Read More Money Than Brains Online
Authors: Laura Penny
When Cronkite shuffled off this mortal coil in 2009, many journalists and media critics covered his death as another obituary for journalism. He had been retired since the early eighties, but his former colleagues turned his death into a symbol of the end of serious news, the kind that used to inspire trust and sway public opinion and politics.
The fragmentation and multiplication of the media mean that participants in public policy arguments, such as the debate about health care, bring very different sets of facts and interpretations to the table, ones that are often incommensurable. Talking heads are unlikely to find any sort of sensible middle or reasonable compromise between “We need a public option” and “This is socialist tyranny.”
It is disingenuous for news organizations to claim that they seek balance or neutrality when they get some blogger who hates Obama to go head-to-head with a Democratic operative. What they really want, what their questions provoke, is a fight – the drama, emotion, and snaps of clashing camps skirmishing. The news is just a wonkier version of the same stuff that sells in other branches of the entertainment industry: conflict between characters. The difference between a
UFC
bout, Kanye West vs. the world, and a spat between opposing members of Congress or Parliament is increasingly one of degree rather than kind.
News organizations, like other branches of the entertainment industry, pimp themselves with promotional merch. Coffee mugs and tote bags are as old as Pledge Week, but
the Fox News store also offers fifteen different ties, golf paraphernalia, books by a number of its on-air personalities, and a branded watch. The
CNN
store sells T-shirts emblazoned with your favourite infotaining headline. Popular choices include “Obama Beats McCain” and “1 in 3 Workers Hungover at Office.” Under the banner of “offbeat,” one can purchase “Poop Power Saves City Money” and “Pole Dance Ends with Face Plant.”
Journalism even has its own combination theme park and mausoleum. In 2008 the Newseum, a $450 million facility years in the making, finally opened. Previously housed in much more modest digs in Rosslyn, Virginia, the Newseum now occupies a massive, splashy building in Washington, D.C., down the road from the Capitol. It hosts a collection of journalism artifacts, interactive displays, multiple movie theatres playing video clips, a working production studio, tributes to journalists who have died in the line of duty, a gift shop, a food court, and a more upscale Wolfgang Puck eatery.
The millions of bucks that built the Newseum came from people who own newspapers, like the Gannetts (
USA Today
) and the Sulzbergers (the
New York Times
). The news industry is trying to burnish its image by presenting its own infotaining version of journalism’s history and future. Like the Creation Museum, the Newseum borrows some gravitas from museology and history to make its case, then wraps all that serious info and old jive in fun for the whole family, in entertaining flicks and interactive displays.
It’s very difficult to disentangle news and entertainment when the news is trying to save itself by borrowing the
trappings of entertainment. But news organizations are also turning to entertainment for cheap content as the traditional media piggyback on celebrity gossip sites and blogs.
TMZ
, a Time Warner tentacle that started online in 2005, has broken several big stories that eventually ended up gobbling plenty of mainstream airtime and inches of op-ed angst. Notable examples include Mel Gibson’s arrest and anti-Semitic outburst, Kramer’s krazy racist Komedy Klub meltdown, and Michael Jackson’s death.
TMZ
has been criticized for its sensationalism and the creepy insistence of its paparazzi. Critics allege that its editors pay sources and use less stringent standards than the traditional media, but
TMZ
gets many stories the old-fashioned way, by sifting through documents, working sources in hospitals, police departments, and restaurants, and pestering the ever-living shit out of its targets.
This is simply to say that
TMZ
is an odd blend of old and new media, of traditional gumshoe reportage, the immediacy of the Web, and the superficiality of celebrity culture. When
TMZ
beat the
L.A. Times
to the story of Michael Jackson’s death, some saw this scoop as the new media triumphing over the moribund old press. Others refused to acknowledge
TMZ
as a legit source.
CNN
journos, for example, waffled about announcing Jackson’s death until the
L.A. Times
did. They mentioned that
TMZ
was claiming Jackson was dead, but Wolf Blitzer insisted that they wait for more confirmation. They might be corporate cousins –
CNN
also belongs to Time Warner – but
CNN
seemed wary of
TMZ
, as if it couldn’t quite trust the louche online upstart.
This old-media hauteur is funny when you think about how much time
CNN
anchors spend reading viewer tweets and emails, deploying whiz-bang techno props like digital maps and holograms, and covering the same celebrities as
TMZ
.
In a 2007 article in the
New York Times
, Harvey Levin, the legalist and investigative reporter who is the Grand Poo-Bah of
TMZ
, compared it to the Associated Press. He said, “We work as hard at breaking a Britney Spears story as
NBC
would work on breaking a President Bush piece.”
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If Levin and his bevy of youngsters had dogged Bush and Cheney in the lead-up to the Iraq war with the same tenacity that they monitor Lindsay Lohan’s leatheriness, perhaps some of their scandals might have broken sooner.
Sure,
TMZ
covers vapid dingbats, but it does not worship them. It treats them much more harshly than the publicist-approved puff pieces we see on
etalk
or in the likes of
Vanity Fair
. It is a lot less deferential than the Hollywood or Washington press corps. Much of
TMZ
‘
S
coverage is mean, smirky, and snarky, more likely to bury Paris Hilton than to praise her.
It’s easy to point to
TMZ
as yet another example of our brainless celebrity culture. Celeb gossip clogs the airwaves and Intertubes, crowding out more important stories. Rich, dizzy babes of questionable talent are bad role models for the kids. It’s a shame that pantyless party girls get more attention than the real heroes, the nurses and teachers and moms. All true, my earnest friend, all true. But that doesn’t really explain why people like
TMZ
. Loving gossip is certainly part of it, but
TMZ
also caters to our seemingly endless
appetite for bad examples, stupid statements, and morons to mock.
Talentless stars and clueless celebs are not really role models, at least not to the extent that some parents and cultural critics fear they are. Rather, the coverage of these stars tends to range from the faux concerned to the downright derisive. Celebrities often serve as objects of
schadenfreude
, a way for the audience to make fun of dummies and congratulate themselves for being more sensible or smarter than the rich and powerful. Britney or Heidi and Spencer might have money, fame, and miles of shoes, but they are miserable or moronic or dopey or douchey.
Laughing at the clueless mouthfarts of cute twenty-somethings who spent their high-school years with vocal coaches or plastic surgeons is another variation on the theme “Are we getting dumber?” Ignorant or loopy celebs allow the public to express and exorcise their own anxieties about their intelligence.
Jesus Christ, are all young people this stunned? Why is this trash in the paper? Who likes these people?
Celebrity stories also offer a chance to complain about the whims of the free market. The economic excesses of celebrities always make for good gossip.
Ten million bucks to get
her
in your movie? He’s bankrupt because he blew it all on jewellery and tigers?
The publicly and lavishly squandered fortunes of celebrities –
TMZ
shoots a lot of shopping footage – tell us that economic rewards are fickle, fleeting, dependent only on popularity. Sometimes talent and hard work are rewarded and sometimes the world’s Kardashians prevail. One day everyone loves you, execs are hucking millions at you, and you’re buying
mink-lined Uggs for all your pals, who chill at your mansion. Next thing you know, you’re outta work, in hock, and scrambling for a spot on
Celebrity Rehab
.
Like school-sucks stories or accounts of campus decline, celeb coverage allows the media to play on our anxieties about how ignorant our fellows are, or are becoming. Then there are the semi-celebs who enjoy brief fame for blurting or doing something stupid, making a mistake egregious enough for the vast majority to point and laugh at. The most infamous recent example of this occurred in August 2007, when Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Caitlin Upton served up this word salad:
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to [locate the U.S. on a map] because, uh, some, people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.
The clip became a popular news item and an instant smash on YouTube, where it racked up millions and millions of hits and thousands and thousands of comments.
Upton quickly parlayed this exposure into follow-up appearances on programs such as the
Today Show
, where
she was given an opportunity to answer the question again. She said:
Personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on a map. I don’t know anyone else who doesn’t. If the statistics are correct, I believe there should be more emphasis on geography in our education so people will learn how to read maps better.
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The hosts applauded her for this effort, which is not much of an improvement on the original. The grammar is better, insofar as there is some. But it is still redundant and narcissistic, disputing the stats on the grounds of her finger’s-breadth of experience, making an
argumentum ad
I-don’t-know-anyone-like-that, a popular undergrad essay move.
Upton may have lost the pageant but she won the publicity, became part of the media mist. (Can you remember who won? Me neither.) Her garble was second only to “Don’t tase me, bro!” in the
Yale Dictionary of Quotations
list of 2007‘s most notable quotes.
NBC
, the network that broadcast the pageant, also used Upton’s jibber-jabber to promote the pageant in 2008. Their pitch:
Come see which one of these dizzy babes will lose her cool and say something ridiculous this year
.
Upton got her fifteen minutes because she is a blonde-joke blonde who gave America the opportunity to ask itself the question “Does this bonehead represent an endemic national boneheadedness?” The morning shows answered this with a resounding no.
She’s just a pretty girl who cracked under
the pressure – time for a makeup test and a cookie!
The Web is a much harsher taskmaster. Bloggers and posters reviled Upton for embodying a host of bobble-head stereotypes of ladies and blondes and Americans. The general tone?
Thanks a lot, you ditzy bitch, for handing the world’s lesser nations yet another chance to point and jeer at that big ol’ doofus the U.S. of A
.
There is a lot of wrong on the Internet: page after page of execrable grammar, bad information, and delusional ranting. But it also hosts countless sites devoted to the excoriation of ignorance and sloppiness, where the persnickety share and shred everything from poorly spelled signs to disingenuous reporting. The Internet is also home to various experts – professors, economists, statisticians, veterans of the old press – who can provide more detailed interpretations of ongoing events than the confines and constraints of a column or cable squabble allow.
A 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press found that more people were getting their national and international news from the Internet than from newspapers. Forty-two per cent of respondents went to the Net for news and 33 per cent still trusted ol’ Inky. But the vast majority, 71 per cent, said that
TV
was their primary news source. This helps explain another finding from the survey: the accuracy and credibility of the press has tanked. Pew has been conducting this survey for nearly two decades. In 2009 the number of respondents who said that the press usually gets things right, 29 per cent, sank to its all-time low. The majority, 63 per cent, said news stories were often inaccurate, and 60 per cent thought the news was politically biased.
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Republicans have been working this angle since the 1980s, arguing that bland moderate media outlets like
CNN
, which frequently air the opinions of corporate lobbyists, are actually radical leftist organs. But Democrats increasingly also see the news as biased. Both sides think the press is in cahoots with the powerful people and institutions it should be policing. Both have decamped to their own cable channels. Republicans watch Fox, Democrats watch
MSNBC
and
CNN
, and never the twain shall meet.