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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Media Is/Are The Emperor Without Clothes, September 13, 2008
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.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Through The Journalist's Peephole, March 22, 2008
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.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Wake-up Call for the Media and its Consumers, March 18, 2008
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?
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