Media Maneuvers

Left Field by Patricia Nell Warren

I’m old enough to remember how the media dealt with top stories during World War II. Unlike today, Americans of the forties were kept better informed on real life-and-death news. This was made possible by the fact that their media choices were narrow. There were a few radio networks, and newsreels at the movie theaters, along with newspapers and magazines. You picked up your local paper, whether The New York Times or the Podunk Post, and the war leaped at you from the big black headlines at the top of Page One. It took a major development—natural disaster, election of a new President—to push the war farther down Page One. Subjects like celebrity weddings, fashion, food, sports, were pushed toward the bottom of the news.

The same urgent principle applied to newsreels. When you went to the movie theater, you had to sit through ten or fifteen minutes of newsreels in order to see the feature. So you couldn’t avoid dealing with the war and its horrific images (there was none of today’s touchiness over “disturbing graphic content”). Americans had to look at the piles of corpses on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, and more piles of corpses when the U.S. dropped the atom bomb on Japan. There was no getting away from it. Sports and lifestyle stuff came later in the newsreel.

Today, we have not only a staggering diversity in the media, but also a decentralization of subject matter and priorities, that facilitates a staggering escapism. There’s the thousands of specialized channels that constitute television and cable. There’s the Internet, with its own intricate infrastructure that allows the Net-surfer to go wherever he or she chooses. In print media, the few big general-interest magazines that dominated our horizon in the 1940s have mostly gone away; in their place are thousands of smaller magazines that focus on everything from agriculture to zits. We call it a “wealth of options,” and it’s true that this wealth affords Americans a lot of wonderful avenues to information and choice.

But this diversity has a dark side. People can pick their own top stories, focus on lifestyle and entertainment stories, and avoid news that they find unpleasant.

Do the media feed this escapism deliberately? Yes, they do. For example, when you log on to AOL, the main news board lets you choose among headlines for four or five “top stories.” As I wrote this column, one headline was “Army ready for four years in Iraq.” But several other stories got equal billing with the war: gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson and blasting his ashes into space, the death of NFL player Thomas Herrion, and tips on cool summer lunches and job hunting. In short, Americans get the impression that summer lunches are just as earthshaking as the war, because the two get the same top billing.

This news maneuver enables many Americans to remain blissfully ignorant about whatever they choose. Many can tell you who got sent home any given week on American Idol, but—when it comes to health, for example—they can’t tell you the names of which pharmaceutical corporations have been dragged into court for which drug-safety violations.

So it isn’t any wonder that the subject of AIDS has faded from the headlines. Many people still find the subject unpleasant. Indeed, if you ask them about the next global epidemic—bird flu—many will probably say, “You mean a dead bird that somebody found in their backyard?” This is because the biggest, blackest headlines on bird flu are mostly buried in the indie media. Yet bird flu has leaped to humans and is marching, the way bubonic plague marched in the middle ages. The area of massive outbreak now spans Asia and southern Russia and is knocking on the door of Europe. The U.S. will be next. As yet there is no treatment or vaccine.

Why in the world would our country want people so escapist about the real news? In 1944 Americans were kept patriotic and supportive of the war by being marinated in the unpleasant stories. But today’s establishment believes that Americans should be kept well entertained and apathetic. This way, voters are less likely to make political trouble for anybody who profits by their ignorance.