This news out of the UK this week seems familiar for Canadian observers: “Labour could be ruined by proposed cap on political donations.” Limits on political party donations are being looked at in Britain at the moment and Labour would suffer the most if a cap were to be brought in to the system:

Labour could face financial ruin under plans being developed to cap the biggest donations to political parties, a Guardian analysis shows.

The independent standards watchdog is said to have agreed to recommend a new limit on donations, introducing an annual cap with figures ranging from £50,000 to £10,000 being considered. Such a move, in an attempt to clean up political funding, would end the six- and seven-figure donations to the Labour party from its union sponsors, as well as the Tories’ reliance on the richest city financiers.

An analysis of five and a half years’ worth of donations to the parties reveals the move would most dramatically affect Labour’s funding base. If the £50,000 limit had been in place over the period, Labour’s donations would have been reduced by 72%, the Conservatives’ by 37% and the Liberal Democrats’ by 25%.

A source close to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which has been reviewing the party funding system and is due to report in October, said it was trying to find a way to impose a cap without bankrupting any one party.

Now that’s good of them to try to avoid “bankrupting” any one party! The Brits are so civilized. No such considerations in play in Canada where our Conservatives have begun to dismantle our public subsidies of political parties and which could have grave financial consequences for the other parties.

There is a minority government situation in place in the UK though and the Lib Dems are saying no dice to such a change that would bring severe consequences for one party:

A Liberal Democrat spokesman insisted that the coalition would not impose a deal on the parties. “The history of party funding reform is littered with corpses. You have to do it in consultation with the other parties,” the spokesman said.

Yes, ideally. It detracts from the self-interested partisan taint of going it alone, particularly when certain parties’ interests are placed above others.

A publicly funded system is being considered as well although with Britain’s hyped up austerity mood, it’s not clear that a public system could be sold or that the Tories would want any part in selling it. The argument could well be made, however, that at such times it’s even more imperative to have a system free from moneyed influences.

Something to watch, to see what they come up with for comparison’s sake and for possible future reform in Canada in particular (the Harper Conservatives won’t be in government forever). Presumably it will not proceed with the result being forecast, with Labour taking the brunt of the reform’s fallout given the Lib Dem pledge. But we do know that irrespective of how integral many of us view viable political parties to our democratic health, that sentiment doesn’t necessarily prevail when matched up against partisan opportunism.

There was an op-ed in Canada’s Globe & Mail last week by Todd Hirsch, a Calgary-based senior economist at a financial firm out there: “Debt is the new carbon.” His premise was essentially as his title states, that climate change, despite a lack of action to date, will fall off governmental agendas to be replaced by a focus on debt reduction. Hmmm. Except he missed the point that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The New York Times editorialized recently about revenue sources that will indeed need to be confronted in what is likely to be a difficult political debate. A carbon tax is staring Americans in the face as an opportunity:

Congress should consider raising revenues in other ways, like a value-added tax, or carbon taxes. That way all of the needed revenue for deficit reduction, and for what government provides, does not need to be squeezed from the income tax. A value-added tax is conducive to saving, and a carbon tax helps protect the environment.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress also set out the case for a carbon tax’s possible introduction in the U.S. as part of a future debt ceiling deal after an Obama re-election (which he puts at 50-50). He cited this point from a Climate Wire piece in his blog item:

“A carbon tax could be an appealing alternative to even more ambitious cuts to entitlements and defense spending as well as a national value-added tax, repealing the home mortgage tax deduction, or higher income taxes,” [economist Joe] Aldy said in an email. “A well-designed carbon tax could raise some revenues to finance deficit reduction and enable a reduction in payroll tax rates, for example.”

In Canada, Professor Harrison of UBC recently made the argument as well:

…carbon taxes offer some near-term economic, and thus political, advantages that may have been underestimated.

In particular, carbon taxes bring in government revenues that can be deployed for various purposes: investing in clean-energy infrastructure and (politically popular) job creation; stimulating the economy by cutting other, less efficient, taxes; and reducing government deficits at a time when traditional revenue sources are not delivering. The last of these probably accounts for the “public benefit surcharges” on electricity that some two-dozen U.S. states have quietly adopted in recent years. It has arguably also contributed to the survival of the B.C. carbon tax (and several long-established European carbon taxes), the revenues from which are essential to avoiding increases in other taxes.

So, it doesn’t seem to be as simple as Hirsch made it out to be in his Globe op-ed where he concluded “Sorry, carbon, you’ve been replaced” as a focus of governments in favour of debt reduction. Carbon and debt reduction could go hand in hand.

There was a great read in the New York Times last Sunday on Barack Obama’s presidency given the debt ceiling events of the preceding week, “What Happened to Obama?” It was a piece by Drew Westen, professor and author of the acclaimed book “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.” The central point in the op-ed was the importance of storytelling in politics and how Obama, surprisingly, has failed in that regard.

When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.

In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes, was a story something like this:

“I know you’re scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn’t work out. And it didn’t work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can’t promise that we won’t make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again.” A story isn’t a policy. But that simple narrative — and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it — would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands. That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit — a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.

And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.

But there was no story — and there has been none since.

The main point was the pitfall of not having a narrative, raising doubts about what you stand for and leaving yourself exposed to others who do have a story to tell. Additionally, there was some highly critical analysis of Obama’s character and background that jumped out as well, suggesting that he is perhaps incapable of meeting the moment, of meeting the challenge of these Republicans who are seemingly incapable of compromise. It was a very critical column but also one that really offered a rude awakening/opportunity to the White House.

As a Canadian political observer, I found the Westen piece interesting. On the liberal side of the political spectrum up north, we too could use some good storytelling and storytellers, for that matter, too. Let’s just say we’re in a bit of a deficit situation on that score at the moment and looking to dig our way out. In fact, three of the opposition parties are in interim leadership situations. Leaving our political narrative a little too tilted in a conservative direction at the moment and in need of a strong counter (our new Conservative majority government obtained just 39.62% of the vote in the May 2011 federal election yet still managed to obtain a majority of seats).

Not everyone agreed with Westen’s take on Obama’s failed narrative and the critique that it embodied. Speaking to the other side of the Obama coin was Andrew Sullivan who offered up one of his blog items “Who is Washington’s Most Effective Politician?” as a counter to Westen’s attention getting op-ed.

I think Obama is easily the winner and currently stupidly under-rated – and drowned out by all the noise in the conservative-media-industrial-complex.

Here are the political accomplishments: defeating the most heavily favored party machine in decades (the Clintons) while actually bringing his biggest rival into his cabinet, where she has performed extraordinarily well; helping to cement the GOP’s broad identity as extremists opposed to compromise; entrenching black and Hispanic loyalty to his party; retaining solid favorables and not-too-shabby approval ratings during the worst recession since the 1930s. 44 percent of the country still (rightly) blame Bush for this mess, only 15 percent blame Obama.

On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation.

Yes, there have been failures. The election of Scott Brown; the 2010 mid-terms; the surrender to Netanyahu and AIPAC; the botched and ill-conceived war in Libya; the failure to embrace Bowles Simpson up-front; the collapse of cap and trade (maybe not such a bad thing anyway). But notice what hasn’t happened. Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin? Where are his Katrinas and Monicas?

When I read commentaries expounding on the notion that this man is competely out of his depth, I just have to scratch my head. Given his inheritance, this has been the most substantive first term since Ronald Reagan’s. And given Obama’s long-game mentality, that is setting us up for a hell of a second one.

Now if only the guy can convince his nation that he is a winner…

Charles Arthur of the Guardian tried to get an exclusive from an Anonymous hacktivist, only to get ridiculed. While PCWorld pointed to AnonymouSabu and the Anonymous crowd being jerks, the article and the Arthur exchange show a culture clash—these journalists just don’t get it. Frankly, it’s embarrassing that anyone covering the tech beat have such a fundamental lack of knowledge of the Anonymous microculture.

In my opinion, Arthur expected his position in the institution of the media to grant him some status, by aligning interests. Unfortunately, his lack of knowledge and posturing only served to raise the ire of AnonymouSabu. This highlights the problem that much of today’s journalism is as deep as a birdbath and subject matter experts are giving way to generalists on a deadline.

This CollegeHumor parody eTrade ad has been making the rounds. In light of the recent stock market “correction”, what is underscored is there is a two-tiered market, as Jon Stewart claimed when he had Jim Cramer on The Daily Show in 2009—one for the powers that be and one for the rest of us. Economic sociology blasts apart the naïve assumption that markets have “atomized” agents guided by rational choice. There are embedded social networks and institutional factors that create information asymmetries, with the deck stacked in favour of those “in the know”. The individual investor and those relying on the market through defined contribution plans, IRAs, etc. for their retirements might relate to this parody ad far too well. Oh, how we should long for the days of the defined benefit pension.

As an aside, as one who has ditched the ivory tower for navigating the entrepreneurial waters, I can say one thing that I knew all along, but is abundantly clear in so many ways—the system is geared towards business and doors open that are closed to individuals, save for those with great means.

In light of the threat of the “r” word—recession, it’s easy to second-guess the “jobless recovery” and US economic policy aimed at bailouts {Obama style} and propping up the capital markets. While corporations are better off than they were three years ago, they have grown accustomed to sitting on cash and extracting more out of the labour force because it’s a buyers’ market. The unanimous consensus is that the economic indicators aren’t rosy and the prospects for US GDP growth are dim. The political focus on deficits is the last thing that the economy needed.

Was the stock market yet another bubble that’s about to burst? Canada’s housing bubble should cause worries, as well, as Canadian unemployment is still relatively high. Of course, Canada’s Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, refuses to acknowledge there’s a housing bubble, hoping the Canadian economy grows out of any and all predicaments, which is exactly what Obama, Geithner, et al were hoping from day one.

In the latest issue of Communication Currents, Kate Kenski makes an excellent argument for why so much emphasis upon the value of “transparency” can lead to incredibly cramped communicative spaces and political styles–whereby options remain unexplored and posturing takes the place of robust conversation:

“While transparency is considered an ideal when it comes to good governance, the deliberative process between political elites is affected by the lack of private space where options can be discussed without concerns about immediate public sanctions over ‘potential’ ideas, let alone actual voting records. With continuous surveillance over every word uttered, the options and tradeoffs that should be considered when faced with a potential crisis are constrained.

While C-SPAN has provided a window into the world of Congress, it has also altered how politicians talk to each other as this window provides a grandstanding opportunity that they did not have before. Members of Congress are frequently tempted to address the television audience and not one another. In life, people make mistakes and they often apologize for them. With cameras recording nearly every political interaction, mistakes are not easily forgotten, preventing politicians from moving forward. This constraint of transparency is magnified by the reality that congressional representatives often come from relatively non-competitive voting districts where they are beholden to perspectives from one side of the ideological spectrum, hampering their likelihood of considering options and compromising on their initial positions.

What this means for people hearing these highly charged political interactions is that politics does not appear to be a place of productive decision making. Elite discourse does not mirror the types of conversation that everyday citizens often have to get through their daily lives, where compromise is key in the work place and in the family. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that citizens who pay attention to the political process often feel like mere spectators rather than actors and many citizens simply tune out altogether.”

This NYTimes article brings up some interesting questions about hacktivism and whether or not it’s a form of protest. I think for many, it’s hard to be sympathetic to the LulzSec/Anonymous crowd with their taunts and adolescent antics, but the idea that many of these young people echo protesters of the 60s who may have been naïve in their understanding of the gravitas of their actions. More interesting to me is how LulzSec and hacktivism can develop into a social movement, tapping into youthful angst in the current zeitgeist in this era of diminished expectations in the West.

I’ve been thinking about LulzSec as a social movement that uses social media to tell the tale of their exploits and get the word out. Last year, Malcom Gladwell asserted that social media takes away from real social change, fostering a lazy form of “one click” activism::

“The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.”

Gladwell was unmoved by the events of the Arab spring, remaining skeptical of social media’s impact. I think what’s missing isn’t just the content of the communication, but the meaning of it and what it does to people psychologically. Social media can be empowering, creating {dare I say} tipping points from social contagion. In other words, people seeing large numbers supporting a cause acting as a motivator that goes beyond low commitment acts.

Hacktivism has a draw as a counterculture, given it’s a movement {evident in social media} and has the objective of pushing back on the power structures—often with adolescent churlishness. Perhaps the computer makes the seduction easier, since one doesn’t have to go outside and don a balaclava. Consequences seem remote, akin to the pirating of IP. In the Times article, Professor Spafford of Purdue was skeptical that the arrests last weeks will make a difference::

“A whole bunch of people were angry, they didn’t really think about whether it was legal or not. It never entered their minds. This was kind of the equivalent of a spontaneous street protest, where they may have been throwing rocks through windows but never thought that was against the law or hurting anybody.”

The allure is empowerment through destruction for a cause. It isn’t all destruction, though. The legal targeting of PayPal in a boycott, due to not allowing Wikileaks to collect donations, will be interesting to watch. While it may not result in any real change, it may be part of a meaning system that attracts more followers and emboldens them, perhaps in the spirit of a Palahniukian Fight Club.

While the Toronto G20 protests serve to remind us that even lawful assembly can get you locked up, I wonder if in the wake of that, counterculture activists are rethinking their strategies. Will there be an allure of civil disobedience behind a proxy IP? Disrupting the communication technologies we’ve all grown reliant on, in order to bring attention to their cause or block the powerful’s media access through denial of service attacks.

I think it’s early days to make any statements about whether or not social media is a bust when it comes to social movements. I don’t think there is a restriction on what types of activities can be fostered with social media, so the beliefs that it cannot spawn anything requiring commitment and that it takes away from “real” social movements seems premature. While hacktivism may seem distasteful, I feel it can develop into a decentralized counter culture movement that delights in destroying the house of cards of data we’re all dependent upon.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts. It will be hard for governments to control the activities of people, particularly as computer security knowledge diffuses and when there are sufficiently large numbers of people acting together simultaneously or relentlessly. The former narrows the information asymmetry between user and law enforcement and the latter is contagion overwhelming the order. We live in interesting times.

This is the second instalment of a three-part series of posts on the media:

1. Media & the Selective Outrage Machine
2. The Culture War Is Not Really Taking Place
3. The Big Hit:: CBC v. The Canadian Cancer Society

My last post was the media’s role in creating a dramaturgical stage of manufactured outrage that’s affecting how people behave within institutional contexts. This post is about media manufacturing a reality by presenting stylized facts and selectively using the “culture war” to do it. While partisan punditry becomes increasingly popular, I would argue that what’s bound to evolve is a news positioning that’s market-driven in more ways than one. The free market is reified and deified, but in a way that’s meant to appeal to advertisers {subscribers and pageviews} and consumers {an economic orthodoxy based on neoliberal views or views positioned as such}. The market is both subject and object. A media culture war has already emerged along specific faultlines, with “code” used by the combatants to frame the rhetoric on both sides. And, it is a war. There’s no room for civil discourse on the battlefield, but perhaps more aptly, there’s no patience for it.

Given the recent News of the World scandal, journalists are getting scrutinized for their ethics, but aren’t the nefarious and illegal tactics allegedly used by NoW the logical progression in an era of extreme coverage that’s meant to evoke visceral reactions and tap into raw emotions? I would argue, in the vein of Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, that the institution of journalism helps to construct a configuration of society, often based upon, for example, lurid details, scandal, fail, and the polarities of the culture war. Currently, the drawn battle lines tend to cleave along political party affiliations::

• rural regions/suburbs v. cities
• social & cultural programmes v. market fundamentalism
• traditionalism v. progressivism
• fiscal conservatism v. “tax and spend”
• multiculturalism v. “anti-political correctness”
• Pro-immigration v. xenophobia
• Pro choice v. pro life
• Marriage is between “Adam & Eve” v. “Adam & Steve”
• Unions v. management

Canadians will be subject to another divide::

• Québec v. ROC (rest of Canada)

You get the picture. The idea is to exploit wedge issues by fostering controversy. But, the culture war isn’t really taking place—we seeing is a media manufactured manifestation of it and what we know about the opposing position is a fiction created by media rhetoric that places the values of those who don’t share our views as on a different planet. A few select juicy quotes here or a controversial soundbite there serve as empirical truth of what’s going on. After all, how many people know that the post-Katrina violence in the Superdome & Convention Center were vastly overstated? I would hazard to guess that many who heard the initial stories of anarchy in the Big Easy in the wake of the storm still have the perception that the city decended into a Hobbesean state akin to the Lord of the Flies. Of course, how this is framed means that cultural logics can be cued without saying anything outright, which is part of the theatrics.

I would argue that this use of the culture war will evolve into a more complex mapping that transcends traditional party lines, in both the US and Canada. In this current era, journalism isn’t rewarded for reporting on the issues, but for shaping and manufacturing them in an often desperate attempt to garner subscriptions and pageviews. Something may start as “grassroots” or may “go viral”, but as soon as the media gets a hold of it, it morphs into a piece of an agenda. You can blame it on the 24/7 news cycle and the rise of infotainment that successfully monetized the “news”, but it doesn’t matter; the genie is out of the bottle. The culture war is perfect fodder to whip readers into a frenzy by presenting the extremes and those across the divide as a polar opposite, while constructing a reality that may not even exist. This works by tapping into our values and attitudes and framing stories to get maximum polarity. It’s an economic imperative for the business model.

The above list of culture war wedge issues isn’t a continuum in practice; it’s binary. The opposing view is characterized as a polar opposite, often with inflammatory rhetoric. This is exacerbated by the fact that the public is less interested in news on a purely factual basis, particularly in the realm of politics and the economics, given the attention economy {the scarce commodity is our time}. We often seek information that’s been pre-digested in a manner most palatable to us. The function of news media now is to present the extraordinary with an emphasis on the sensational. The “cultural products” of the news media are soundbites and sexy attention grabbing headlines, increasingly important as Internet headlines can persuade and “inform” without even being clicked on.

Up in Canada, while many media outlets will stoke the fires of the culture wars, merely invoking the term invites criticism. When pollster Frank Graves of EKOS used it last year to identify a strategy for the Liberals, all hell broke loose. After all, why would anyone want to bring the ugliness of US-style politics to Canada? Well, the truth of the matter is that the news media has much to gain from the culture war and the class war that’s nested within it, but don’t want to ever get caught promoting it. Graves’ great crime was putting a possible strategy out there that could  be used against the Conservatives that some construed as distasteful::

“I told them that they should invoke a culture war. Cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, secularism versus moralism, Obama versus Palin, tolerance versus racism and homophobia, democracy versus autocracy. If the cranky old men in Alberta don’t like it, too bad. Go south and vote for Palin.”

The “controversy” of Graves’ statement was manufactured and used as evidence of his partisanship, but it’s hardly shocking. Graves wasn’t talking about anything new in terms of Canadian political marketing, he just dared to put it out there in such stark terms. He unmasked the great Oz and violated the social compact by showing how the persuasion sausage is made.

The US is more accustomed to journalists, pundits, and politicians invoking the culture war and I would argue that the heated rhetoric dividing the left and the right is a product of the media manufacturing realities so that groups become extreme caricatures. Underlying all of this right now is a general uneasiness of the future of the middle class and partisan rhetoric is shaping a class war by using the culture war.

Canada has a few journalists who are exemplars of what I see as the future of this trajectory. What might this future be? Look to journalistic statements in magazines like Maclean’s magazine {a Canadian weekly} and by journalists like its national editor, Andrew Coyne and his ilk, e.g., Margaret Wente, are couched in false dichotomies with the volume turned to 11. The emphasis is on commentary, as opposed to hard news, but there’s a sly twist. Journalists like Coyne and Wente position themselves as iconoclasts that defy partisan lines, but know how to sniff out controversy and milk it for all it’s worth. They would scoff at this idea they’re exploiting the culture war, which is also part of the shtick. In this era of social media and conversations, Coyne prefers to use all media at his disposal {Maclean’s, Twitter, CBC-‘At Issue’ panelist on The National} like a megaphone aimed at the masses and that’s too bad. What’s lost is nuance and real dialogue. What this brand of journalism does is foster people shouting at each other, because, after all in a Charlie Sheen world, it’s about the winning—and the drama. The name of the game is staying relevant and Coyne and Wente are making a play with their centrist, iconoclastic approach. It would be brilliant if it weren’t so utterly sloppy in its execution, but I’ll be blogging more about this in a future entry. The result is that it’s hard to take either Coyne or Wente seriously.

My lament for what’s lost with this journalistic divisive theatre is somewhat half-hearted because what else should we expect when the fourth estate is tied to business models and financial imperatives? George Monbiot, in his “A Hippocratic Oath for Journalists”, makes some interesting observations in the wake of the NoW scandal::

“Journalism’s primary purpose is to hold power to account. This purpose has been perfectly inverted. Columnists and bloggers are employed as the enforcers of corporate power, denouncing people who criticise its interests, bullying the powerless. The press barons allowed governments occasionally to promote the interests of the poor, but never to hamper the interests of the rich.”

Monbiot’s words may sound a bit strong, but given that journalism is a business trying to keep its head above water these days, it makes perfect sense that the institution will use whatever means to ensure its own survival. I agree that journalism’s function these days is anything but holding power to account and would argue that most of the time it has functioned as chief architect in the fabrication of an elaborate cultural reality—a simulacrum embedded within media economics.

There is room for pushback. Big media are subject to the constraints of mass markets and by ultimately who pays the bills, i.e., the consumer and advertisers. Technology can enable a cost-effective end-run around the prefab strategies and canned approaches that are more about marketing than news. The target market being people wanting in-depth analysis, as opposed to dramaturgical showmanship. In essence, the long-tail of news. The Economist noted back in 2006 that hard-hitting journalism won’t die and there will be a market for it, but I would argue that in order to serve the journalistic function of holding power to account, alternative models will need to offer substance over infotainment. Ironically, it may well be the mainstream media and its reality distortion machine to produce the future that serves to create a consciousness that rejects it. What could possibly break the bonds of the news-consumption cycle? Prolonged economic doldrums that sow the seeds for a bona-fide class war, not an imagined one.

Twitterversion:: [blog] How the culture war “isn’t” really taking place & how angry “iconoclastic centrism” is journalism’s next big thing @Prof_K @ThickCulture

Recently covered in The Guardian, this visualization by David McCandless (author of “Information is Beautiful”) quickly highlights the metaphoric and ideological networks of association between the left and the right. What strikes me the most is how it could be used as a criterion to get beyond “single-issue” political conversations with others. If an issue like “gun-control” or “the environment” were being raised, it could quickly segue the discussion into the metaethical (and narrative) commitments that underlie policy positions–and perhaps the fissures in one’s own views that don’t fit the map at all. McCandless’s chart provides a great example of the possibilities for visual rhetoric in our age.

This is the first of a three-part series of posts on the media:

1. Media & the Selective Outrage Machine
2. The Culture War Is Not Really Taking Place
3. The Big Hit:: CBC v. The Canadian Cancer Society

While it’s not new that news journalism is a business in financial dire straits and the newspaper already has its death date set in 2043, the pressure to remain relevant has pushed it from infotainment into a neo-Hearstean monster. While William Randolph Hearst would engage in fabrication, known for his quote, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”, news these days is about dramaturgy in the narrative in a cynical grab for viewers, subscribers, and pageviews.

Jon Stewart coined the term “selective outrage machine” to characterize Fox’s outrage at the Common-White House controversy. In order to be fair, the same tactics can be seen on MSNBC, as well as on the far right and left of the political spectrum. It’s how the game is played in the attention economy.

I think in our current culture of optics, the other side of the “fail” coin is the blatant attempt to manipulate the news media’s thirst for the dramatic. It’s a Goffman world, ruled by the tenets of The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life.

DSK & Roman Polanski

Watching the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape allegation was particularly cringeworthy. I thought Cyrus Vance’s {Manhattan District Attorney} mouthing off to the press was setting the stage for disaster. While some were playing the angle, I was thinking of the Duke lacrosse players. Let’s face it, the story as it unfolded was red hot. A rich, powerful champagne socialist with a history of womanizing rapes an asylum-seeking Islamic immigrant  housekeeper at in his pricey suite at the Sofitel. It was one of those divisive stories where even being neutral was deemed as tacit complicity in violence against women. The media frenzy created an indefensible whipping boy in DSK, which, to me, seemed premature given that the facts surrounding the case left some ambiguity with respect to its supposed airtight nature. The case started to unravel, with allegations that the accuser lied and had inconsistent stories, along with supposed assertions by the NY Post that the victim was part of a prostitution ring.

Salon.com has annoyed me over the years by actively creating an adversarial mosh pit, where feminism is positioned in ways to extract maximum ire. I would argue that Kate Harding’s 2009 piece on Roman Polanski, reminding readers that the self-exiled director raped a child, served the single purpose of invoking the outrage machine against someone Harding deems as indefensible. Rather than explore the nuances of the case and the strange prosecutorial and judicial circumstances of 1977 that was the crux of the matter in 2009, readers were reminded what a monster Polanski is and implying that due process be damned. My post on Roman Polanski was a reaction to Harding’s piece, which I felt was troubling to say the least, in its knee-jerk simplicity that plays to generating controversy. Then again, 722 comments and 236 Facebook likes probably added up to mission accomplished.

Fast forward to this month. Salon posts an OpenSalon blog entry by Heather Michon in the same vein as Harding’s as a Editor’s pick. The focus is on the discrediting of the accuser because of her past lies, some of which are more material to the case than others. Michon is concerned that there’s a gulf between what transpired and whether the government thinks it has a case to make a conviction. This supposed “disconnect” is due process. So, how does this all play out? Salon selectively ignores the accuser’s conflicting stories that can sink the case, while focusing on the scrutiny of the accuser’s past. Meanwhile, others in the media pat the system on the back for “working”, by eventually coming to some “truth”. The reality is that this is all pure theatre and a theatre that’s entering into the logical calculus of those within the institutions that should be above using the media to generate hype for publicity and political gain. This isn’t new, but the ubiquity of media is and this should concern us. The alignment of interests of the media and the state is the logical extension of infotainment presaged by Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and my sense is that the genie is out of the bottle with little that can be done to put it back.

Casey Anthony & Nancy Grace

The public outrage regarding the Casey Anthony acquittal was pretty predictable. The stage was set for this generation’s OJ trial, fuelled by another media frenzy. The most interesting article I read in the aftermath was Brian Dickerson’s column on how Anthony’s #1 detractor, Nancy Grace, made her acquittal possible.

Nancy Grace became part of a media hype machine, using her punditry soapbox to paint Casey Anthony as incarnate evil, complete with the derisive moniker, Tot Mom. Dickerson argues that the publicity given to Anthony vaulted her from indigent defendant obscurity to a criminal defence lawyer career maker. Grace used Anthony as a punching bag in her well-orchestrated drama of the indefensible defendant. Polanski raped a child and Anthony killed hers. Manufacturing the outrage provides for a clear and easy target to direct the hate in the name of justice. Through the outrage, everyone can participate in meting out justice for the victim, Caylee Anthony.

The problem again is that due process takes a back seat to the hype. Let’s face it, due process isn’t sexy. Particularly when it evokes examples of “technicalities”, allowing the “guilty” to go free.

In another media twist, the defense team used social media to fine tune their approach by analyzing public sentiments. While the efficacy of such maneuvering is still up in the air, crowdsourcing opinions of testimony in high profile cases is likely to be de rigueur.

The selective outrage machine has the potential to morph how we the public form opinions. Appealing to a sense of justice in a juicy narrative is where the media is at, while social media digests it and puts it back out there. This further influences others and serves as a feedback loop into social institutions, such as the courts. I don’t see news as getting better or journalists becoming more ethical about their craft because, frankly, the market could care less and I don’t see any way of legislating style or professionalism, in light of free speech.