What frustrates people about both political parties at the end of this Thesis of Conflict is the wide and widening gap between words and action.
This is especially true in questions of leadership. What were individual, human hypocrisies under the Clinton AntiThesis of the 1990s has become the destruction of America’s leadership in the world during this decade. I did not have sex with that woman has become I did not destroy the cradle of civilization.
The wide, and indeed growing, gap between our words and our action is now clear in our foreign policy, as Seymour Hersh reveals this week in The New Yorker. But it’s also true on the other side, in the brouhaha over Hillary Clinton’s failure to apologize for her vote that launched this war.
It’s a continuing pattern not just in politics, but in business, in religion, in sports, and in too many personal lives. We deny, deny, deny, and even when we’re caught, when we’re forced to change our view, we deny that our views changed at all. Spin trumps reality every time. (And don’t look to put a halo on me, either, as my family likes to remind me.)
More important is that the widening gap is most evident in the field I profess, journalism. It’s been 10 years and these idiots still don’t understand that The Daily Show is about them, and their innate hypocrisy. Chasing the dollar with the pretense of being above it, judging others while refusing to accept judgments themselves.
The fact that the media in this country, most especially the TV media, has allowed so many people to get away with this has done more to destroy the business prospects of media companies than anything else, even the rise of the Web.
It’s true on every single beat, the shame of the press in ignoring the lies and going with the spin. The politics guys ignore Iraq and just eat the spin. The sports guys ignore steroids and just eat the spin. The entertainment reporters ignore drug abuse and just eat the spin. The business reporters are the worst, swallowing wholesale looting of public companies and repeating the spin of their PR people.
I would think that the destruction of my own corner of the
journalism world — computer journalism — in the wake of the dot-bomb
would have taught people something. It’s truth-telling sites like The Register that have gone forward, while the entire ad-heavy magazine business practically disappeared.
The fact is there are two ways in which you can sustain a journalism
enterprise, through readers and through advertisers. A publisher who
stands on the side of the advertisers, or who allows themselves to be
intimidated into silence by those advertisers, loses touch with the
readers and deserves to lose their business.
This is the real lesson of the blogosphere. Not the gains of the
bloggers, but the losses of the other media. Bloggers, being
deliberately estranged from the market, are free to say not just what
they feel but what the readers feel. Readers choose to hear the voices
which repeat what they themselves are feeling. Mealy-mouthed
"objective" journalism that stands, in the end, for advertisers can’t
compete with that.
Thus we have the heart of the present crisis. We don’t believe the message anywhere, and we don’t believe the messengers either.
Yet it’s so easy to see what can break through all this.
Tell the truth. Speak with passion. Don’t parse. Lead.
This approach will find success in politics, in sports, in
entertainment, in business, and in journalism. This is a major
ingredient in the Al Gore yearning that exists on the left, in the Ronald Reagan "real conservative" yearning that exists on the right.
My own plan is to continue telling the truth, as I see it,
unvarnished, and hope the number of readers who find me continues to
grow. It may not be the way to wealth, but I can look myself in the mirror, and sleep better at night.
