The Medium is the Message
In the newest issue of Harper's, editor Lewis Lapham quotes Theodor Adorno in discussing the ways in which facts and sensibility have effectively been discarded in the press in favor of easily digestible news that won't rock the boat:
"Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying...The confounding of truth and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a distinction, and a labor of Sisyphus to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge...marks the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power." Adorno was talking about the German Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in the 1930s, but it's clear that he could just as well be talking about right now, when a President's lies, tampering with voting in elections, out-and-out lawbreaking, mean so little that they are displaced on the news cycle by whether or not brad Pitt is fucking Angelina Jolie. Our point, long made on this site, is that what President Bush says or does matters as little as whether Ashlee is lip-synching her concerts; as the Ministry of Propaganda instructed, arguments must be simple and emotional, instinctual rather than intellectual, endlessly repeated until they're true.
- It's conventional wisdom that content trumps form, that what you say is more important than how you say it. That is obviously no longer the case. Theory-heads will argue that the reverse is true, that we now live in a time when form mattters, not content. That the content is almost worthless, only what it's contained in is valuable. But in a time when names take precedence over events (the who, not the what), and the narrative is constructed by images on TV and good camera shots as opposed to the words being spoken (or the soldiers being killed), it's looking to us like the form IS the content. As Lapham says, "Who cares to know whether Rush Limbaugh's truths are truer than Toyota's? Nothing necessarily follows from anything else, and the viewer is free to shop around for a reality matched to taste." And with such logic does a democracy turn into an entertainment center, benevolently managed (we used to call that authoritarianism) by the funhouse employees of the media and the kindly old store owner of the Bush administration.