Rambutan is Mad as Hell! Thoughts on Mainstream Media
The point I'll try to make in this text is that there is such a thing as a mainstream media and being coward is its most prominent aspect. Below I'll explain with detail why I think so, resorting to sources and quotes. But before that I want to draft my argument here so that anyone who wants to replicate or refute my ideas can easily do so. The claims I'll make are as follow:
Thesis – mainstream media is real and its defining characteristics is cowardice. It is coward because:
1. As a product in a market, it'll try to appeal to as much potential consumers as possible, and thus will pretend it doesn't support any specific political ideology (for that would niche the consumer base). These media platforms will often brand themselves as "moderate", "centrist" or even "apolitical" in order to convince readers they're free of ideology (and they will use their great circulatio powers to convince people this mean being committed with facts).
a) I'll argue that there is no such thing as a factual report of reality or even a report free of ideology, for any experience can only be perceived through the filters of our own subjectivity (and there never is a immediate apprehension of reality outside of our perception).
b) The brand of "apolitical" is often used by people who don't commit to activism in any classic ideological debate, but apolitical entities are actually activists of the status quo. Thus these media outlets become in reality discrete propagandas for its owners and donors, marketing their views of the world as a natural and neutral ideology.
2.These outlets align themselves, due to their supposedly neutral and factual style, to ideas of restraint and temperance in opposition to any opinionated media with strong views.
a) This happens because, as mentioned above, mainstream media needs to be apolitical to fulfill its role as a subtle liberal agenda propaganda machine. Being so well-established (precisely because of this massive support from the main liberal forces that control our economy), however, these journals can naturalise their speech as the only correct, formal and trustworthy form of media communication.
b) The moderate-radical binary mindset that emerges has the primary element often associated with values of confidence, elegance, refinement and knowledge (exactly because it was naturalised as the correct speech), while its second part is usually put in a chain of signification along with vague ideas of violence and totalitarism.
c) The final effect of the false associations established around this binary is disregarding any form of frustration, indignation or rebellion from the masses as ungracious, impolite and invalid. Thus, we have the creation of docile bodies conditioned by the need of a docile laguage.
In a September 25th article, The Financial Times presented a interview with Ed Zitron. As a newspaper article should be, it is not entirely flattering but also not 100% condemning. Most of the text is curiously ambiguous (starting from the headline: "Ed Zitron is mad as hell"). Overall, despite so many comments, the final effect is strangely neutral: empathetic and critical but just enough to validate anyone with any opinion whatsoever on the interviewee and his ideas. In it, Tabby Kinder, the reporter (which actually did a great job and this text is by no means a way to provoke her or diminish her effort), says the following about her subject's take on journalism:
"Zitron is not a hater of all journalists [...]. But there are inescapable similarities between his views and the conservative disdain for the 'mainstream media', the sense of 'us and them', that most journalists are part of a kind of establishment elite."
This short paragraph made an impression on me because of the inverted commas in "mainstream media". What should they mean? Are they present to represent these words as a direct speech of the interviewee? There wouldn't be such a need, since this is a common concept usually found outside the discourse of Zitron himself. They are also not there to allow for foreign words or neologisms in the middle of the text. But both these common cases of inverted commas help us understanding Kinder's real intention when making an unneeded use of them in this passage: she, as the author, wants to distance herself from the idea expressed by these words. That is, she is talking about mainstream media, but only because her interviewee does so in those terms, not because she wants to deal seriously with such a topic. It's a conceptual foreignism to her.
But then comes another question: why even bothering displaying the distance between your opinions and the ideas you are expressing in such a case? Can anyone really argue that such a thing as mainstream media doesn't exist? Clearly some media outlets are more circulated than others and it's an easily measurable fact that most of the population get their news from only a handful of popular sources.
The thing is, of course, that this simple mathematical finding of some newspapers being more distributed isn't exactly what people talk about when they refer to mainstream media. There is another, deeper layer of meaning in this concept. But what would it be, then? People don't really seem to agree on a single interpretation, and maybe this polemic is what Kinder fears enough to keep distance from the term. Well, I'm of the opinion that, beyond simply being widely distributed, the second atribute needed to define mainstream media is cowardice. These are the two necessary and sufficient conditions: being popular and being coward. So not all media platforms of great circulation are mainstream media. But what do I mean with cowardice? How would I determine the meaning of this term? Well, in this specific context, I'd say being coward means both: 1. Hiding your true dispositions and intentions from your public by promoting a false apolitical discourse; and 2. Promoting docile bodies by the naturalisation of a docile language which dismisses any exhibition of frustration as invalid.
1.
A lot of media platforms (and a lot of people, too) seem to think that you need to be free of any political influence to see the world clear and report things like they really are, so being a centrist or a moderate would be a great virtue in our quest for the truth. And people read news because they want to get to the truth of what is happening out there, of course. So, naturally, media platforms should strive to be apolitical. Or at least our consumption of media should: I've heard friends commenting they'd like to have the time to read every news twice: once in a left-wing publication and then in a right-wing one – because they genuinely believed this would give them a more complete and factual account of the events. People have this idea that being impartial means being completely and solely grounded on facts, and that every event can be written about in a single exact, mathematical, factual way that delivers information free of any preconceived opinions or preferences.
Now I'm not one to be into physics metaphors too much, but I guess you could say journalism can't ever be totally impartial (in this definition of impartiality, at least) because one way or another you must have the interference of reporters themselves. And they, when perceiving, necessarily have an impact on the event being perceived (that's the observer effect in quantum mechanics – and the fact I linked Wikipedia as a source there shows how much I'm really not into physics at all). But let's not pretend any event is a quantum phenomena: still, even when considering ordinary macroscopic events, from a philosophical standpoint I'd argue that any empirical experience must pass through the filters of our subjectivity (just think, for example, of our five senses. They can't be suppressed or consciously controlled and thus they impose certain narrow ways in which we are allowed to have contact with reality). So there isn't such a thing as contemplating a fact exactly as it happened in the real world.
Even if you want to adopt a sort of Epicurean objectivity regarding sensations and say that the same fact will produce the same affections in everyone's perception, I must still insist that facts don't exist afloat in a void. Nobody can avoid the urge to fit events and concepts in preestablished frameworks of ideas and opinions. So even if everyone's filters of perceptions were fine-tuned to process the same information in the exact same way, we would still have subject filters of conceptualization separating us from the experience.
The average fact supporter will try to argue that we can study reality without consulting our subjectivity: through science, that is. Lovers of facts (and by facts I mean reality free from subjectivity) are crazy about numbers. They would quantify their every thought and emotion, if possible. It's all a matter of doing several randomized double-blind trials and then a metanalysis and pow, the numbers jump out of the page more real than reality as if they were revealed by Divine Grace, totally above the interference of our mortal perception.
Well, I love science as much as the average weirdo writing on the internet. But I wouldn't say this kind of dogmatic faith easily convinces me. Especially because science is a mean, not an end. That is, science is identical to its method and not identical to the truth (considering the truth to be it's end, of course). Indeed, it's pretty possible to achieve evidently false results from science when we twist it the wrong way. And one doesn't even need fake data or failed statistical analysis for that: just choosing the right sample and the right math is enough to make the numbers say basically anything you want them to. Science isn't a magical fact machine, it is merely a (scientific) method that can be used to achieve both correct and incorrect claims. As a college student in a heavily scientific major, I've seen studies which followed the same procedures revealing diametrically opposed conclusions time and time again: truth and reality in science seem to be mainly a matter of what variables you account for and which samples you include.
But we don't need to cast doubts in the accountability of science. Let's just pretend it's always rights: we can control every variable and we work with a sample large enough to represent everyone on Earth. We have our perfect numbers! Okay, now are those the facts? Is this reality free from any conceptual narrative? Even in this utopian scenario, I'd still argue that no. And that's because numbers and statistics can only shine a light on reality when we can measure the studied phenomena with quantitative variables: science can only explain things this far. But there simply isn't precise, easy and adequate variables to quantify most aspects of reality. Take for example the right-wing claim that US-born workers are losing jobs to foreigners employees. The linked LiveNOW Fox article (written of course during the 2024 Trump electoral campaign) reads that between August of 2023 and August of 2024, 1.3 million native workers lost their jobs while 1.2 million immigrants (who entered the country with or without authorization) found them. Well, these are the numbers, but what are the facts? Should we assume that foreigners are invading the job market in the US and mercilessly throwing millions of victimized, God-fearing American families into poverty? You may believe so, these numbers alone do not say otherwise. Actually, this seem to be the narrative Fox Business is pushing into its readers. But maybe you'd rather think about how this demographic change in the workforce is a reflection of greedy capitalists trying to maximize profits by minimizing wages (wages that no native-born American would ever accept receiving but marginalized and unsecured immigrants do). And how these immigrants may even have advantage in work experience in certain industry sectors and thus are better workers than native Americans, mainly because the USA expelled so much of its manufacturing business to offshore.
My point is that numbers (even when you have direct access to their primary sources and to the methods used to arrive at them, what is rare because most often than not these results are codified under a pile of academic text not friendly to the layperson or behind a paywall) can't account for all the unverifiable processes happening in reality, and thus any statistical result must be subject to interpretation before it can mean anything – that is, one must hypothesize which aspects of reality that can't be measured are acting as important variables to achieve those results. Now, there is no way you can say that interpretation happens outside of our minds, where facts will be affected by all our opinions, prejudices and preferences. So I think my case against descriptions of reality outside our subjectivity is made.
When we read a news article like Ed Zitron's interview above, the subjective filter is being applied to real world phenomena at least thrice: first, when the reporter (in this case the interviewer) comes into contact with the phenomenon (in this case, Ed Zitron) we have her sensations of the perceived experience distorting the "absolute factual"; second, when the reporter writes about the perceived phenomenon, she is being constrained by language (and not even by all of it but merely by all the language she knows, which is an even smaller set) that can't represent directly everything that she perceived in reality (or that may represent even more than what was in reality, since some argue representation is always greater than the thing being represented¹); and third, when we the readers come into contact with the reporter's text, now we are reading and understanding her words in a way also constrained by our linguistic skills and understanding. So I guess what I'm trying to say (but I don't know if that's what you're comprehending...) is that there is no such thing as an absolute report of reality. Everything that is written and read (or said and heard) must be positioned in relation to a larger framework of previous concepts and opinions, first by the sender and then by us as receivers. That one friend of mine who wanted to read both a left-wing and then a right-wing publication to get a fuller version of the facts would actually merely be getting two alternative sets of narratives without one complementing the other. And in the end of the day he would just have a favorite one, even if his preferred narrative is simply to sit on the fence claiming that everyone in either side is wrong (as you may know, there are many such cases).
Another problem I have with this notion of impartiality (that is, that being impartial is being free of any ideology and thus newspapers should be apolitical) is the implied notion that an apolitical account of things could even exist. Now I'll not go as far here as to say that everything is political (for example having a picnic outside with your friends isn't necessarily political in itself) but I do think that everything always happens in a political context and, being journalism the art of reporting on things happening (this definition isn't really official by any dictionary, but I think it's not polemical), you of course can't have apolitical journalism.
So what's the agenda being secretly pushed on us when we read an "apolitical" media outlet? Well, it's the worst kind of ideology: one that was so cultivated and spread that was formalised as a neutral, natural way of thinking². In our society, that would be things like liberalism, capitalism and nowadays even technofeudalism. Being apolitical – that is, engaging in no ideological debate, performing no activism in any front – isn't simply not fighting for a change: it's actively fighting for no change. Apoliticism is the militancy of the status quo, it's the discrete ideology of an army that server the interests of the groups doing fine in our current scenario (mostly rich businesspeople and opportunist politicians). These group usually even own these media platforms: and they aren't capital agents just because they got rich with their journalism, no – now more than ever there are richer people, even from outside the media circus, buying big outlets and adding them to their portfolio. Just think about the Paramount Skydance merger under David Elisson (with also his father, Larry Elisson, CEO of Oracle, becoming one of the major controlling investors in TikTok's operations in the United States: not yet a monopoly, but it's already all in the family!) or the Washington Post (the third most circulated newspaper in the USA) being bought by Jeff Bezos. You really think all these platforms are so apolitical, centrist and moderate that they can resist the interests of their own owners?
Like one of the greatest lyricists of our generation, Bladee, would say: "If you stand for nothing, what would you fall for?". If you buy into the capitalist trap of not questioning and not fighting, you have become a gentle sheep of the herd, never posing any menace to the capital. You wouldn't ever be caught dead protesting or boycotting. And that's exactly what people responsible for so much of mainstream media nowadays want out of you: your money and your obedience.
Of course I'm not defending that since every text is embedded in narrative from the get-go then we should just give up on impartiality as a journalistic principle. I believe that being impartial means being worried about grounding your point in reliable interpretations, in observations clearly evident (for a large group of people at least) and in experiments that can be easily reproduced. We shouldn't refrain from using science and statistics as sources but we should always care for making comprehensive and sensible readings of their results when trying to fit the numbers in the big picture. Without this regard, then journals would become simply machines of propaganda, spitting bullshit (proper bullshit, exactly according to the excellent definition in Harry G. Frankfurt's paper³) to support any ideology behind their owners – sadly, in the world of far-right podcasts and tabloids, such disinformation tactics are already common, and the sensationalism they issue may help explain their popularity.
Actually, it's funny I just mentioned the right-wing and their populist tactic. Tabby Kinder also mentions them in another passage I found especially interesting. It reads:
"Liberal or left-of-centre voices presenting themselves as neutral or institutional are often drowned out by rightwing rhetoric that seems louder and more unified. Social media platforms reward emotionally charged content that portrays itself as the voice of the silent majority. Zitron’s rants work precisely because he is willing to shout, to caricature the establishment, and to be outraged."
From that I'll expand upon the second point of my cowardice argument, right after a short
2.
subtitle break. Ok, now we are on the other side of our little structuring subtitle displayed there to better organize my writing and your reading, so we may start with the second point.
First of all, I'll just make a quick digression to say this: sure, I do wish that a lot of the aimlessly violence eroding political and cultural debates that we see reverberating in the internet would simply go away. Some contents are well beyond opinionated or biased, they are straight up hate speeches or incitements of brutality, denying any possibility of a proper dialogue between parties, classes, genres, etc. And it's a real shame that social media algorithms show us so much of this stuff – though from their comercial point of view it makes sense: algorithms need to lock our attention and they choose which content to display following this only metric, so our mental health or our societal values of diplomacy and respect are totally indifferent for the machine. I feel that Tabby Kinder talks about this shift from institutional authority to internet decentralized anarchy with resentment. I can understand that, because I myself certainly feel resented about this. But if this feeling resonates with you, then in the end of the day you actually buy Ed Zitron's thesis: technology has its uses and will continue to be an important part of our future, but the people building technology today aren't in the least interested in the future, they are interested in our money, and they will continue to feed us algorithmic slop in order to keep you and me glued to our cellphones as much as they need to.
But let's go back to the main argument and break into its last past. In the abovementioned fragment, Kinder makes a discrete distinction between "neutral" or "institutional" voices – that is, voices aligned with the value of moderation these mainstream medias outlet must assume to appeal to the wider possible audience (curiously, in the trail of my previous argument, Kinder defines one of the institutional groups not as simply left-wing but left-of-centre. That is, she is defining the left in relation to an emphasized centre, the one tied to the moderation and apoliticism preached by these platforms) – and emotionally charged discourses that spread in nonacademic and unprofessional circles like social media (another quick digression: this distinction actually fits quite well with the "sense of 'us vs them', that most journalists are a part of a kind of establishment elite" which Tabby Kinder was dismissing just a few paragraphs back). Even though her value judgment isn't made explicit in the excerpt you can kind of feel it emanating from the text like smoke from fire: what bothers her isn't so much what these emotionally charged people are saying in the popular setting of social media but how they are saying it. It's much more a matter of form than one of content. Her criticism towards Zitron (as shown by the examples she picks to illustrate his style) is centered above all in his vulnerable, affected, dramatic speech. Not in his actual ideas, for the most part.
She doesn't spare the interviewee from comparing him with his right-wing counterparts, of course, even though they mostly defend the exact opposite of what Zitron does. It's a common tactic: highlighting something similar in one's adversaries in spite of everything that differentiates them and use that to diminish both at the same time, putting them in the same bag. It's similar to what Hannah Arendt does in her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): grouping together people as far apart as Hitler and Stalin under the same vague, meaningless brand of "authoritarians" and thus creating a simplified and false dichotomy that has in one side the democratic liberal views that support capitalism (the "narrow spectrum of convenient opinions", as one political scientist put it in Le Monde Diplomatique) against all other kinds of governments. These democratic liberal views are defended in democratic liberal newspapers, which as I said above need to be moderate and "apolitical" (because they are produced by capitalists and thus must convert into capital, and to be converted into capital people must be buying them, and to buy them people can't feel their political opinions are being attacked). These newspapers, well established and financed, have the freedom to endorse an institutional language, without the need of resorting to sensationalism. People living in the margin of this system, whoever, need to shout loud and to appeal to feelings of indignation and rebellion to get attention to their silenced causes. Like that, emotionally charged voices are associated with people who want changes in the regime, what in turn means people who need to be silenced by liberals to avoid any disruption in the capital. So we have now a new binome: the moderate, traditional, elegant, intellectual voices of the established capitalist media against the violent, totalitarian, rude, undignified voices of everyone put under feelings of frustration or indignation by the status quo.
This one is certainly a dangerous association. It teaches us that no matter how grueling the context is for ourselves, we must always act and speak in a manner of much moderation and restraint, for any display of insurgency may automatically disqualify our arguments as abrasive, mean-tempered and nonsensical. A worker can be exploited in his workplace, but he can never revolt against it because the violence of his response (violent simply by denying the forces of the capital, due to our chain of associations illustrated above) would immediately make him "out of his mind", whatever that means. This is the discipline the cult of moderation wants to plant in your mind: being right means simply always be in the primary side of the dichotomies liberalism X totalitarianism, "centrism" (which actually means any political position that acts to protect the capital, what is often right-wing) X extremism, composed restraint X mindless indignation, good X evil, light X dark, etc. Moderation, in this sense, becomes simply the inability to defy the established order. Is this elegant, having people stomping on your shoes and you being the one to say sorry? Yet, if you are not like this, then you're an offense to the establishment, and thus an offense to mainstream media. This is what "the creation of docile bodies⁴ conditioned by the need of a docile laguage", as I put it above borrowing a concept from Foucault, means.
And...
These are my thoughts on mainstream media! I hope my points were all made clear, but I honestly don't think so. There is still many concepts I need to develop better and many connections between point A and B of my arguments I need to work on to make it all cohesive. Then there was also all my problems dealing with such abstract ideas in English. But I hope the overall feeling of my argument at least was intelligible by what I wrote. If you want to point me to more sources and better texts on this topic or if you want to counterargument any point I brought up in here, please do feel free to contact me at vinidantassantos@gmail.com! I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible. Wish you all a great week and see you next time (which will be as soon as I get the courage to write anything again, but that might take a while).
Notes
1. Martin, M. (1962). Le langage cinématographique, Chapitre I. Les Caractères Fondamentaux de L'Image Filmique, Page 27: "Ce qui est plus curieux, c'est cette autre définition de la photogénie par Delluc : « Tout aspect des choses, des êtres et des âmes qui accroît sa qualité morale par la reproduction cinématographique. » Cette introduction du qualificatif moral révèle bien chez Delluc la perception de quelque chose de spécifique dans la représentation cinématographique du monde : on est ému par la représentation que le film nous donne des événements plus que par ces événements eux-mêmes."
2. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative?, Chapter I. It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalismo, Pages 8-9: "For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable [...]. [T]he old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream."
3. Frankfurt, H.G. (2005). On bullshit.
4. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Part Three: Discipline, Chapter I. Docile Bodies