Mmh, yeah--I didn't order this...

Thinking about how the current Media bombards us with horrid tidbits from the sex lives of public figures and calls that "News," reflected how gossip has migrated from fringe publications whose ink smudges your hands at the first touch to Central Attention in the headlines, and how Picking-On-People has been mainstreamed in behavior and falsely labeled as Journalism and Reporting -- made me recall two things I read that seemed relevant.

The first is an excerpt from an article written by A.J. Liebling:
---------------------[excerpt, "The Long Name for the Lifeboat"]----London, during that summer of 1941 when the tide of war stood still at lowest ebb, just before it started to flow in, was the official capital of eight countries and the unofficial one of France; there were besides the governments of Great Britain, Norway, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Greece, and the Free French, a half-dozen semirecognized national movements, free Danish, free Rumanian, free Bulgarian, and free Austrian....

All the governments had their own intelligence services.  The prime ministers received exhaustive reports not only on what was happening in their German-occupied countries, where their sources supplemented and sometimes scooped the British Intelligence Service, but on what was happening in London. 

Ministers got reports on their opposite numbers in half a dozen other governments, and operatives shadowed each other, until lunch at Claridge's or the Ritz Grill resembled a traffic jam of characters out of an Alfred Hitchcock film.  Operatives of lower categories and corresponding expense accounts shadowed their opposite numbers at the White Tower, the Greek restaurant on Percy Street. 

Every twenty-four hours there was a general pooling and interchange of information, probably held in Albert Hall or Piccadilly tube station, and then everybody heard the secret information that everybody else had been compiling.

London, since Pepys's day and before, has been a gossiping city.  The coffeehouses of the eighteenth century flourished with talk as the main attraction; the Englishman in his club is sometimes a marvel of malicious veiled curiosity. 

There is a fair argument for the thesis that all the careful barriers the Briton builds around privacy -- the blackball, the no-trespass, the truth-increases, the libel principle in newspaper laws, the mannered reserve, and the choked voice -- began simply as precautions against the national weakness for talking too much. 

The flood of refugee gossip adding to the normally high stream of British indiscretions, the torrent of confidential conversation overflowed its banks and London became the gabbiest city in the world.

My favorites in Babel were the Norwegians and the Poles, I suppose because I am a sucker for extremes.  The Norwegians listened and never talked.  The Poles talked and never listened.
--------------------- [end Liebling excerpt]
{The Road Back To Paris,
by A.J. Liebling.  Doubleday, Doran
Garden City, New York.  1944}

And, second -- a Kirkus review of a book called What The People Know.  (Reviewed on September 15, 1998)-------------------- [the review]-------Veteran journalist and author [Richard] Reeves...reports on the state of the press (print and television).  He is guardedly pessimistic.  Reporting the news was once a fairly simple and, for Reeves, exciting and honorable task:  get the story, get it right, report it. 

Today, however, journalism "is in a crisis of change and redefinition."  The reasons for this crisis are complex and interrelated.  Technology, particularly the internet, has made information instantaneously available to just about anyone.  How do older media like newspapers compete?  The answer has become to report on what the public wants; find out what attracts people and feed it back to them.

And what the public wants increasingly is short, untroubling entertainment.  So we get coverage of scandals, entertainers, health tips ("evening news without news"), while more important events go underreported.  Between 1992 and 1996, for instance, network television reporting on foreign stories, measured in minutes, dropped by almost two-thirds. 

Exacerbating this move toward news-lite is the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few huge corporations:  Westinghouse, General Electric, etc.  News operations are minuscule parts of such corporations, but they are not immune to the corporate demand for profits.  How does news make a profit?  Give the public what it wants. 

Finally, journalism itself is in part to blame for its own predicament.  In its post-Watergate zealousness to portray all politicians as crooks and all politics as corrupt, it helped create a public mood of cynical lack of interest in public affairs.  Despite these problems, all is not lost.  Reeves sees a continuing role for journalism, and that is simply to tell what "you and I need to keep our freedom -- accurate timely information on laws and wars, police and politicians, taxes and toxics."...Nice reporting.

{Pub Date:  Nov. 1st, 1998
ISBN:  0-674-61622-7
Publisher:  Harvard Univ.}

"Giving the public what it wants" is an oft-used excuse of shit-shoveling schlock-meisters.

No.  We don't want it.

You wanted to, and chose to, perpetrate it.

(If they're going to rake in Dollars, they have to accept Responsibility, as well.  But they try not to -- they try to only take the Dollars and shrug-off the Responsibility onto "the public."  How much contempt do you have to have for your fellow man, to bombard them with such empty, shallow, unattractive junk and blame them for it - ?!)

INFORMATION:
laws and wars
police and politicians
taxes and toxics...

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