Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (7 page)

Later, coverage of the Vietnam War threatened this arrangement, as daily footage of American soldiers enduring and even perpetrating war atrocities proved too much for the evening news to contextualize. There was still a story being told, but the story was out of the government’s—or its propagandists’—control. If anything, the story that the television news was telling ended up more accurate than the one President Johnson’s staff was feeding him. The cognitive dissonance between the stories we were trying to tell ourselves about who we were as a nation and a people began conflicting with the stories that we were watching on TV. In a world still organized by stories, news about Vietnam atrocities and Watergate crimes can only mean there are bad people who need to be punished.

This cognitive dissonance amounted to a mass adolescence for America: the stories we were being told about who we were and what we stood for had turned out to be largely untrue. And like any adolescent, we felt ready to go out and see the world for ourselves. What a perfect moment for Ted Turner to arrive with an unfiltered twenty-four-hour news channel. Like every other escape from media captivity, the launch and spread of CNN in the 1980s appeared to offer us liberation from the imposed narratives of our keepers. Instead of getting the news of the day neatly packaged by corporate networks into stories with tidy endings, we would now get live feeds of whatever was happening of importance, anywhere in the world. Although CNN would lack the network news’s budgets, editorial experience, and recognizable anchormen, it would attempt to parlay its unique position to its advantage. CNN was not under traditional corporate control, so it could present news without worrying about who or what was impacted; its always-on format meant the newsroom was not under the obligation to craft events into satisfying packages for a single evening broadcast; its position on the cable dial lowered expectations for high-budget production values; and, finally, its freedom from traditional narrative made it less suspect in the post-Watergate era. Like Ted Turner himself, CNN would be renegade, free of corporate or government control, and utterly uncensored.

This is why the network came under such widespread attack in its earlier days from traditional news media, academics, and politicians. Contrary to journalistic standards of the day, CNN let Saddam Hussein speak directly to the American people. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, CNN was the only network to broadcast the first bombardments of Baghdad from a hotel window, having made arrangements for transmission access with the Iraqi government that were later criticized. CNN also carried immediate and around-the-clock coverage of the Battle of Mogadishu, the protests at Tiananmen Square, and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. This saturation with live, uncensored, and unconsidered images from around the world impacted public opinion profoundly and actually forced government leaders to make decisions more quickly. Officials at the Pentagon eventually dubbed this phenomenon “the CNN effect,” as then secretary of state James Baker explained, “The one thing it does, is to drive policymakers to have a policy position. I would have to articulate it very quickly. You are in real-time mode. You don’t have time to reflect.”
¹⁷
Baker isn’t simply talking about needing to work and think faster; he’s expressing the need to behave in real time, without reflection. Policy, as such, is no longer measured against a larger plan or narrative; it is simply a response to changing circumstances on the ground, or on the tube. Of course, the Internet, Facebook status updates, and Twitter feeds amplify this effect, bringing pings and alerts from around the world to people’s desktops and smart phones without even the need for a CNN truck or a satellite feed. Just as CNN once forced network news broadcasters to carry images they might have otherwise held back, now YouTube forces the cable networks to show amateur clips, even if they do so with disclaimers.

The focus on immediate response engendered by always-on news becomes the new approach to governance. Pollsters such as Republican operative Frank Luntz
¹⁸
take real-time, moment-to-moment measurements of television viewers’ responses as they watch news debates. Holding small devices with dials called “people meters,” sample audience members register their immediate impressions of candidates, coverage, and calamity. Policy makers then use this information to craft their responses to crises as they unfold. No one has time to think, and insisting on a few hours or even an entire day to make a decision is regarded as a sign of indecision and weakness. The mythic emergency phone call to the president at 2 a.m. must not only be answered, but also responded to immediately, as if by instinct.

As a result, what used to be called statecraft devolves into a constant struggle with crisis management. Leaders cannot get on top of issues, much less ahead of them, as they instead seek merely to respond to the emerging chaos in a way that makes them look authoritative. While grand narratives may have prompted ethnocentric and jingoistic attitudes from ideological policy makers (neoconservatism being just one of the more recent varieties of world writing), the lack of any narrative at all subjects them to the constant onslaught of random disasters. The effort to decisively end a story is futile. George W. Bush posed his control over narrativity just three days after 9/11 when he stood at Washington National Cathedral and told America, “This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.”
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He later landed on an aircraft carrier and stood in front of a Mission Accomplished banner, as if to punctuate the conclusion of this story, but reality would not submit. In a presentist world, it is impossible to get in front of the story, much less craft it from above.

Likewise, without long-term goals expressed for us as readily accessible stories, people lose the ability to respond to anything but terror. If we have no destination toward which we are progressing, then the only thing that motivates our movement is to get
away
from something threatening. We move from problem to problem, avoiding calamity as best we can, our worldview increasingly characterized by a sense of panic. Our news networks and Internet feeds compound the sense of crisis by amplifying only the most sensational and negative events, which garner the highest ratings and click-throughs, generating still more of the same. Yes, the news has always been dominated by darkness and disaster; newspapers with a dead body on the cover page sell better than those announcing a successful flower show. But now the feedback on viewer ratings is instantaneous, and its relationship to ad revenues is paramount, as once-independent news channels like CNN become mere subsidiaries of NYSE conglomerates such as Time Warner. The indirect value that a quality news program may have to the reputation of an entire television franchise ceases to have meaning—or at least enough meaning to compensate for poor ratings in the short term. Blatant shock is the only surefire strategy for gaining viewers in the now. In addition, the 24/7 news cycle creates the sense of a constant stream of crises that are inescapable, no matter where we go. I remember a time in my youth when taking a vacation meant losing touch with whatever was going on. We would return home to mail, phone messages, and the major news stories. Now, as kids on line at Disneyworld busy texting their friends back home seem to attest, there’s almost no way or cause to leave all that behind.

The world is now connected by the news feeds of twenty-four-hour networks, and so together we watch the slow-motion, real-time disasters of Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon, and the Fukushima nuclear plant—as well as what feels like the utter ineffectualness of our leaders to do anything about any of it. CNN put up a live feed of the BP well spewing out its oil into the gulf and kept it in a corner of the broadcast continuously for months. The constancy of such imagery, like the seemingly chronic footage of Katrina victims at the New Orleans Superdome holding up signs begging for help, is both unnerving and desensitizing at the same time. With each minute that goes by with no relief in sight our impatience is stoked further and our perception of our authorities’ impotence is magnified.

Talk radio and cable channels such as Fox News make good business out of giving voice to presentist rage. Opinionated, even indignant, newsreaders keep our collective cortisol (stress hormone) levels high enough to maintain a constant fight-or-flight urgency. Viewers too bored or impatient for news reporting and analysis tune in to evening debate shows and watch pundits attack one another. The pugilism creates the illusion of drama, except the conflict has no beginning or end—no true origin in real-world issues or legitimate effort at consensus. It’s simply the adaptation of well-trodden and quite obsolete Right-Left debate to the panic of a society in present shock. What used to be the Left argues for progress: MSNBC’s brand motto encourages us to “lean forward” into the future. What used to be the Right now argues primarily for the revival of early-twentieth-century values, or social conservatism. Whether looking back or looking ahead, both sides promise relief from the shock of the present.

OCCUPY REALITY

The problem with leaving the present altogether, however, is that it disconnects us from reality. For all the reality shows, twenty-four-hour news channels, issues-related programming, and supposed information overload online, there’s precious little for people to actually rely on or use effectively. Are real estate prices going up or down? Who is winning in Afghanistan? Do Mexicans take American jobs? It all depends on who is talking, as the descent of what used to be professional journalism into professional opining generates the sense that there is no objective truth. Every day, thanks to their immersion in this mediated distortion field, fewer Americans agree that the environment needs to be protected or that biological species evolve. From 1985 to 2005, the number of Americans unsure about evolution increased from 7 percent to 21 percent,
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while those questioning global warming increased from 31 percent in 1997 to 48 percent in 2010.
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These impressions are formed on the basis of religious programming posing as news reporting and cable-channel debates about email scandals, while back in the real world, aquifers are disappearing and first-line antibiotics are becoming ineffective against rapidly mutating bacteria. In the relativistic haze of participatory media, it’s all just a matter of opinion. You are entitled to yours and I am entitled to mine. This is a democracy, after all. As even the jaded, former public relations giant Richard Edelman now admits, “In this era of exploding media technologies there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself.”
²²

The Internet welcomes everyone into the conversation. An op-ed in the
New York Times
may as well be a column on the
Huffington Post
, which may as well be a personal blog or Twitter stream. Everyone’s opinion may as well matter as much as everyone else’s, resulting in a population who believes its uninformed opinions are as valid as those of experts who have actually studied a particular problem. (I can even sense readers bridling at the word “experts” in the preceding sentence, as if I have fallen into the trap of valuing an elite over the more reliable and incorruptible gut sense of real people.) College students often ask me why anyone should pay for professional journalism when there are plenty of people out there, like themselves, willing to write blogs for free? One answer is that government and corporations are investing millions of dollars into their professional communications campaigns. We deserve at least a few professionals working full-time to evaluate all this messaging and doing so with some level of expertise in ascertaining the truth.

Young people are not alone in their skepticism about the value of professional journalism. A 2010 Gallup Poll showed Americans at an under 25 percent confidence in newspapers and television news—a record low.
²³
Pew Research shows faith in traditional news media spiking downward as Internet use spikes upward, and that a full 42 percent believe that news organizations hurt democracy. This is twice the percentage who believed that in the mid-1980s, before the proliferation of the net.
²⁴

As cultural philosopher Jürgen Habermas offered during his acceptance speech of a humanitarian award in 2006, “The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.”
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To be sure, the rise of citizen journalism brings us information that the mainstream media lacks either the budget for or fortitude to cover. Initial reports of damage during Hurricane Katrina came from bloggers and amateur videographers. However, these reports also inflated body counts and spread rumors about rape and violence in the Superdome that were later revealed not to have occurred.
²⁶
Footage and reporting from the Arab Spring and the Syrian revolution—where news agencies were limited or banned—were almost entirely dependent on amateur journalists. But newsgathering during a bloody rebellion against a violently censorious regime is an outlier example and hardly the basis for judging the efficacy of amateur journalism in clarifying issues or explaining policy.

If anything, such heroism under fire, combined with the general public’s access to blogging technology and professional-looking website templates, gives us all the false sense that we are capable of researching and writing professional-quality journalism about anything. In fact, most of us are simply making comments about the columns written by other bloggers, who are commenting on still others. Just because we all have access to blogging software doesn’t mean we should all be blogging, or that everyone’s output is as relevant as everyone else’s. Today’s most vocal critic of this trend,
The Cult of the Amateur
author Andrew Keen, explains, “According to a June 2006 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 34 percent of the 12 million bloggers in America consider their online ‘work’ to be a form of journalism. That adds up to millions of unskilled, untrained, unpaid, unknown ‘journalists’—a thousandfold growth between 1996 and 2006—spewing their (mis)information out in the cyberworld.” More sanguine voices, such as City University of New York journalism professor and BuzzFeed blogger Jeff Jarvis, argue that the market—amplified by search results and recommendation engines—will eventually allow the better journalism to rise to the top of the pile. But even market mechanisms may have a hard time functioning as we consumers of all this media lose our ability to distinguish between facts, informed opinions, and wild assertions.