Rebecca's longest post ever or: Sleep deprivation kills conciseness

I’m in a class about conspiracy theories this semester, and I think Jay Rosen’s “Beast without a Brain” is strangely applicable to the course. I’m always kind of excited when I see thematic overlaps in my classes, even if the crossover is a little fuzzy and abstract. The overlap always has a cool way of bringing central themes into my intellectual spotlight for a little while.

Anyway, a common theme in U.S.-based conspiracies is that “the media” is, in one way or another, brainwashing the American public. Some conspiracy theorists cast the collective media as the puppet of an elite few masterminds bent on controlling the country. Others think the media itself is the root of conspiracy…that there’s some “boy’s club” out there where Tom Brokaw, Wolf Blitzer and whoever else meet together in secret performing Satanic rituals while they plan the next step they’ll take toward world domination. (Something like that…it’s all so silly.) Regardless, these guys look at the news like it’s purely evil.

The thing is, and Rosen brings this up…the idea that the media has a mind, that we plot out coverage to cater to our motives — election of our favorite candidate, prejudice against (insert group here), world domination — is pretty widespread. It isn’t limited to fanatics living in basements on ranches in Utah waiting for one form or another of a conspiratorial holocaust to arrive. And that’s a problem…because obviously we know we newspaper and TV folks don’t cluster together and form a conscious plot for the timbre of the week’s news coverage.

I agree with Rosen. In political coverage especially, the news rides on a tide. We rely on repetitive mantras: one week it’s about how Obama’s going to sweep the nation because he won Iowa; the next week, Clinton and McCain are “comeback kids;” and the next week, Huckabee’s giving McCain a run for his money (but is he really?) while Obama’s back to his “momentum.” I don’t know if I completely agree with Rosen’s assessment of how those mantras evolve and dominate the thread of political discourse, but I think he’s pretty close to being on target. Closer than anyone else I’ve read or heard discuss the issue…but that could be because he’s the first person to address it I’ve paid any attention to. (Thanks for the link, Tom!)

Here’s the problem, I think, but I’m limiting my thinking to primary coverage. I think that because we put so much emphasis on removing conflicts of interest, on keeping bias toward a particular candidate out of our discourse, we destroy our coverage. Elections are about democracy. They’re about finding the best candidate. It seems to me that the folks who dedicate themselves to political coverage tend to be the ones who are most passionate about politics and, consequently, are going to be passionate about a party and a candidate. Can political coverage ever really be any good if it’s being done by a bunch of people who are constantly afraid they’ll reveal their political leanings?

Maybe that’s why coverage of campaigns so often focuses on statistics and strategies. Maybe coverage amalgamates in these broad themes that make it seem like the media really does have one mind because we tend to rally behind a consensus, a vibe, drawn from the sum total of political coverage. When the threads of individual stories come together on a common trend, they weave a sort of safety net we can safely fall back on. If everyone’s saying the same thing, we can rely on repeating it. It’s hard to get called out for being wrong when every one of your competitors is wrong, too. Furthermore, you can’t accidentally let slip too many of your political leanings with independent, enterprising coverage if you let “the beast without a brain” take over.

And we wonder why people think there’s a mass media conspiracy. We really do repeat a lot of the same messages, and I don’t think there’s any way to deny that…especially not when it comes to politics. I don’t know how to fix it, either, but you’d better believe I’ll keep thinking about it.


Progress Report:
I don’t get how I can do so much work and feel so exhausted all the time with so little to show for it. I’m learning, more and more, that my advanced reporting experience is more about the things I do behind the scenes than the bylines I get in the paper.

Even though I can’t cover a story about the Ragtag actually moving on Sunday, I set up all of the meeting times and details so that a couple convergence students would be able to cover it instead without having to do too much extra legwork. I managed to write a decent story on True/False selling out of passes…by frantically typing between classes on a very busy Tuesday. I’m going to the Ragtag tonight to interview people about a couch. (Yes, a couch.) The story to come should be a lot of fun.

Other than that, I’ve been pouring most of my focus into my prehistoric Missouri story. I only hope to God it’ll work out, because man…I’ve poured a lot of hours into this only to find that I have no idea what angle I want to take. Oh boy.