Context
Mark
Crispin Miller
Crispin
Miller: I’ve been asked to set the context
for some of the other lecturers you’ll be hearing from at
this event. I know
many of them, including Brian, they’re very good. I’ll
try to
It’s
not going to be any news to any of you that we live in a media culture. The younger you are, the more likely
you are to assume--let’s put it this way, the younger one is,
the likelier one is to assume that this is a natural and God-given
status quo. But it’s really a very recent development. We’ve
never before in the history of human culture had a situation quite
like this one wherein all the major cultural activities are dominated
by culture industries, all of which have been absorbed into one very
large corporate image and text-producing machine. The
media industries have all been commercial for a long time. One often hears, in response to the kind of thing I say, the
counter-argument, well, you’re imagining a golden age when
media industries weren’t commercial. Of
course they were always commercial, but there’s commercial
and there’s commercial. There
are different kinds of commercialism and there are different kinds
of business structures. I’m
going to put this perhaps over-simply, but one of the things that
has happened is that all of the print industries which were formerly
separate from one another and commercial to varying degrees, have
been incorporated into the same mechanism that also includes the
broadcast media, cinema and music. To put it again over-simply, because
there are various complicating factors here, the print and image
worlds have converged so that we now have, with one slight exception
that I’ll explain in a moment, all of the culture industries
basically under one oligopolistic corporate umbrella. The
slight exception is newspapers. Newspapers have by regulation this far been forbidden from
full inclusion in the same machine that owns TV and radio stations. That’s a broadcast regulation that’s
about to bite the dust. There
have been waivers for the owners of newspapers; Rupert Murdock obviously
got a waiver so he could own the New York Post and still keep TV
stations in New York--The Chicago Tribune, owns the Chicago Tribune,
as well as one of the largest and most successful TV stations in
Chicago. So these regulations have never been
what you’d call onerous, but it won’t be necessary soon
even to have to get that waiver because that regulation will disappear
so the New York Times company, the Washington Post company, Night
Ridder, GNet, Cox, these newspaper corporations will, mark my words,
become part of the AOL-Time-Warner-Disney oligopoly. That’s
the exception.
I
think the industry most radically effected by these changes has been
book publishing, because of all the culture industries, book publishing
was formerly the most modest in its expectations. It
was never Woodstock. Obviously,
the paper that ran publishing companies wanted to make money, but
the profit expectation was a modest one, so that when big publishers
like Alfred Knopf and others looked for a profit, they were looking
for a profit of eight percent. Now
that all of the major book publishing companies in the United States
are owned by multi-national media corporations, with the only one
exception being W.W. Norton, the profit expectation is as high as
12 or 15 percent. This offers me a handy segue into an important point which
is that under the new dispensation, the new regime, you no longer
have a situation in which certain mighty hard-hearted capitalists
would, despite their interest in profit, would nevertheless indulge
a certain passion for a particular medium. There’s
an important difference between on the one hand the movie moguls
of the 20s, 30s and 40s, the broadcast titans of those decades, people
like Dave Sarnoff and William Paley, the magazine moguls like Henry
R. Luce, the newspaper titans like Pulitzer and Hurst, there’s
an important difference between people like that and people like
the Rupert Murdock, Chase, any of the other CEOs who’s job
it is basically to keep the stock price healthy. For even the most hard-hearted media
moguls of the past, there was, by and large, a fascination with and
a belief in some of the possibilities of that particular form, the
medium that they owned. Someone
like Sam Goldwyn, not exactly the world’s most sensitive person,
he did love movies. He loved them and he wanted them to be
good by his lights. Even
an ape like Louie B. Mayer not only loved movies, we wouldn’t
have shared his tastes in movies, he not only loved movies, but there
was a certain undercurrent of idealism there that lead him to commit
himself to the Andy Hardy pictures with Mickey Rooney because he
thought they were good for children. So
in many cases there was a sense of some kind of civic obligation
that coexisted interestingly with the most rapacious business practices
so William Paley, for example, who owned CBS really did believe that
the news side of the business should be protected from the commercial
pressures of the entertainment side, and he would violate that rule
himself sometimes. He
forced Edward R. Morrow to do Person to Person, this brainless
interview show, and the granddaddy of all brainless interview shows. Morrow hated it and he was terrible at it, I don’t know
if any of you have seen tapes of him trying to interview some of
these celebrities, it didn’t come naturally. He lacked that common touch, but he had to do it. In every instance here you can’t
simply take these exalted notions of past practice straight. It was complicated. Still, there was a kind of ideological
commitment, even if only abstract, to trying to do the right thing
by the American people; trying to give something back. Particularly around the time of World War II and for about
ten years after that, before it wore off, Paley was committed to
making CBS the best-broadcast news organization there was. That sets a standard, even if it’s an ideal that Paley
himself would violate. That’s
an important difference. This
isn’t to say that the people in charge today are lesser species
of the past, that we’ve gone from an age of gold to an age
of lead--that’s not the argument. It’s
that the business structures in place have changed so radically that
there’s simply no place for a steward-type Paley because now stock price is everything. The people in charge are very far removed from any particular
business. Even Rupert
Murdock who has printers ink in his veins, he loves newspapers, his
father was a great newspaperman, a heroic newspaperman, even Murdock
is less interested in his newspaper as newspapers than he is in his
newspapers as one piece of the machine that is always in debt and
that he has to keep squeezing every part of to try to contend with
that debt. So it’s
that distancing from every single aspect of the empire that’s
different and it’s treating everything as a capitalist, at
its purist will treat everything, which is just as grist for the
mill, you see. So the
old ideology of stewardship is gone; completely gone, whereas it
is still the case throughout the educational establishment, that
the people who are studying to be actors or journalists or writers
or musicians or photographers are still learning the rules of their
respective crafts according to a kind of dated notion of excellence. How
quaint.
You
don’t go to school to learn how to make garbage, but you go
to school to get credentials so you can get a job that will tend
to require that you produce garbage, which is a sad situation. Yet
at the same time, I think affords one latent possibility for improving
things, but we’ll get to that at the end. How much time do I have?
Younger: I
think what you’re saying is really interesting, so just give
as much as you can give them and they’ll ask questions at the
end.
Crispin
Miller: Newspapers, magazines and book publishing
are now a part of this machine that include TV, radio, music and
the movies and the internet web sites more and more, although the
web is still a great democratic various, I hate to use this buzzword,
but empowering medium, but it’s still increasingly dominated
by the large players. Even newspapers had their overlords in
their days. You know,
you had your Hurston Pulitzer, although there were a lot of regional
papers, a lot of family owned papers, and they were often just
as crappy as the worst corporate-owned paper is today, but there
was still more room for exceptions to the norm if you had more
owners. If you had
local owners, they tended to have an interest in local affairs,
whereas the paper that’s owned by GNet is going to be shifting
its personnel all over the country, not accommodating or encouraging
local reporters so the news suffers and the craft suffers.
Magazines,
too, were heavily dominated in the past by Henry Luce, who started
the Time-Life empire. At
his height in the 30s he reached roughly 1/3 of American readers,
that’s an enormously high percentage, but still there were
a number of independent magazines aside from him. Profit
expectations for those industries tended to be lower, especially
magazines and booksellers, than they were for Hollywood, but that,
as I say, has all changed. So everything’s been incorporated
into the same general mix.
Now
that the stock price is all important, now that any cultural industry
you enter as an employee will be trying to squeeze you both for extra
pennies and for product that sells sure-fire, there are a number
of tendencies that are marked whether you’re talking about
movies or novels or newspapers or news magazines. First
of all, there is on one hand a tendency to go for material that is
sure-fire, that is a grabber, that is titillating, that is lurid. Material
that will knock you out of your socks, that will blow you out of
the back wall of the theater, that will do all kinds of violent things
to you. You can’t
resist. Don’t touch that dial. No flipping, right? You’re transfixed, you can’t
move, it’s that great. BUT,
at the same time, they cut costs. Part of the same logic, actually. So this rampant cost cutting, for example, slices news budgets
to the bone so there’s no money for investigative reporting,
there’s no money for maintaining actual staff photographers
or supporting freelance photographers. I’ll
get to that toward the end. So you get things like cable news. The 24-hour cable news operations are--you know what I’m
talking about. Especially
FOX and MSNBC are perfect examples of what they want. Because on the one hand you can talk
about Bill Clinton’s genitals endlessly and people were apparently
fascinated by that. It
was Gary Condit’s genitals, then it was anthrax, and it’s
nothing right now, but the point is that people ritually complain,
especially journalists. “Oh, the O.J. phenomena, Oh, the
Princess Di, Oh, the JFK Jr.” Because
it is, you know, all of a sudden you’re living in Princess
Di world or you’re living in Monica-Gate world. It’s just like when a movie like Star Wars comes out. Everything
resonates with that and journalists lament this, but I think too
infrequently talk about why this is the case. It
is the case because it’s like printing money, because you jump
on that bandwagon, for of all, and it doesn’t cost you a dime. FOX, MSNBC can have people on there gassing off endlessly. It
reached its heights with the Clinton scandals, but it may have reached
its heights of absurdity with JFK Jr’s death, because you had
people like Mike Barnacle on FOX or MSNBC, this Boston Globe columnist,
talking endlessly about his memories of the departed, because he
had a house near his in Hainesport, that was the basis of his acquaintance! So
he’s talking and people are listening and asking questions
as if this mattered or he had anything to say, it’s just filler
is all it is. Really, people’s opinions don’t
cost anything unless they’re a full-time pundit, so that’s
a very good example of the kind of double whammy you get from the
culture industry, particularly in the journalistic field; lurid material
and promiscuous cost cutting. So
we have virtually no more foreign bureaus at any of the networks,
they all rely on CNN or the BBC. It’s
too expensive to keep them open. God
forbid they should do investigative journalism which they did do
in the 50s and early 60s. They
did do documentaries in the 60s, their own. Morrow
did some news documentaries, I’m sure you know about them,
that to this day have power. Harvest
of Shame about the migrant workers, or The Selling of the
Pentagon was a very powerful documentary about an issue that’s
still relevant, but you won’t see the likes of that today. It
has something to do with the fact that they don’t have the
resources to do it, and increasingly they don’t have the skill
because they’re not going for journalistic skill. They’re
going for good bridgework, nice breasts, right? (Laughter) It’s
always darkest right before the dawn. It’ll get better, I promise.
Now. I say it had something to do with cost
cutting, but it doesn’t have everything to do with cost cutting. It also has to do with the fact that
the larger the parent company and the more it owns, the more opportunities
for conflict of interest, right? So
you first of all simply have a worst version, a more extreme version
of a problem that bedeviled journalism throughout modern history
which is the problem with advertiser clout. It’s
not new. A great book
for you all to read is Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check,
published in 1919, and it’s as fresh as a daisy except it’s
not about TV, it’s about newspapers, but he basically nails
the same problems that afflict much of journalism today. Advertiser
clout. So just as a local newspaper will not
do any damaging exposes of the family that owns the local department
store, because the department store advertises in the newspaper,
neither have any of the major news outlets, print or broadcast, ever
really gone after the tobacco companies. It
started to loosen up a bit after the 60s, but for decades medical
science was aware of the link between smoking and death since the
mid 30s! The first paper was published by a doctor at Johns-Hopkins
Hospital in I think it was 1934, Raymond Pearl, but the only mainstream
outlet that would deal with it was Readers’ Digest and that
was because Dewitt Wallace had a thing about smoking; he was extremely
right wing, but he had a bee in his bonnet about smoking so he did
cover that issue which helped because it had huge circulation. He
only did it in his American editions; he took tobacco advertising
in his foreign edition. Only he did it and then George Seldes, who was a famous maverick,
sort of an I.F. Stone-type journalist who published a little independent
magazine called In Fact which had a circulation of 2,000 and
read only by reporters and FBI agents. Those
were the only two outlets that dealt with the tobacco issue for decades. Even after the Surgeon General’s
famous report came out in 1964 and doctors started quitting right
and left, the networks shied away from it. Well,
it’s not because they’re evil, it’s because they
depended on the revenues that came in from the tobacco companies--more
revenues than from any other source, you see? It
wasn’t until the tobacco companies went off the air in 1970
that there was a little more freedom, but then the tobacco companies
soon bought into companies like Kraft and Nabisco, you see? So
they still held a tremendous clout.
Younger: Whenever
the huge government crack down was going on they asked all the museum
directors and curators to write letters in support of them, and these
were the curators’ ideas that were being supported by . . .
Crispin
Miller: Well, there you go. Money talks! Bullshit walks. Everybody’s
heard it. It’s
the way the world works, you know? The question is how do we free the media from that influence
because if I didn’t think it was possible, I would be here. This problem of advertiser influence,
as I said, is an old one. But
there’s also a new one that’s related and that is the
problem of conflict of interest posed by other properties owned
by the parent company that owns the network or the newspaper or
the news magazine. Some companies labor mightily to work
against this, like in Time magazine there have been a number of
journalists who have tried very hard to go against that by focusing
on AOL-Time-Warner-related stories, but it’s a struggle and
it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t continue over time
with the same zeal because there’s a certain inexorability
about this process that gradually, you know, you just have to stop
doing it. But it’s
a very difficult problem, when a company owns not just other media
organizations, but take General Electric, everybody’s favorite
example. It’s
the first major multi-national to buy a network. GE
bought NBC in 1986. You
know that GE is also a major defense contractor and GE is also
heavily into nuclear power and GE is also heavily into financial
services, one of the largest in the world. So
we have stories of actual interference from on high at certain
moments of crisis. Lawrence Grossman in his book The
Electronic Republic tells a story of something that happened
during his brief tenure as president of NBC News in 1987 that was
the stock market crash, and of course NBC News, being a news organization,
was playing up the bad news, that’s what journalists do. They
called it a crash, which I don’t think was an exaggeration. Jack Welch himself “Neutron Jack,” head of GE
actually called Grossman on the phone and said, “Stop saying
crash and stop making it sound so bad, you’re going to hurt
the price of our stock.” He
was very frank. Grossman
said, “I didn’t hear what you said.” I’m
paraphrasing. And
continued to do what he did. But
then he didn’t continue to stay there, either. He left. He wasn’t
fired, but he left. I
have so many stories like that. It’s
one of these things that you come to assume everybody knows, but
then you have to debate somebody who has a vested interest in not
knowing it and you have to say them all over again. People like to say, “There’s no evidence that
there’s any kind. . .” “There’s
never been a case where. . .” they’ll say. It
reminds me of the old--“There’s no scientific evidence!” Anyway, there’s plenty of evidence. Abundant.
The
problem isn’t so much, this is parenthetical, that people make
phone calls like that. I
think that’s rare. I
think that that’s extraordinary when that happens. Let’s
put it this way: That’s
less frequent than the more mundane thing that happens which is the
journalists just learn how to function in the world they live in. They
learn how to think of story ideas that aren’t going to get
that phone call. You see? They develop an extinct for how to get ahead in the organization. We
all do this. It happens in universities. It happens in every large bureaucracy. It
happens in news organizations, too. So
if Tom Brokaw didn’t have to be taken aside by Neutron Jack
Welch and told to stay away from nuclear power. I
think Tom Brokaw was smart enough to know that that’s something
that’s probably wasn’t going to fly. See? Just as
he’s smart enough to know that the Greatest Generation was
a brilliant marketing idea. He may be in awe of them, that may be
true, but he also had the brains to see that this is big, this is
very, very big. The
problem really is that the values of the organization will tend to
seep into people’s consciousness, particularly if they didn’t
have a conscience to start with.
There’s
also a positive version of this conflict of interest problem, and
that’s the problem of synergy. I
say positive, I don’t mean good, I mean as opposed to there
being stories you can’t do because say your parent company
owns this, this, this and this. But
there are also stories that have to do, or that they want you to
do, because the company owns this, this, this and this. Sometimes
the examples are bald, aggrievous. When Twister came
out. How many have seen
it? Doesn’t surprise
me. When Twister came
out, this was a Warner Brothers film, right? It
was about tornadoes. The
same week that it came out Time magazine did a cover story on tornadoes
and the cover even looked like the poster for the movie, you know? That’s
pretty bald. That kind
of thing has been happening more and more. It is, to some extent, why the parent
companies like to have news organizations. There are number of reasons why. It isn’t only because they need money, because they
often don’t. But
it’s also because you can affect the debate or you can prevent
any real debate. You can help to accelerate the shift
away from journalism to star watching. So
celebrity becomes, and has become, the fuel that this whole system
tends to run on. I made
some notes, I should look at them to make sure I’m not skipping
anything. Okay. Just a couple more points and then I’ll talk a little
bit about photography.
One
of the most dangerous aspects of all this is that there comes to
be no room for anything that’s a surprise or a challenge, and
I think this should affect photographers especially, as well as reporters
who are going to come out with news that’s sobering and important,
complicated, as well as artists, writers, who are going to want to
come out with stuff that’s genuinely new, like The Sopranos,
who couldn’t get a aired on any of the networks. The business press will tend to talk
about the likes of Michael Eisner and Rupert Murdock in exactly the
way the business press would talk about business barons. That these are men of boundless energy and vision, of god-like
boldness, you know, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. That’s fine. That’s very flattering, but the
reality of the situation is that as far as taking any real aesthetic
or journalistic risk is concerned, these are extraordinarily timorous
organizations. They are terrified of innovation. They are addicted to market testing. They tend to start up projects on the
basis of market testing which is another fairly recent development,
but that’s not what Henry Luce did. That’s
not what Paley or Sarnoff did. They would have an idea and then start up some kind of a cultural
institution on the basis of that idea, not on the basis of this or
that demographic block of possible customers. This is very, very deeply engrained by now. All the more reason for us to recognize
that it’s historically fairly recent. It’s important to understand that the kind of product
that these entities are looking for is always fundamentally warming,
comforting--even when it’s ugly. I’ll
talk a little more about that in a moment.
I
want to mention another counter-argument that one often hears in
response to the kind of critique that I’m giving you, and that
is that we’re only giving the people what they want. We
hear this over and over again. If
there’s no interesting new cinema or no hard-hitting news or
whatever it is you’re looking for, if there’s none of
it it’s because the people, God love them, are too dumb to
expect that. We’re giving them what they want, so if it’s mostly
crap on TV it’s because they want crap. I can understand the attraction of that argument for the people
who make a lot of money off it, but it’s as wrong as it is
elitist. The kinds of
product that tend to disappear, don’t disappear because people
lose interest in them. They
disappear because they don’t make enough money to justify maintaining
them. I’m not saying that these parent
companies should be operating charities. I’m
not saying that they should keep businesses alive that don’t
make any money. I’m
saying that they don’t make ENOUGH money to justify maintaining
them. At a certain point,
the profit motive ceases to be a rationale drive and starts to become
demented, because it isn’t just a case of trying to get a certain
return on your investment, it’s a case of trying to get an
ENORMOUS return on your investment because you’re trying to
make up for so many other failures throughout your empire. Take,
for example, classical music. In more and more cities throughout the United States there
is no classical music radio station, and these are often cities with
large listenerships for classical music. Like
south Florida. Ft. Lauderdale,
Miami. There is now,
as of about six months ago, no classical music station down there. We heard about WNYC cutting back on its
classical music; don’t tell me there aren’t classical
music listeners in this city. The same with Philadelphia. Philadelphia had a full-time classical music station. It was sold. It was making $5 million a year though, before it was sold. But
whichever of the behemoths bought it figured they could make more
if they turned it into ESPN sports or soft rock or whatever other
permitted seven genres it was. So radio has really been--and if you
drive across the country with your radio on, if you heard it in the
past, you can hear a real difference. You’re
getting the same stuff from coast to coast. So our formerly most democratic medium,
radio, is now completely centralized by the likes of Clear Channel
and Infinity which is owned by Viacom. Radio
is probably the most thoroughly transformed of the culture industries
because of the 1996 telecommunications act and that radical deregulation,
radio was the first to go. It
just went (finger-snap) like that. What
we’re really trying to do is prevent the other cultural industries
from going the way of radio while trying how to figure out how to
bring radio back.
Foreign
film. Ten percent of
movie revenues once came from screenings of foreign films. As recently as the 70s. Now what happened? Did people suddenly not want to see foreign
films anymore? Did that
taste just vanish? Or,
rather, does it have to do with the fact that the owners of multiplexes
which have tended to replace art theaters all over the country, the
owners of multiplexes require a films producers to pay for the marketing
of a film. You see? The producers of foreign films can’t
afford to do that, with very few exceptions. Although there are more screens than
ever before because of all the multiplexes, they actually show a
smaller range of films than they used to show. Foreign
films, therefore, dropped down to practically nothing. In this city and L.A., maybe even in
Chicago you can see them on a regular basis. I went to school in Baltimore in the 70s, this is not like
the capital of sophistication, but there were three or four theaters
in the town then, a blue-collar town, that showed mostly foreign
films. It’s unthinkable today. And it’s because it’s economically
driven. This is the
point I’m making.
Also,
at the same time, I want to make the point that when the atmosphere
becomes a certain way, it does tend to induce certain changes in
taste. You do tend to become accustomed to what you’re accustomed
to. To put it another
way, people don’t necessarily know what they don’t know. They don’t know what they’re
not getting. Which is
why, often, the things that take people by storm are things that
are radically new. Nobody
expected The Sopranos to take off like that. Nobody
expected The Beatles to take off like that. Nobody
expected movies like Shine and Babe to be such huge
hits. Well Shine and Babe came
out of the Australian film industry which is subsidized, so they
will take risks. There is a down side to that, too. There’s all kinds of regulations and it’s an onerous
process to work with the regulations. Still, they serve the purpose of freeing film producers from
having to worry about market testing. From
having to worry about doing what’s being done now. Those films were huge hits. The Babe: Pig in the City stunk
because they tried to imitate it here. The
point is people will tend to look for what’s familiar, and
let’s jolt it out of it. It’s the jolting out of it that
brings me to the subject of photography, but before I do that, maybe
I should see if you have any questions about--this was a very cursory
discussion of the media industry. Does
anyone have any questions about these large changes in the media
corporations or anything like that?
Audience: What’s
your response to some of the charges that because of the proliferation
of the news media, the 24-hour news station in particular, that the
news media is actually creating stories rather than just simply reporting
on stories. We see things
like the Gary Condit story, for example, was everywhere and you started
your day with that and then immediately after 9/11 it disappeared
completely. Now that we’ve become complacent
again and we’re okay, it’s resurfaced. Particularly, a couple of weeks ago, and I’m thinking
about this rather than the Condit story, the New York Times had a
magazine section where they talked about different forms of terrorism
and how to kill people efficiently. Different
types of stuff you can use and where you can leave it and what time
of the day--like creating this hysteria of terrorism because nothing
has happened yet. They’re almost like trying to create
something. I’m
just curious, how do you respond to that?
Crispin
Miller: That’s a very good question. The news media have actually always been
accused of doing this kind of thing, and they have always done
it to a great extent. The
most famous example is the Spanish American War which was basically
started by William Hurst. So
these things do tend to happen. But,
the problem that you’re describing is actually the result
of a deeper problem, without which this wouldn’t be as dangerous. If we compare our system with the system, say, in Iraq or
Cuba--there’s no denying that we have a freer system because
we don’t have an outright strict control of the media by
the state. We have something different. We have something subtler. We have a system in which those in power
are often very skilled at manipulating the press who understand
the way the press operates and what the press needs. Because of that skill, are very, very good at promoting their
own propaganda agenda through the media. The Gary Condit story was driven by a partisan machine. It was the same partisan machine that
drove the Clinton stories which were just as or maybe more groundless. I wasn’t a Clinton supporter, okay? My
non-support for Clinton has to do with his policies. It
has nothing to do with any of the stories that dominated all the
discussion throughout the media, including the New York Times and
the Washington Post, Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate--all that
stuff is all bologna. It was all concocted. It was made up. There was nothing at all to it. Nothing. But it was the relentlessness of that attack machine behind
the scenes that kept this in the public eye. There are complicated
reasons for this. One
complicating factor is the ultimate success of the right-wing propaganda
drive against the liberal media. Because
of the success of that drive, a lot of nervous liberals work in
these organizations and a nervous liberal is a better ally than
a staunch right-winger because they’re always bending over
backwards to be fair and to go after the leftist Bill Clinton and
things like that. So
the reason why these things often end up preoccupying us, sometimes
it’s just serendipity, you know, Princess Di gets killed
and there’s this enormous spontaneous outpouring of emotion. That’s a natural thing for any person in the news organization
to go with because people are thinking about that. It’s fascinating to look at the
Clinton scandals because although people watched, Clinton’s
ratings didn’t drop that dramatically as a result. So there was a weird disconnect, in a sense, between that
theatrical experience and the political consequences which shows
that it wasn’t driven by mass animus against him, it was
driven by other players. That’s
the real danger there, is that the media system is so corporatized
and so politicized in its own way, and the parent companies have
so much to gain from playing ball with the powerful. They
get so many breaks. And
the sweeping deregulation that’s going on now is just another
payoff.
Audience: Mark,
I’d like to give this sort of insider’s amplification
because you used two very good examples and I think I would probably
separate the terrorism article. You’re
referring to Bill Keller’s article about nuclear terrorism?
Crispin
Miller: Yes.
Audience: Maybe
you can talk a bit about that later, but I’m not sure that
the impulses that drove him to write that are the same impulses that
gave us Condit wall to wall and Chandra Levy, I think that the reason
we got that can be discussed to a great degree, but there are other
things that I think are in the equation. The competition among the
24-hour news networks with the networks, the CBSs, the NBCs, drives
a sort of me-too-ism, so if someone is going wall to wall with this,
you’ve got to go wall to wall with it. I’m not saying that that’s
a defensible strategy because I think it’s abysmal and people
fight it every day, but I think there’s that. Then in addition to the sometimes-converging agendas of people
in politics and in the media, I think it’s also fundamentally
a cultural thing. That
people who manufacture media in New York and Washington went to the
same schools as the people who are running the Capital Hill committees
and who are in power. This is not some sort of strange leftist
critique. It’s
the truth. This is what
they do. This is where their sympathies lie. That’s
a sort of very basic fact. Now
as far as the Bill Keller article, I think that he was probably trying
to be sort of even farther afield than provocative and just say, “Listen, there’s
been a nuclear threat out there forever. I
wouldn’t put that in the same basket as the anthrax story,
but I can talk about that later, having had to cover that ad nauseam.”
Crispin
Miller: Those are all very good points. It has occurred to me that there was
a strange kind of regional snobbery at work in the anti-Clinton--you
know, who does this guy think he is, he’s from Arkansas. He was a rogue scholar, he thinks he’s so smart. Bush belongs in Washington and Clinton
doesn’t. That
was definitely part of this shared worldview that these people
have. Of course, when you say cultural, that reconfirms the point
that the whole media machine has become culturally very hermetic,
very closed. News
used to be a blue-collar occupation. You
go see the front page. To
be a reporter was somewhat better than being a factory worker. Seriously. And
every newspaper had its labor reporter. Can
you imagine that now? There
are no labor reporters any more. The Times doesn’t cover labor issues, they cover it
as a business story. All
over cable, all over TV, all over the major newspapers and newsweeklies
is a tremendous amount of stuff about the stock market. We
all know more about Wall Street now. That didn’t used to be the case. That represents a cultural shift away
from a news audience that included blue-collar workers to one that’s
only about consumption. Only
about high-level consumption. It’s
only about trying to appeal to the people who take trips and buy
fur coats and so on. That’s
an extraordinary shift and an important one. There’s
a famous story about I think it was someone from the New York Post
went to Saks Fifth Avenue to try to get advertising placed in the
paper and the person at the store said, “Your readers are
our shoplifters.” Which
is another way of saying, “No, we don’t want the people
who read your paper to come into our store.” That’s
a remarkable shift, and it’s one that’s basically gone. This
is another important point: In
contradiction of the old myth that the press has this liberal bias,
there was a study published by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
that had been conducted by an academic named David Croteau. A
study of the economic attitudes, the economic views, of the Washington
Press Corps on economic issues with almost no exception, the Washington
Press Corps has views way to the right of the average American. On
minimum wage, on corporate power, on social security, on issue
after issue, with the lone exception of spending on the environment,
the only issue on which there’s a certain liberalism. The Washington Press Corps, they have a lot of money! They’re very high paid celebrities. Sam
Donaldson has a horse farm in Virginia. Yelling
at the top of his lungs and acting like he’s in your face
gives you the impression, if you’re not paying attention,
that he’s a scrappy outsider, but he’s just a millionaire. They all are. I’m
being perfectly serious here. George Will, on ABC’s This Week, may be the one who’s
the right-wing ideologue, but Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts are
insiders, they go to the same parties as the people they cover,
and they’ve got a lot of capital and their attitudes are
affected by that. That’s a factor and it’s
another one that Upton Sinclair talks about in his book. The disappearance of labor coverage and
so on is definitely a remarkable change over the last 20 years. Do you have a question?
Audience: Yeah,
and it may be jumping the gun a little bit here, but you use that
metaphor of the big conglomerate media company won’t cover
the tragedy in the local department stores’ family and then
you use the example of Jack Welch calling NBC and saying stop saying
this. That I can see and understand because it’s sort of purely
mathematical, this will cost me so much money if you do it; if it’s
cheaper to get rid of you, I’ll do that. What’s creepier is when you talked
about Tom Brokaw knowing to stay away from nuclear issues, and to
me that’s the central argument in how you change it is, you
know, it’s not in the manual, do not do stories on this, but
everyone knows that everyone creeps around it, and I think it’s
a way in a lot of other cultural political social racial issues how
the system works. So I guess my question for you who said you had a little bit
of hope, how do you subvert that?
Crispin
Miller: As long as the media landscape is heavily
shadowed by just a few gigantic structures, most people who come
out of schools ready to do creative work are going to have to go
to work in those structures or be very hungry. Your
options are you either work for a living for one of them and do
the best work you can do, and they all do good work, you know,
as good as they can do. Or, you become a full-time outsider and
you’re going to be talking to some of them and that requires
tremendous pluck and inexhaustible energy. I
have a luxurious post, I have tenure, so that – I continually
feel like I’m obliged to make up for that because it’s
an institution that’s done nothing but harm as far as I can
see. Anyway, what has to change in order for
that to change is for the media landscape to be varied sufficiently
so you don’t have to develop that instinct. You don’t have to develop that sense of “I better
not do this or I’m going to get screwed.” Unless and until there’s an actual
political movement to change things, it won’t happen. First let me just say very succinctly
what I think the goal should be and then I’ll say a little
something about strategy for getting there. We
need real anti-trust measures. This
means discussing anti-trust, not in the usual economist
terms in which it’s discussed, but in terms closer to the
ones we’re using in here. What
are the civic effects? What
are the consequences for this country, for this people? What are the consequences for us of having these enormous
top-down organizations? See? Now they’re not successful as business
models, either. That
can actually work to our advantage. If
they were making buckets of money it would be harder, but they’re
not. They’re
all in trouble. It’s
not viable. It’s
too sprawling, it’s too big. But
if you go back and read the muckraking reporters of the first decade
of the 20th century and you even read the language of
the original anti-trust statutes, the Sherman Act and the Clayton
Act, you can see that there are grounds for saying, it isn’t
just a matter of trying to make things equitable among the suppliers,
it’s also a matter of this is the press! This is the free press! It’s actually enshrined in the
Bill of Rights. The United States depends on it. So isn’t this trend working against that? So there’s a kind of conceptual
or intellectual game that has to be played, some work that has
to be done before we can get to anti-trust, because now that the
judiciary in this country is completely enthralled – there’s
economist model of anti-trust discussion and they’ve completely
bought the notion of commercial-free speech which is an abortion,
which has got to be eliminated, it’s just grotesque, and
it’s very recent. It’s
from the late 70s. It’s
berserk that non-human entities, corporations, can have free speech
protection. It’s
not in the constitution. Alright. Anti-trust, okay? Deregulation. The broadcasters use the public airwaves, they use the digital
TV spectrum. Congress
has bent over for them, has given them the TV spectrum for nothing,
it’s public property. When
the American people know this, and I base this on polls that my
organization did, I know what I’m talking about here, this
isn’t a guess, when the American people know the situation,
when they know that these companies of which there are only 5 or
6 have been given absolute open free access to the digital spectrum
and the airwaves for nothing, not even having to do any programming
in return, and when they know how much it’s worth, they get
mad. Now it’s never put to them in this
way, right, and these organizations don’t cover these issues. The only time that media regulation and
this stuff comes up it’s on the business pages of the newspapers.
But we know from the polls that we did that if you put it in plain
English, people are smart enough to see that it’s unfair
and that it’s bad for them. There’s got to be re-regulation. Any
entity that makes out like a bandit on the digital TV spectrum
should not only pay to use that resource, but they should also
be making it up to us through non-commercial programming, which
is exactly was established with the FCC was formed in 1934. Over
the years those requirements have eroded, but they’ve got
to be brought back: Anti-trust, re-regulation.
Those
two refer to the commercial sphere. We
are alone among the advanced democracies in the poor quality of our
public broadcasting system. We
have a terrible public broadcasting system. It’s
public in name only. NPR
and PBS, they do some good things, but they are under funded, they
are understandably paranoid, they’ve got to worry about Congress,
they have to worry about corporations, so they’re not in any
position to do a lot of Frontline-type shows. They
have to do more John Tesh Live at Rusty Rocks. (Laughter) That’s
what they have to do because it’s safe, right? Sesame Street is okay, but the Three Tenors is also okay. I
have nothing against those shows, but you could put those on any
channel. So we need to have a completely revamped public broadcasting
system that’s local as well as national, because as it stands
now, it’s only national and just so you know, NPR provides
a disincentive to local public radio station managers, a disincentive
which actually inhibits them from doing local programming because
NPR says, “Here, you can have this package of Morning Edition,
All Things Considered, Terri Gross, it’s this cheap,” and
it’s an offer they can’t refuse. This means that they don’t do shows
in their local town about local issues. I had a lot of experience with this in Baltimore so I’ve
see it up close. So,
anti-trust, re-regulation, a radical reconceptualization of public
broadcasting, and finally, some way to democratize media policy-making. You talk to people about media policy
and their eyes glaze over, my eyes glaze over, it’s so boring. It’s highly technical and it’s
federal, so most of the media activists that we have at work right
now are in D.C. and it was all about going and tap dancing in front
of the FCC commissioners and filing suit, well now, what are they
going to do there? They don’t care what they think. These guys are just absolutely unreconstructed
free market animals, so they have no leverage there. They’re all understandably depressed,
you know? I think there
should be state versions of the FCC, the way we have state versions
of the EPA. Maybe even municipal versions. It’s true it would create a bureaucracy,
but it would at least localize media discussion.
That
issue brings me to the discussion of strategy and I’ll just
make this one point that’s very important. So
far, the only the right wing has tended to make an issue out of the
media, but they’ve tended to do it in a way most of us would
reject because it’s puritanical, it’s censorious, it’s
also basically anti-Semitic, they’re implying that the wrong
type of people are in charge, right? They
don’t ever talk about the structural reasons why this is the
case because they don’t talk that way about anything--they
don’t talk about the problems of a free market economy. That
doesn’t interest them. They’d
much rather demonize the media, scapegoat it and put Lynn Cheney
in charge of it and William Bennett in charge of it and lay down
the law. Or John Ashcroft. That’s what they like to do. They, however, are the only who talk
about the media. Now. When it comes to the trashiness of a
lot of the content on TV they actually have a point. But the solution isn’t censorship. The solution, because there’s always
going to be stuff like that; is that you’ve got to live with
it. The point is you
don’t want to have a media landscape dominated by companies
that do more and more of that. You
can’t get away from it! There’s
no place to go. And
you’re especially conscious of it if you have children. So
a lot of people with kids will listen to Dr. Laura, listen to the
Reverend Wildman because they’re talking about this at least. People on the left don’t like to. It’s
not cool. However, more and more people in the
media industries actually share, with a lot of people outside of
them, a sense that something’s wrong. I
talk to them all the time, not just people in photography, but music,
filmmakers, people in publishing, the unions, the screen actors guild,
these people are incredibly receptive to this critique because, as
I say, they didn’t go to school to learn how to do stuff like The
Man Show. Seriously. So
not only should the left make a counter-argument that acknowledges
that there’s a lot of garbage on, but the people in the media
should be talking to one another and should be going public because
when people think “the media,” they think of a monolith. It’s
not a monolith--there are great people in the media, you see? So
they should be heard from. They
should say something, and the people in the unions do try. But
they’re members of the culture, too. That’s the beginning of an answer. This is a very complicated problem because
the biggest stumbling block to reform is this: The very means we would use to create
a grassroots movement which we have to have is the problem. That’s the media. (End of tape)
For a long time in this country, the modern
way was the muckrakers. The
reason why their work was so influential, talking about Sinclair,
Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Stephens--the body of muckraking journalism
is really yet to be fully appreciated. It’s
amazing stuff that deals with all aspects of American culture. It wasn’t just the big businesses
they wrote about, they wrote about the schools, the wrote about the
church. They were amazing! They wrote about the media. They were
influential because there was a range of independently owned magazines
then, for about 15 years. Like
McClure’s, there were about a dozen of them and people read
them. It’s interesting that muckraking
basically stopped in 1913. And
there again, it didn’t stop because people said they were getting
tired of eye-opening exposes, it wasn’t that they were bored,
it was that these magazines either were bought out by the very interests
that were under attack or they went commercial. They
decided for structural reasons that they could do much better if
they started taking more advertising. This
has to do with a large shift in the print media away from circulation-based
revenues to advertising revenues. This
kind of thing can actually be rectified through changes in the tax
laws and so on and postal rates. But
that’s what happened to the muckrakers, they had no place to
write. A lot of people today have the same sensation. And it’s not just writers. People in radio and TV. You’ll be hearing from Danny Schechter
after me and he can talk all about that.
So
that is the challenge. How
do you inform people about this? How
do you get the word out? Because
the liberal media is in the way. That’s
what has to be changed. And
they have tremendous clout. Any
time you start to suggest policy changes, if you were to tell them, “If
you’re going to use the airwaves and the digital TV spectrum,
you have to do so much community programming, you have to do so much
education programming, you have to give equal time,” they’d
start placing millions of ads saying, “They want to take away
your free TV!” They used to say that. They can’t say that anymore because
very few people have free TV. But
they’ll come up with something. “You won’t be able to watch Friends anymore!” That will be all people hear and they’ll
go crazy. That’s
a very, very formidable ability that they have, and I don’t
pretend to know any easy way around that, other than grassroots,
face-to-face, local, small-scale activism.
I
didn’t even talk about photography. Well
maybe I should talk about photography. Do
you want me to? Yes? Okay. First of all, I reckon you must know a lot of this history
already, but the most exciting news photography was enabled by the
great pictorial news magazines, Life and Look especially
which came along in 1936 and 1937, so the golden age of press photography
was really coterminous with the sway of those weeklies. That fact had everything to do with the willingness of people
like Henry Luce, the publisher of Life magazine, to subsidize
the work of photographers with sufficient generosity so they could
actually make a living. Day
rates, as you know, have become impossible to live on, and I wrote
down some figures for you in case you want them. The
cost cutting that I’ve talked about before underlies the whole
problem here is that because of this promiscuous cost-cutting, and
not only reporters not paid to dig into stories, but photographers
aren’t given the wherewithal to travel to places that Americans
ought to know about, like say Afghanistan, and take the kinds of
pictures that can convey dramatically a sense of what’s going
on in those places. The
minimum wage in 1973 was $1.60 an hour. In
1998 it was $5.15, so it went up 3.2 times higher than it had been
in 73. The average day
rate for editorial photography assignments in 1973 was $200. By 1998 it was only $450, so it only went up 2.2 times. So when you stop to consider how much
it takes to be a photographer, you have to maintain a lot of expensive
equipment, you have to buy your own business insurance, you usually
have to pay for your own medical premiums, and you’re forced
to sign away your rights, right? That’s
nowhere near enough. Newsweek,
Time and U.S. News, just to take these as examples, are
notoriously stingy, so there is an economic factor, a crucial economic
factor, that can really only be ameliorated by some kind of collective
action. Here the problem is that artists of all
kinds, including photographers, are very hard to organize. They’re not exactly ditto heads,
you know, but that is still what it’s going to require. Now there’s a paradox at work that
I want to elaborate on that puts this in the context with the other
culture industries. On
the one hand it would seem to be the case that there’s an unprecedented
demand for images. Right? Because we live in this thoroughly mediated
environment, we’re constantly being blitzed by images, so you’d
think there’d be an unprecedented demand for images, just as
there’s an unprecedented demand for actors, because there’s
so much stuff on TV, there’s so many commercials on TV, an
unprecedented demand for people who write, but while that’s
true, on the other hand there’s this like double-whammy where
the cost-cutting make the kind of work you do increasingly difficult
to live on, and, again, the imperative of the system makes the quality
of the work you do so low that you almost don’t want to do
it anymore, you see. A lot of journalists lately have been leaving the profession
to go teach, even though they take cuts in pay, because they’d
rather teach journalism because they can’t practice it anymore. I don’t know if that’s an
option so much for photographers, but I assume it must be.
There’s
also another way to talk about all this. It
isn’t all just dollars and cents, it never is. There’s also a cultural and aesthetic
factor at work. I’m
going to be kind of speculative here. What’s happened to visual material,
what’s happened to the images that people consume is really
very interesting and pertinent to what you all want to do. I’m going to read you a passage
by Henri Cartier-Bresson. “In
photography, the smallest thing can become a big subject. An insignificant human detail can become
a light motif. We see
and we make seen, as a witness to the world around us, the event
in its natural activity generates an organic rhythm of forms.” This notion of organicism was really widespread among a lot
of the visual artists of mid-century, and a lot of the intellectuals
who wrote about the visual arts, the idea that a picture would have
sufficient meaning and complexity, that it would actually inform
people in a way that would connect them with the world around them. The
kind of visual material that you’re being asked to provide
now is very different from that. Even
though it’s something people look at, it has the nature of
being what I would call sub-visual. It’s
not really visual. It’s
not really meant to be looked at, any more than a lot of TV or movie
dialogue. It’s really meant to be listened
to and understood. If
it’s expletive-laden; every other word out of a character’s
mouth is “fuck.” There’s
a certain, let’s call it “piffiness” or a bluntness. There is a quality of shock to that that
takes us away from the realm of the discursive, the linguistic, into
a different realm. It’s
the realm of the sensationalistic. Pictures,
likewise, in what we could call the culture of TV don’t really
work visually because they aren’t asking you to sit and look
at them carefully. Photography,
at its best, requires a level of attentiveness, a kind of quiet attentiveness – even
in the context of daily newspapers--that is extremely difficult to
find in a world so speedy and thoroughly mediated as this one. A cultural space like ours. Let me give you a couple of elaborations
on this point. The still
photographer doesn’t use montage, obviously. The image is meant to sit there. Television has tended to valorize montage
at a very high speed. The
rock video is kind of the avant-garde of tele-visual technique. Rock video technique is now in the news,
it’s now in all kinds of advertising, it’s now in reality
TV shows. The way The
Osborne’s is shot and cut is like rock video. It’s
very different from, I don’t know how many of you saw it, The
Loud Family back in 1973, but that was a real documentary that
took time to watch and you get to know the characters, there wasn’t
a lot of fancy cutting. The Osborne’s, okay, you
don’t hear expletives, but you hear bleeps which is supposed
to be funny. There’s a lot of fast cutting. There’s a lot of wacky music. They only bring us the highlights. So basically, all commercial spectacle
aspires to the nature of the rock video, increasingly, so that change
itself, from one image to another, tends to supercede the possible
affect or meaning of any single image. Change
itself becomes kind of value, because it’s distracting. And it also tends to be hypnotizing. So
whereas photojournalism at its best is actually mobilizing, has a
mobilizing affect, post-MTV tele-visual technique has a paralyzing
affect. Let me make a distinction between a certain impressive group
of photographs and then their version in contemporary visual culture. You’ve all seen the pictures taken
by the likes of Dorothea Lang and Margaret Bourke White and Walker
Evans of advertisements in the depths of the depression, this being
a very well known photojournalistic sub-genre. These
people working for the Farm Services Administration ventured forth,
took pictures of America, and it’s a surprising unanimity,
although they treated the subject differently, the all tended to
take these pictures of billboards that were ionized by the reality
around them. So you would have “Next time, take
the train! Relax!” And some good burger, a bourgeois burger,
not a hamburger, having a nice rest in his bed, clean sheets, Union
Pacific Railroad. And
then under the would be an encampment of Okies heading west, you
know, kids are all dirty and they’re exhausted. Many
pictures like this. And
very powerful pictures. It
was so widespread, it was so commonplace, that it became a kind of
cliché of leftist politics It
also ended up in some Hollywood movies, like Sullivan’s
Travels there’s a shot of Joe McCray who’s a film
director who’s decided to go on the bum to see what life is
like for the have-nots and he’s leaning against a big glamorous
billboard, so it became kind of a trite move, but at its best, very
suggestive. The most
amazing one of all is the picture, of the breadline. You’ve
all seen this one in front of the--“There’s no way like
the American way.” That’s
an amazing piece of work compositionally, politically.
What
makes this kind of picture really incredible is that it punctures
a certain media bubble with images of the contradictory reality. The
media, being basically run by propagandists, rather political or
commercial, seeks to insulate people. Propagandists,
like all rhetoricians, want to incase the audience in an impermeable
bubble where no contradictory evidence can enter in, so that all
you hear is the word of the propagandist. The
work of a subversive artist is often to break into that bubble. Say, “No. Look out here. Look at this,” so that all of the
terms that you’ve been accepting don’t really match reality. That’s what those pictures do. It’s
extremely difficult to imagine a picture doing that now because there
is a certain post-modern value to precisely that kind of co-existence. It’s kind of cool to have these things juxtaposed next
to each other, it’s a fashion statement. The contradiction is not going to cause a revolution, you
know, which is something people used to actually think. No, the contradiction is just kind of
cool. My favorite example
of this is the New York Times series of ads, “Expect the World,” where
you’ve got--well, the most appalling one as far as I’m
concerned is the one that has a pair of feet in ruined shoes, toes
poking through, rags tied around them on one side, and a pair of
feet in smart new ballet slippers on the other. Now,
sixty years ago this would have been a withering commentary on inequality. For the New York Times reader, sophisticated, etc., this is
just kind of a cool picture. Shows
you there’s all kinds of stuff in life and you can get it all
by reading the Times. You
won’t get hurt. You
certainly won’t have to go out and meet one of the people in
the lousy shoes. Basically what I’m saying is that
the subvisual character of images now has the effects of narcotics;
works like a narcotic. Its
purpose is to stimulate. Its
purpose is to grab you, to get your attention. It’s
to get you to sit on the edge of your chair, but not get out of the
chair. It’s often
very, very ugly, and as the audience becomes increasingly blasé,
the tactics used to get that audience attentive will be increasingly
ugly, but however ugly the tactics, the underlying assurance is always
very, very powerful, so that the images tend to be simultaneously
titillating and deeply consoling. So there’s no sense in which the
mere grossness or grotesque degree of the image is supposed to shock
you into a new awareness of life or reality. Rather,
they work as a further means of hypnosis.
Younger: We’re
kind of getting close to time. Does anyone have a question that they’re burning to
ask? Okay, then let’s
take a break.
(Applause)
Crispin
Miller Analysis
by
Sheila Pree
Freedom
of the press is defined as the right to publish newspapers, magazines,
and other printed matter without governmental restriction and subject
only to the laws of libel, obscenity, and sedition.
Mark
Miller, a professor of media ecology at New York University, is not
an advocate of mainstream media in the United States. Miller suggests
that new media culture is at risk due to print industries like news,
cinema, music and the Internet. He
also believes that these mediums are brought about by large corporations
that influence the great media cartel and which now includes the
nation’s mainstream news organizations. Parent companies of these organizations
are cutting costs and budgets in foreign bureaus, which give us 24-hour
cable news. As a result there are fewer staff journalists in the
field researching stories. Visual
images in the news end up having shock value rather than a “news
feel”.
Miller
also describes processing information rather than gathering information
synergy, which causes the attention of the viewer to be taken away
by merging companies and allowing their dependence on large advertisers
as well as an inordinate closeness in the White House, to continue.
This allows corporations to work consistently against their most
committed journalists and therefore against public interest.
Miller’s
perception of the current media culture is informative and suggestive
of society as a playground for corporations and the government to
disillusion the masses by controlling their thoughts and perception
through pop culture. He explains that it’s critical
that we observe the mainstream media with awareness and recognizing
that for years they have manipulated, lied, and deceived the American
people. “We cannot have a true democracy, we cannot make informed
choices, we cannot live authentic lives when so much crucial information
is kept from us just because the bottom line with media culture is
economic--it’s all about the dollar,” Miller said. Sept.
11 was a wake up call for the masses to realize the importance of
alternative news outlets, instead of traditional media like The New
York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Enquirer and channels
such as, ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN. In order to make a change in the mainstream
media, it must-- as it always has--start at the grass roots level.
Miller’s
lecture raises some interesting questions including, what is the
solution to synergy? What political movement will change the new
concept of media culture and is it true that the media only gives
the people what they want to hear and see?