“Something stinks in Boston: Our noses work even as our eyes cannot see

“Something stinks in Boston,” I was told. That’s a really interesting statement, as it is sensual but avoids mention of what the eyes have seen.

Aside from the 1) incuriosity of journalists and 2) fear of marginalization of even curious citizens, the most distressing feature of American news reporting is the power of television. The medium owns the American mind. Dissemination of news on the Internet appears now to have the same hold, so that younger people not watching TV talking heads are demonstrating the same lack of guile in viewing the events of our times. TV news is not a description of events given to us for discussion and analysis. It is reality.

I went back to a Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (a critical edition edited by Terrence Gordon) the other morning to try to get better grasp of what is unfolding here before us. I realize that not too many readers are familiar with McLuhan (1911-1980), so just briefly, he was a darling of the intelligentsia in the 1960’s and 70’s*, but even beyond that was an insightful man whose contributions to understanding the interplay between media and consciousness were groundbreaking. His famous expression was that “the media is the message.” The same depiction of reality given to us in print, on radio, in animation, in a movie or on television each carry a different meaning. Movies, for instance, are a subtle and friendly medium requiring little investment by the viewer, as the pictures are clear and precise, wide and focused.** Television, during his time anyway, was two-dimensions and very fuzzy (even though we didn’t realize it) and required a huge investment by the viewer to participate.

Some media offered low information and required high participation by the viewer – speeches, cartoons, television, for instance. Others required low participation – radio and movies. Each media affected us in a different manner.

Examples:

• Radio: Each listener is in a personal dialogue with the radio voice, reacting, often viscerally, to the words. It’s an ideal medium for agitation propaganda, which is why the Reagan people immediately removed the Fairness Doctrine on taking office. They opened the door for Rush Limbaugh and all that followed. The angry right wing had its birth in that decision. It was not an accident. The power of radio was well understood even by the 1930’s.
• Cartoons: The characters in South Park are mere circles on paper, but each one has a distinct personality. The South Park viewer has to invest his own senses heavily in the show to produce this result. McLuhan called the cartoon personas “do-it-yourself” characters. When watching that show, reader, in some fashion you are viewing yourself. I hope you’re not Cartman.
• Print: The important transition was from images, such as a drawing, to use of meaningless symbols, as the letters in the word “tree,” to represent reality. It’s a startling step forward in human development, creating the ability to store and disseminate information in symbols. As with cartoons, ultimately the reader has to invest heavily in the images to understand the ideas in transmission. We who read like to consider ourselves literate, but we all read all the time. Subversive ideas can be smuggled in through books as easily as in movies, so that a series of novels by Tom Clancy is an ideal medium for achieving the same end as blunt propaganda contained in high school history books. Supposedly we are more critical as we read. But not really.

The medium is the message. Patriotic ideas spewed by a radio host enflame our emotions. The same message given to us by a dying solider on a movie screen, a heroic character in a Clancy book, or a dry rendition in a history text, all carry with them a different experience of the same event.

Which brings me to TV. It has been writ large before my eyes with the Boston spectacle that television is not a news medium. It is, for the viewer, reality. Viewing photographs and cut images from videos, I’ve easily discerned that the injuries and death in the Boston Marathon bombing were fake. This message, even among intelligent readers, produces ridicule. I am part of a “fringe.”

But what is it that makes me part of that “fringe”? It’s simple. I don’t watch television news, so I am not invested in that reality. A certain commenter who harangued below another post, and who obviously places high value on his ability to interpret sensory input, said the following:

“Everyone who denies your evidence is in mainstream media, self deluded denial.

His use of language is densely packed, so that it’s hard to draw out meaning, but here it is clear. “Evidence is in mainstream media.” Set everything else aside. He saw it on TV. It’s reality.

McLuhan (remember his era):

Perhaps it was the Kennedy funeral that most strongly impressed the audience with the power of TV to invest an occasion with the character of corporate participation. … It revealed the unrivaled power of TV to achieve involvement of the audience in a complex process. … By comparison, press, movie and even radio are mere packaging devices for consumers. [His emphasis]

The Kennedy assassination was not such, but his funeral was a natural event. The image of John-John saluting is with us to this day, even as most of us were not alive then.

During the 1950’s our opinion managers had already begun to understand the power of television, via the Kefauver Hearings on organized crime in 1951. Frank Costello agreed to appear but asked that his face not appear on TV to protect his identity. So the TV screen showed only his hands. But mere hands carried the message! The televised hearing as a propaganda device was born. Later, during the McCarthy hearings, the idea of cells and foreign agents in government was implanted in mass consciousness. Even as McCarthy was ridiculed, his message hit the mark. Anti-communism became our national cause.

Later we would be subjected to the long drawn out hearings about Watergate, incessant drum beating, so that Nixon’s resignation for no crime at all produced relief. Information that came out of those hearing had no meaning or importance. The real message was incessant drum beating. We were literally bludgeoned into a forced resignation of a man who had done nothing unusual while in office.

But TV as a propaganda tool had yet to reach its highest and best use.

The power of uncontrolled TV messages first became apparent in the coverage of the Vietnam War, as images of death and suffering came straight to us, words discarded. No matter that our talking heads like Walter Cronkite were deeply invested in the propaganda message, the images undid him and the message meant to be conveyed by a serious man in a suit. The war became unpopular, and even as protesters were sullied as long-haired, dirty and violent by the same medium, the near insurrection produced by TV images had to be contained.

After Vietnam, by necessity, wars went underground. Reaganites fought two that we hardly remember – Central America and Afghanistan. There were few images. The matter was under study, and the inability to openly attack other countries was constrained by the “Vietnam Syndrome,” or the shock that that accompanied real images of war.

By the time of the 1991 Iraq attack, war had been repackaged as a television show with strict controls on what we saw. All images were sanitized, and the now-common video game aspect came into use with the pilot’s voice, the bomb, and “boom!” on the ground. There was, however, no bloodshed or suffering. We were merely destroying buildings. Word of massive casualties eventually got through via other media, but never registered in the mainstream.

The second attack on Iraq produced the “embedded” reporter, allowing the re-introduction of the illusion of journalism to accompany the usual images. War was now a TV show, complete with a script and actors.
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It should come as no surprise then that they have taken the next logical step – not to just contain the power of TV news, but to get proactive about it, actually creating the events. We are spectators, but also heavily invested in TV images. They are reality. So with 9/11, the medium under control of government, we were given manufactured images of a jet aircraft doing something impossible – flying into a building and being totally absorbed without resistance.

That’s utterly impossible, but don’t dare suggest to anyone that it’s not real! It was on TV.

And don’t tell anyone that Boston was not real. It was on TV.

That’s all that’s going on here at the blog these days – I am arguing with reality. It’s painfully obvious that Boston was staged, but the power of TV is such that it has complete power over our minds. People now tell me “something stinks” about Boston. But that’s the far edge of skepticism in our society – a reference to smell.

Images, after all, do not lie.
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*McLuhan was featured in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie, Annie Hall. Allen’s character is in line at a movie as a blowhard in front of him wildly misinterprets McLuhan, who then steps out from behind a placard to set him straight.
**Does anyone share with me a sense of fatigue after sitting through a 3D movie? Too much of reality is presented, there’s too much to take in visually, so that I am not allowed to passively view.