Monday, September 12, 2005

Welcome to the Underbelly

The information superhighway is, as the saying goes, as straight as a country road. Information, like the cable attached to my headphones, just wants to wind itself into ever more complex tangles, and the Internet can only serve to facilitate this mysterious process.

Yet the myth persists that the medium is somehow geared to deliver an enhanced, more democratic, more truthful, more straight version of the traditional fourth estate. At the end of last week Spiked's Brendan O'Neil was moaning again, this time about how bloggers covering Katrina have been "parasitical" on the traditional media amplifying hearsay, supposition, and sensation whilst obstructing the facts with a semi-fictional narrative appropriate to the horror genre.

This adjective parasitical suggests a uncreative one-dimensional relationship. The reality is surely knottier. Blogs are revealing to us just how much the clearcut hierarchical distinctions between us the readers and them the professional constructors of meaning have eroded. Hyper-subjective, rather than hyper-objective, they haul us into the hall of mirrors that our information culture has become.

That popular discourse has always had a creative way of assimilating events, insinuating a moral into every tale, has long been enshrined in the magical realist literature of Latin America. Weblogs not only speed-up this natural and necessary process, they render it more transparent and traceable, and in near real time.

We don't read the news exclusively in order to be factually informed, yet it takes a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, spinning faster than the speed of the modern media, to expose the cracks in the hacks' self-image.

"It is as if none of the news teams knows how to treat what is in essence a Third World disaster in a First World country" AA Gill observed yesterday. "Was it the disaster, or was it America having a disaster? Usually, the name of the country is just a tag, because natural bad stuff most often dumps on Third World people whose addresses are only really of importance to themselves. "

It seems that the non-independents have been really struggling to package this story using the standard templates: "It turned out that CNN was the most all at sea. It likes to think of itself as a stateless, pan-global news purveyor. It doesn’t have foreign correspondents, because nowhere’s foreign to it. But it utterly lost the plot, and any sense of dispassion or distance, over this story. The emotional range of the reporters grew operatic as they tried to outdo each other in mawkish empathy. I watched with surprised disgust as reporters repeatedly broke into manly tears. The low point was passed on to me by another viewer, who said she had seen CNN follow a woman who had been rescued but whose child had been washed away. They found the child and set up a classic Esther Rantzen-style “You thought he was dead, but in fact ...” sentiment sting. They waited a few hours so they could get the moment on camera. It was adding a little reality TV to reality. How many seconds of thinking your kid is dead do you reckon is worth a news award? It all got very Broadcast News. The tearful reporters, the set-up sympathy. It was a reminder, if we needed any more reminders, that there is no such thing as disinterested news, and that you must always question not just what’s in front of the camera, but who’s behind it."

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