Brokeback Media

Perhaps it's just me, but news seems to be coming our way faster and with a greater fury than ever before. A tsunami of "breaking news " bulletins course through the veins and ganglia of what passes for an information system. A corporate news machine then pumps it out on a plethora of platforms dedicated to "more news in less time" -- in the press, on the web, on TV, on the radio and now on the phone. It's hard to escape the deluge.

Before we have time to digest, or understand, a story's implications, it's on to the next, making it more and more difficult to focus on any one item or connect it with another. The author Larry Beinhart of Wag the Dog fame speaks of the proliferation of "fog facts" in which important information systematically disappears from view.

No wonder a paralysis of analysis has set in with "on message" spin machines making it harder and harder for us to assess trends objectively, construct meaning or let us think for ourselves. Rather than inform, much of the news often disinforms, distorts and deceives. Rather than strengthen our society by talking truth to power, our media system increasingly undermines democracy by making a civil discourse harder and harder to practice. The loud-mouthed partisans in the punditocracy turn substantive debate into noise. Heat, not light, proliferates.

We are all under attack -- some from bombs, others from bullet points. The media system has become a battlefield of competing values and often the absence of any values.

2005 was a year in which the media not only brought us news but also became part of the news as scandals usually associated with government and politicians rippled through the media companies, their boardrooms and newsrooms.

Everyone tainted by the Valerie Plame affair took a hit. The New York Times' Judith Miller went to jail, returned a media hero and quickly became a zero when her own newspaper forced her out. The publisher of Time turned over a reporter's notes to a federal prosecutor over his objection. Robert Novak, who first leaked the name of a CIA employee, sputtered "bullshit" on CNN. Forced out on grounds of arrogance, he has now been put back on the air at -- where else -- Fox. Soon the Washington Post's famed Watergater Bob Woodward was also being called to account for being too busy to tell a prosecutor what he wanted to know about the crimes of the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, out of public view, Pentagon subsidized Information warfare specialists spent hundreds of millions to monitor media outlets, execute "rapid responses," plant news and pump up government policies. The war in Iraq is often more of a media war than a military conflict in a world where perception trumps reality. GOP operatives meanwhile reshape public broadcasting more to their liking.

The old media maestros are fading away as Mark Jurkowitz observed in the Boston Phoenix: "In a year of jarring transition, 2005 may be best remembered for the roster of major media players who left the scene. Dan Rather gave up his anchor chair, Ted Koppel departed Nightline and Peter Jennings lost his fight with lung cancer." Koppel and Tom Brokaw, who also retired this past year, acknowledged that the press is often trapped in its own hubris and arrogance, and is not connected to the audience it serves.

Journalists die and journalism is dying

It was a year in which more media workers died in Iraq (the toll there is higher than the whole of the Vietnam War), with most media companies not even protesting, and in which journalism itself seemed to be devolving before our eyes in spasms of jingoism, junk news and trivia. How much cable news time was devoted to a missing white American tourist of the blonde persuasion in Aruba when other important stories went begging for attention?