Get Me Rewrite!

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

This approach works best when the reporter is collecting evidence or anecdotes in support of a foregone conclusion. But when the reporter starts with a hypothesis, or even just a question, then there is always the danger that as the process of investigation goes on, it will lead to conclusions very different from those decided on at the maestro session. In fact, this is what is supposed to happen in journalism.

In theory, it is possible for the reporter to go back, after further investigation, and announce that her fearless quest for the truth has led to unexpected conclusions, and that the page design will have to be scrapped, the headline rewritten, the photographer sent out again. The maestro system creates subtle pressures on the journalist not to ask questions that may lead to inconvenient conclusions and a lot of extra work for busy colleagues.

Perhaps the most insidious and far-reaching result of the news business turning into an arm of global megacorporations, however, has to do with scale. As media extend their reach to embrace a larger and larger audience, the universe of stories with broad enough appeal gets smaller and smaller. It's no longer possible to cover every local school board or city council race when your broadcast or circulation area encompasses scores of municipalities, so you barely cover any of them. Better to run stories that everyone can relate to, like the Heaven's Gate mass suicide. Or stories about the imaginary world that the media themselves have created, of Seinfeld, Schwarzenegger, and megasports.

This is a specific case of a larger problem: the enormous strain that media giantism is putting on language itself. Language got its start in small face-to-face communities, where shared experience provided the context that provided meaning. Today, a constant flow of words floods the world, spilling over the boundaries of cultures, as the vast apparatus of persuasion, commercial and political, ceaselessly works at stretching the boundaries of meaning.

Language was never meant to carry this load. Just as the industrial production of cars, computers, and other goods threatens to overwhelm the carrying capacity of our soil, water and air, the industrialization of communications threatens to overwhelm the capacity of words to convey meaning. As more and more messages are put into circulation, language itself is devalued. The response of the culture to a media environment dominated by selling is a smirky irony, the David Letterman-style cynicism of people seemingly too cool (but really too overwhelmed) to believe in anything. 'Everybody lies,' says the motto at one veteran newspaper columnist's desk, 'but it doesn't matter, because nobody listens.'

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print