•My desk at Fox News during my time there was right next to
that of Joe Muto, the notorious “Fox
mole” who wrote stealthy dispatches about working at the place, until he was
fired. Muto now has a $100,000 or so
book advance for a manuscript with the working title Atheist in a FOX Hole. And
readers everywhere will just have to hope the book contains juicier revelations
than his “mole” articles did, since the biggest bombshell in those was probably
the leaked video revealing that Romney sometimes talks about horses.
If I were the tell-all turncoat type – which I’m really not,
unless you’re, like, plotting to kill someone – I could probably scrape together
some kind of shocking tell-all (the things
you don’t know about Joe Muto...), or...
•I could more naturally go the Pat Caddell route, warning (quite rightly) about
the disturbing power the partisan press has when it decides to be a de facto
one-party press, outlier Fox notwithstanding. If the media have not-so-subtly hinted to
each other that it’s OK now to be blatantly in the tank for the Democrats, the
whole culture is imperiled in a truly frightening way.
•And yet: I’ve been saying for years, since I first worked
at ABC News, that the real “media bias”
story is not political in the usual sense – though it will affect even
tonight’s presidential debates (and may even help explain Gary Johnson’s
exclusion from them, since he has only belatedly become a punchy, dynamic
speaker, if you ask me).
The truth is that TV, at least, is less left-wing (or
right-wing, certainly) than concerned with its own internal aesthetic
dynamics. If a story has striking
visuals or a short, clear soundbite, it doesn’t merely become more likely to
get aired – it gets talked about by the visuals-oriented media as if it really is more important than the
complex or non-visual stories. And
even if you think you’re a hardcore skeptic, you’re probably falling for
it. (I said way back in the 90s that if
visuals didn’t matter, the Federal Reserve would probably be on the news all
the time, and I suppose by that measure, things have improved.)
The Net has complicated the TV/press dichotomy, but just a
few years ago, a good test of the truth of my point in the preceding paragraph
was talking to people who got their news mostly from TV vs. people who got it
mostly from print. Sometimes there were “big” ongoing stories largely unknown to
one or the other audience based mostly on the dynamics of their preferred
medium (“There’s a kid stuck in a well?
When did that happen?”).
And it’s not as simple as explosions getting more
replays. The very experts you think of as experts are dictated in large part, not so
much by whether they are (in the strictly sexual sense) “good-looking,” but
certainly by whether they are interesting to look at, by whether they say
things in a way that quickly grabs the attention of channel-flippers. And these people even end up more likely to
be touted in print. And the media get so
accustomed to doing this, they don’t even think about it anymore.
If you’re in a rush and producing something, you may have
time to say, “Oh, she’s good!” but you
will probably never find the time to say, more accurately, “Oh, she’s good,
as a talker and a visual, compared to other physicists, at least given that we
need to try to squeeze in another female for gender-balance and because women
hold more eyeballs.” (Shallowness is
feminism’s best friend on TV, by the way, and don’t let them guilt-trip you
into believing otherwise.)
And, as with so many things (sports, religion), people come
genuinely to believe what it’s functionally most useful for them to
believe. So they really do think that
guy’s a brilliant scientist, and this other one is an eminent psychologist, and
so on. And you believe it too.
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