Propaganda with Personality

To start out with, I will say that Salon.com is a mixed bag of news, stuff, and garbage. For every article that is actual journalism or hard-hitting opinion/activism there is a fluff piece about pop culture or something from an obscure academic studying societal taboos like doing it in the butt. Sometimes I wish they could categorize their articles a little better. Sometimes I wish the actual "liberal" media in Salon was stand alone, so that good writers like Bob Cesca were not crammed in with dreck like 9 reasons why not having kids was the best life decision I've ever made. I understand that click-bait headlines and aggregation are the keys to getting page-views and therefore revenue, but shoehorning the silly in with the serious does Salon no real favors. On the whole, I like them, even if the overly complex site causes my computer to freeze occasionally and you have to sift through some chaff to find the wheat.

That said, one of my favorite things on Salon are their book excerpts. While simply cutting and pasting a passage from some out of the way tome and slapping a click-bait headline is not exactly cutting edge, there is something slightly compelling about a snapshot of the prose. Actual book reviews are certainly better, but just jumping into a subject without context is almost like a roller coaster ride for an academic. The book in question is called Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt our Finances, Freedom, and Security but Salon's excellent and no doubt well-compensated headline writers (snark) introduced it this way: The propagandists have won: What Fox News and the pornography revolution have in common. But whatever, Salon is a relatively mainstream medium and these excerpts are a way for professors, aspiring academics, and serious researchers to get their work in front of some eyeballs that might otherwise never get out of the ivory tower. I had a similar reaction to this excerpt of Michael Kimmel's Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era and immediately put the book on hold at the library.

First of all, fox is not actually mentioned in the article. And despite Jenna Jameson's somewhat menacing backwards glance at Sean Hannity's derpy mug in the headline picture, author Professor Janine Wedel is rather uninterested in either of them for the purposes of analyzing news media. Porn is used as a stand in for what Wedel is really getting at, the average American's quest for authenticity and sincerity in world that is increasingly stage-managed and performance centered. "Corporate nice" is the term I may not be alone in using to describe the phenomenon. When you walk into a fast food restaurant or a big box store and encounter staff who ask as nicely as possible "how may I help you?" and always say thank you for shopping here, etc. Or the tone used by spokespeople in TV commercials. It is scripted, it is fake; we know this, the biggest freedom customers seem to have sometimes is being rude to the poor people trying to earn a living working off management's script.

In this excerpt Wedel describes a sea change in the porno industry as now being "DIY" and that the industry's customers are demanding a more "real" experience from their products but leaves out the ridiculous idea of "reality television" as an example. Mainstream flame outs by reality TV stars such as the bearded swamp dwellers on Duck Dynasty or the Duggars notwithstanding, millions of Americans tune in for each week's sampling of carnival sideshows without fail. But the "reality" under real discussion is the news.

The sea change in porn might seem to be of little consequence to those who don’t indulge in it. And yet it pulls back the curtain on the personalization of the media and Internet and why today’s top power brokers, clothed as they are, can operate willy-nilly beyond accountability—and get away with it. Unlike with other arenas like finance or health care or national-security policy, however, we, the public, can hardly make a convincing case that the sweeping changes in the media just happened without our complicity. We have been, and are, ever-more-active participants in sowing this unaccountability.

The idea of unaccountable, elite, power-brokers making changes in wide swaths of societal fabric is certainly unsettling for a democracy; it is even troubling for a capitalist economy in that the public is being served products and services that they do not actually want but are manipulated into accepting or even demanding ones that suit these elites better. Purists that say "kill your TV" are really not helpful in this regard, as many or even most people cannot be persuaded to put down the fancy gadgets much less the now quaint ones like television that they see as enriching their lives. The genie of media will not be put back in the bottle. Therefore what people outside the mainstream media but who still participate in the political and social discourse need to do is encourage and cultivate more discerning taste. Then the direction of causation can be made more apparent to the audience. If consumers of media are really driving the personalization of the news that Wedel believes is easing the imposition of greater unaccountability, then there is no reversing it. A pro-democracy bent will come off to most people as unappealingly as the aloof hipster who is always better than thou.

But if the personalization and accompanying manipulation is really the result of elite power-brokers imposing these vulgar media choices, then raising people's expectations and demand for good entertainment and news from media could bring the rickety edifice down. A good bullshit detector is the first line of defense against being manipulated. A strong network of critical thinkers multiplies the detection of that Grade A American bullshit.

So I am going to pick up this book in the new future and try to get as much out of it as possible. Hopefully I can write a proper review as well.