It is not difficult to find a lot of written material in modern Western society criticizing the main-stream media (MSM) for their role in manufacturing the consent of citizens in various endeavours of governments and militaries. Ever since Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent was published in 1989, political awareness of this trend has been relatively high, particularly amongst those who consider themselves politically progress.
What I seek to explore today though, is a deeper, more radical notion: one that nearly all media today are dependant on having clear and easily definable conflicts, and consequently, often are complicit in the escalation of the conflicts they cover.
Some History
It may sound crazy, but the modern main-stream media is owes a lot to theatre actors who toured Russia in the 1920s – working on behalf of the Bolsheviks of what later became the Soviet Union.
“Agitprop theatre” began as a marriage between the terms “agitation” and “propaganda”, back when propaganda was not yet considered to be a problematic means of disseminating information and news.
Russia, being so huge in its physical geography, was not somewhere where news travelled fast. After having recently lead Russia through a revolution, the Bolsheviks wanted to increase enrolment in the military, and of course maintain the support of the populace to prevent any counter-revolution. Their answer was a unique one at the time: send theatre troupes to all the population centres, to deliver the news through dramatic and comedic street performances.
Theatre provided and excellent means of getting the agitation and propaganda out: simple dramatic works tend to have antagonists and protagonists, and tend to centre around a specific two-sided conflict. If the news these actors presented had the “enemies of Russia” as the antagonists, and everyday Russians as protagonists, the need for Bolsheviks being seen in a positive light is being met. Since these theatre troupes were all the news the rural peoples of Russia were getting, and they were entertaining, this endeavour was highly successful.
Today’s Parallels
Today, we have many sources of news. One could think this means we are far less likely to succumb to only consulting singular sources for our news, but this is not necessarily true.
Time, it seems, is against us in this regard. The modern urban individual often considers themselves as “short on time”, and finding news sources that are an amalgam of entertainment and news meets two needs: to be entertained, and to be aware of what’s going on in the world today.
Ratings in the modern cable news network drives decisions as to the kind of programming that is offered. A program that is short, easy to produce, and with a large audience is the most profitable. The penultimate media programming is that of clashing opinions, especially ones with only two sides.
A two-sided conflict is ideal in main-stream media for many reasons: there’s a gentler learning curve for a late-coming audience, the conflict is easier to understand, it is reminiscent of spectacles such as duels (and thus, entertaining), and it is generally easier to pick a side and feel like you’re part of the debate.
The most glaring problem with this is that the big problems in society are not often that simple as an Us. Vs. Them debate leads us to believe. Currently, if an issue cannot be explained in a sound-byte, it tends not to be discussed at any great length as it is not as profitable of a subject to explore.
The only exception to this, is entertainment news.
An Alternative Look at Partisan News
It is no secret that in the United States right now, biases exist within various news networks. The most obvious example is that of Fox News, a network which does not hide its politically right-wing bias.
If you happen to check out Fox News during its “news journal” shows, though, you might find the bias to be a little on the extreme side, almost to the point of seeming satirical and being said only to be entertaining.
Perhaps that is intentional though. Someone on a major news network saying outrageous things is in itself, news, but also entertaining. There is some danger in this however, in that some do use this network as their sole source of information, due to a previously established relationship of trust, or a lack of time to explore alternatives. The entertainment being passed off as news can, and does, escalate polarizing conflicts within society.
Dismissing Complication
Inevitably, when a complex conflict forces itself to the forefront of the main-stream media, a process of simplification can occur. What could be a rich and interesting story of educational complexity can get boiled down into:
“Should we have government-mandated health care, or is it just too complicated and cost too much?”
rather than a full exploration of what the “complications” are.
Canada has also seen the simple vs. complicated debate happen with indigenous issues – namely the “Oka crisis” and the on-going land claims in Caledonia. Even CBC’s current archives on the Oka crisis describe indigenous traditions and values as “complex”, and the development of contested land as “simple”. This delineation of “you’re being complicated” and “we’re simply…” can operate to orient the reader into seeing the “complex” side of the conflict being unnecessarily so, being troublesome and confusing. Again, this can actually affect the conflict by adding more support to the “simple” side, possibly escalating the conflict to more dangerous levels.
Deconstructing the Main-Stream Media
Since the emergence of Manufacturing Consent, there has been a resurgence of entertainment loosely based on the agitprop theatre model that is critical of the main-stream.
Rather than spreading the propaganda of the state however, this movement has existed to expose main-stream media’s biases and manipulation of information. One of the earliest works in this realm was Guillermo Verdecchia and Daniel Brook’s The Noam Chomsky Lectures, a meta-theatrical piece produced in Toronto in 1990.
Most notably though, was the emergence of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in the late 1990s. When Jon Stewart took on the show, he immediately went to a more politically focused comedy show. What resulted was a daily critical exploration of the main-stream media’s biases in an entertaining way.
The main-stream media was being deconstructed, not by an academic, but by a comedian. Oddly enough, by 2009, Jon Stewart has been noted in a Time Magazine poll as one of the world’s most trusted news sources.
What to Look for in Alternative Media
There are numerous alternatives out there to the main-stream. There is nothing inherently bad with the main-stream, especially if you are aware how it operates. For full in-depth understanding of culture, however, the best alternative media is that which does not censor itself for time or length.
Although there’s a lot of time to fill on a 24-hour news station, their news segments are limited to a very short length. Those limits create a sort of censorship, where the news editor gets to decide what is most important to know about a news story. Any news source that does not have such limits allows you as the reader to decide what is important to you, rather than having that decided upon by another.
Additionally, sites which encourage their writers to use a personal voice perspective tend to be more clear on what their opinion is, and what facts exist.
Study Pieces
“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” shown daily Mon-Thursday, 11pm on Comedy Network in Canada (12:05am on CTV), or Comedy Central in the U.S., also online on those networks’ respective websites.
“The Colbert Report” which is shown right after the Daily Show, at 11:30pm (or 12:35am on CTV).
