some have mentioned the author's style, which might be off-putting if you are used to works intended for the general public: Bowman's tone is academic and his prose is unengaging at times because he writes in abstract rather than concrete terms. He does pepper chapters with examples that have been cherry-picked to support his basic argument, but anyone who remembers news from before yesterday can easily recall examples that counter his in establishing the media as basically conservative.

Part of the mushiness of the debate comes from the term "media," which refers not only to the news media (Bowman's main concern), but also to radio, film, television, punditry (which is not news, but opinion masquerading as news), etc. Bowman's use of "media" means the news media and punditry. Because they generally don't like facts to get in the way of their views, conservatives use the same argument consistently to establish that news outlets are liberal: namely, they base the claim on polls of the political affiliation of news reporters. If more reporters are Democrats, the media are liberal. This idea would seem sensible if, in fact, reporters decided what went into print or on the air. However, if one wants to judge the loyalties of an organization, s/he would look instead at who the owners are, who pays the bills, and who has final decisions over what goes public. Thanks to the Clinton administration, media companies have become monopolies owned by only 5 or 6 companies, all of them run by staunchly conservative types. So, for example, a TV station owned by General Electric will not report "liberal" news going against the parent company. These companies are further filtered by their advertisers, whose business concerns render them more conservative as well.

One can further determine the political stance of the media by looking at content as a whole. If the media were liberal, news about labor issues would be extremely pro-union, there would be a labor section in every newspaper, there would be a labor channel, issues of corporate misdeeds as they relate to their effects on labor would be featured constantly. None of this is the case. Instead, the interests of the financial sector and markets are catered to generally, and although unemployment statistics are reported, not much effort goes into linking those with the actions of the companies that have destroyed conditions for the American workforce. Exposes of businesses like Monsanto polluting their communities or endangering the food supply or mistreating overseas workers are rare. Instead, the news broadcasts items that serve as commercials--Starbucks has a new coffee flavor, the new iPad is out, etc. If the news is liberal, why do people lionize Ronald Reagan without analyzing his dismal record, and why do people still take Newt Gingrich seriously? Furthermore, the tampering with elections by the Bush administration would be widely known, yet the subject remains the obscure arcane knowledge of those interested in electoral ethics.

If the news were liberal, the treatment of minorities would be at least more even-handed. Yet research consistently shows that, for example, African Americans appearing on the news are most often linked to crime, giving people the false impression that African Americans are criminals. Arabs are almost uniformly identified as terrorists and Muslim, when most Arabs have no sympathy for terrorists and are often the victims of terror, many are Christian, and Arabs only make up 12% of the world's Muslim population. The news would also be filled with sympathetic stories about protesters for liberal causes, and the activists would be portrayed in a positive light. When protests are covered, which is rare, the coverage is not often favorable. News of police brutality against protesters, like that during the last cycle of presidential election conventions, is not reported. In fact, if we include film and TV, protesters are most often portrayed as nutcases, angry and irrational boneheads prone to violence, when in fact most protests are peaceful until police, working on behalf of business interests, use rubber bullets, pepper spray, tasers, or sound cannons on them.

Broadening the scope to include other types of media, one can see that talk radio is dominated by conservative personalities. Movies and TV shows, even kids' programming, are flooded with conservative messages--the righteous warrior must defeat all foes, Arabs are terrorists, torture is a necessity, etc. When was the last time you watched a movie focusing on diplomacy?

The only stance someone could take in the face of the actual content of the media is that a) it is conservative, or b) at times it shows both liberal and conservative biases.

Bowman, on the other hand, sees only liberal malice afoot. Liberals receive emotionally loaded negative adjectives (Clinton's tales of being less than privileged as a kid are "alleged," Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 is a "circus") while conservatives are portrayed as mistreated and misunderstood, such as Ann Coulter, who makes it a habit of using derogatory terms for homosexuals to insult people she disagrees with, and whom Bowman praises as "daringly outspoken." Bowman bemoans the manhandling of George W. Bush, apparently forgetting that from 2003 until 2006 (when the government's policy of abusing prisoners was discovered) news outlets favored Bush and supported the war, cheered Shock and Awe, embedded reporters, relied on "information" (what we know now are lies) from administration experts. The author mentions Dan Rather's report on Bush's military record as being a sign of bias, but neglects to read into the fact that Rather was fired as demonstrating the editorial policies of the network. Also fired was Phil Donohue, whose cable talk show was not "patriotic" enough (as revealed later by an MSNBC memo) for network brass because sometimes Phil Donohue let people who disagreed with the president speak. In fact, out of over 300 "experts" who discussed the war, only 3 were anti-war. In the lead up to our invasion of Iraq, only generals were consulted (generals it has since been reported were paid to provide pro-Bush, pro-war propaganda), and no one asked whether we should go to war, but only when and how and what weapons we might use.

Bowman defends Ann Coulter's claim that the media misrepresented her comments about the 9/11 widows, but does not defend Al Gore against the media's misreporting and attacking his claims about the Internet (which the creators of the Internet have said were true), about his and his wife's being the models for the characters in "Love Story," (when he was only repeating what he had read in the local newspaper and half of which was true--Al Gore was the model for the male character according to the book's author), etc.

A better book on this subject is Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," which covers much the same ground but does so, ironically, more objectively.

With skill and wit, Bowman identifies the malady afflicting the US mass media. It's not the bias but the pretense to objectivity that is sinking these purveyors of groupthink. He points out symptoms like hypocrisy, moral posturing, sneering condescension and dogmatic relativism that permeate their message. Intelligence has become the highest virtue at the expense of character, integrity, courage and common sense. The most complicated issues are reduced to a simple good-evil dichotomy in order to remove them from scrutiny and debate. Context has disappeared from the vocabulary, hyperbole has become the norm and victims are cynically used for maximum emotional effect. News and opinion are becoming indistinguishable as the media promote their ideological agenda. Those who disagree with the narrative du jour are demonized, belittled or ignored. In a parasitical symbiosis, the fatuous opinions of celebrities - most of whom are ignorant & uninformed - are served to the public to reinforce the bias.

The situation of the print media - not the BBC - is different in the UK where newspapers openly proclaim their political allegiances. Bowman observes that the narrative of the mainstream media in the USA is a form of utopianism. The morality is sentimental, arbitrary and intolerant despite claims to the contrary. Emotion has become more important than truth. Artists and intellectuals frequently express their "piety" in hysterical fits of morality. The relativism, rage and selectivity betray it as mere posturing; it is moreover demonstrably contradictory in the way it clings to moral absolutes whilst insisting that none exist.

Declining circulations and revenue have made no difference, demonstrating how entrenched and pervasive the hubris is. Consumers of opinion and infotainment are migrating to the Internet where a greater variety of voices can be found and where allegiance is frankly stated. Moreover, the Blogosphere has been highly successful as a watchdog of the dinosaur media, for example in the cases of Dan Rather/CBS and the photoshopped pictures of the 2006 Lebanon War. There are blogs dedicated to specific newspapers & news services with an impressive track record of exposing errors and spin. Other valuable books on media bias include Spin Sisters by Myrna Blyth, Give Me a Break by John Stossel, Weapons of Mass Distortion by Brent Bozell and The Other War by Stephanie Gutmann.

In this scathing, intelligent exploration of media bias, James Bowman's cool plays well to Bernard Goldberg's hot denunciations. Bowman, the media columnist for the New Criterion, moves well beyond the media's tired refrain to present day criticism of "objective reporting" by carefully and logically dissecting the elitist, scandal driven, celebrity based emotionalism of the news business. Often writing in long weighty sentences, some in need of parsing, Bowman, in a book less than 120 pages, strives for accuracy and analysis over catching name-calling and bloviation. Identifying newspapers, reporters and columnists, his argument is not a defense of George W. Bush or an attack on the liberal media's screed his administration endured for the last five years as it is a contemplative exploration of the corruption of the body politic, the debasement of the market place of political discourse and the American culture by our media.

James Bowman acknowledges the decline of the mainstream media of the past but spends most of the text missing the point. What are the audience share leaders today? Not network news, not CNN, not newspapers or newsmagazines. They are sliding fast in relevance. The share gainers are Fox News, CNBC, and a bazillion Web sites and bloggers, heavily leaning right. Roger Ailes thought the answer to pervasive liberal control of old-school media was to build his own intentionally biased news machine. The big difference here is the intent. Old-school media never plotted to be one-sided, they just likeminded themselves into unrestrained subjectivity. The new media are built to play the spin game, not a positive development. Bowman needs to spend more time working on the immorality of his own side.

Everyone is biased - it's a simple fact of life. It's the media's job to simply feign unbiased and honest reporting. "Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture" is an examination of today's media and the mythology that governs it. Written with a dry, sarcastic wit throughout, author and writer for the Wall Street Journal James Bowman attacks the media's obsessive love of scandal, moral superiority, and the excessive damage they have done to themselves and others, and how the world is moving away from them because of it. "Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture" is highly recommended for community library social issues shelves and for anyone also disenfranchised with today's news media.

James Bowman is a very intelligent man but a terrible writer.His sentence structure is terrible and I find myself having to reread his ideas several times to divine the meaning.I was looking forward to this book as it is such an important subject but find I have a hard time picking it up to read now.