Media Bashers:

Rebels Without an Effect

Book review for The Stranger, 12/19/97

We the Media: A Citizens’ Guide to Fighting for Media Democracy, edited by Don Hazen and Julie Winokur (The New Press)

The Conquest of Cool, by Thomas Frank (University of Chicago Press)

Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy, by Robert McChesney (Oxford)

Made Possible By…: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States, by James Ledbetter (Verso)

Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, by Stephen Duncombe (Verso)

While American leftists share few notions on how to improve society, just about all of them love the Media Analysis game. How to play: (1) Read something in the “mainstream media” (anything bigger than Mother Jones or The Nation). (2) Pretend to be shocked that the major news institutions behave, well, like major institutions. (3) Complain long and loud about how Big Media isn’t telling The Real Truth (without you, yourself, saying much about what that Real Truth might be). It’s easy, it’s fun, it doesn’t require changing anything in the real world (the game’s rules presume you can’t change the world, just critique it).

The game’s played to perfection by the creators of We the Media, a brisk anthology of short essays and cartoons covering most of the Media Analysis movement’s topics. Nearly every of its 200 pages express amazement that publishers and broadcasters act like the major corporations they are. We the Media exists only in oppositional stance; it bitches about the media loving big business and business-friendly politicians as if anybody’s still surprised at it. (Most of us grew up with local papers kissing their local business communities’ butts; there’s no reason not to expect “national” journalists to act any different.) Only briefly, mostly toward the end, do the editors get around to stating what they’d like us to be crusading for and what communications tools exist or could be created to aid such crusades.

Baffler co-editor Tom Frank holds few illusions, sincere or feigned, about corporate media ever having had ideals to have fallen from–besides the ideal of self-interest. The Conquest of Cool isn’t the grand unified philosophical statement I’ve hoped from Frank. But it does focus his main sociocultural obsession (“hipness” as a pro-corporate marketing concept) onto one specific point in time–the late ’50s and ’60s, when Madison Avenue discovered newer, flashier, homier, hippier, and sexier ways to push consumer goods. Frank believes advertisers didn’t “co-opt” the era’s “youth movement” but paralleled and even helped inspire it. He “credits” a few “rebel” ad men, who initially wanted to break out of their own industry’s stifling conformity, with instigating the whole notion of a “permanent revolution of style” (what critics called “planned obsolescence”); a notion still seen today in ads showing “rebel” teens gulping Mountain Dew and “rebel” executives running Windows 95. Frank adds a closing section about the simultaneous rise of “hipness” in the men’s fashion biz, the process that led directly into the early-’70s polyester-pimp look now curiously nostalgized.

Robert McChesney helped start The Rocket (local bastion of hip marketing) 18 years ago, then went off to grad studies in Wisconsin. Oxford’s paperback reissue of his 1993 treatise on the early days of radio comes out in time to give background on the first corporate media consolidation movement, just as sweetheart deregulation bills are locking the airwaves into fewer and fewer hands than ever. His book’s heavy reading, full of scholarly detail about forgotten, Depression-era radio reform movements that never stood a chance against the RCA-CBS duopoly that controlled the so-called Golden Age of Radio.

It’s not just that business has always wanted to make big money in media. McChesney believes it’s also always tried to silence any potentially viable alternative. So does fellow scholar James Ledbetter. His Made Possible By… details the ’70s rise of public TV and radio in the U.S. and its quick subjugation, first by right-wing politicians and then by corporate “underwriters,” filling PBS schedules with U.K. drawing-room dramas and Lawrence Welk reruns. But after reading it, I got to thinking about what kind of public broadcasting we might have otherwise had. From the standpoint of getting independent and/or progressive documentaries and public affairs shows on the air, the PBS setup’s about the best one could imagine. A vertically integrated organization like the BBC not only has stricter “neutrality” rules, it’s much less open to outside producers. On the more fiscally unstable, yet more decentralized, PBS setup, anybody can propose a program, seek funding for it from inside or outside the system, and even syndicate it to individual affilliates if the PBS network feed doesn’t carry it. I agree with Ledbetter that today’s noncommercial-TV setup leaves a lot to be improved upon; unlike him, I believe it can be improved upon without the drastic restructuring he advocates.

Meanwhile, Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground tries to imagine the potentials for a different type of media universe, using as his starting point the so-called Zine Revolution with its potentials and contradictions. For Duncombe, the punk-rock, political, and personal zines symbolize the risks and frustrations of an oppositional “alternative” culture–do you stay small and irrelevant, or become part of the corporate media machine? Other books about the Zine Revolution revel in the coolness, weirdness, and wildness of DIY publishing. Duncombe instead solemnly ponders zines as artifacts of safe, middle-class “rebellion,” and wonders whether (and how) they might lead into a more serious movement for social change. It’d be a start if more Media Analysts developed Duncombe’s smarts.