La Grève and the Media

We surveyed, in our press class, the media responses to the strike. France, like many European countries, has a partisan press: Le Figaro is right, L’Humanité is leftist, etc., etc. It’s an alternative model and one that is worth thinking about.

Take for instance the media articles written in the wake of the strike. The coverage of each paper aligned with their politics: L’Humanité declared the strike a “record success” both in terms of turnout and intensity; on the other hand, Le Figaro announced that the government had “divided the unions” by negotiating with the “powerful conductor’s union,” which, by cutting a separate deal, dealt a “betrayal” to its union brethren. These are two separate views of the world; practically the only thing agreed upon is that there was a strike and that the FGAAC, the conductor’s union, cut a deal separately with the government.

On the other hand, American news organizations, by ethics and law, are nonpartisan and “objective” in their news reporting.

The difference between American and European news system represents no less than a different philosophy of news. I don’t necessarily believe that the media is a representative of the populace, but its obsessions often correspond with the populace’s obsessions, so by looking at the media, we can often see the actual culture through that.

The American news system embraces positivism, more or less. Positivism is a ‘scientific’ view of the world; positivists in history or sociology would insist on scientific methods. The scientific method is the method of the disinterested observer. The American journalist tries to uphold that method: with balancing quotes, equal time and the like, the idea is to represent the world as it is. By logical extension, the creed holds that only in hearing diverse views can we get at the truth.

By contrast, the European ideological media is more of a postmodern perspective. There are no objective observers. We are all under thrall to our biases. We should therefore admit to them and interpret our news through that framework. The goal is not truth per se, but truth in the service of ideological.

Yuk. Typing that last sentence made me feel bad. But the European model is far more honest to ourselves (keeping in mind all my biases—god is the American media bad) than the American model is.

Here is the most charitable thought experiment I can think of: you have a perfectly objective observer, the perfect journalist, in other words. He will see the truth and report it perfectly. Similarly, his editor is perfectly objective. The question is, however, what do they report first? Simply in choosing an article, we must admit that some articles are more important than others and hence allow a slant in. Of course journalists and editors are not objective; they have pet projects, they are often in a pretty high tax bracket. Culturally most of them are professional’s children and have grown up in the urban upper middle class. They have their biases. To try to pretend otherwise is a sham.

One of the honored formulae of American journalism is the balancing quotation. So, if Republican Hack X says “Democrats enjoy choking young puppies to death and drinking blood,” Democratic Hack X gets to reply, “We’ve got a problem with George Bush lying about Iraq.” This example, of course, shows the problem: the debate is pretty ridiculous. Republican Hack X shouldn’t have had his quotation published; it’s pretty freaking dumb. This is stretching the issue but not by much. Consider any debate with global warming or some other politically charged scientific issue: usually there’s a reasonable sounding scientist who provides a scientific view, and some Christian “scientist” who lives off of the right-wing charity network who says, “Global warming is absolutely false and never existed.” And the media generally takes each side seriously at face. If you don’t believe me, reread the Intelligent Design articles from a few years ago. The whole debate existed solely because there was a “scientific” imprimatur behind the Creationist, er, Intelligent Design side. If we had a scientifically literate media, this controversy would have been nipped in the bud.

Typically at this point in the argument, or even before, someone will interrupt me and say, “But doesn’t this approach turn the writer into the arbiter of truth?” And I say, “Of course it does,” because that’s the point. The point of having a journalist is to figure out the truth as best he can for me, because I don’t have the capability to. Journalists already do this anyway. Ask yourself why it’s always a Republican/Democratic balancing quotation system; why is there no LaRouche voice? Isn’t the journalist deciding in that instance that the LaRouche voice is not valuable to the debate? Of course that journalist is, and for good reason, because Lyndon LaRouche is crazy. And that’s fine.

Now, what the European approach gets right is that it presents a view. Is it a skewed view? Certainly so. But it admits it; everyone knows which way it’s likely to be skewed, and can be appropriately skeptical. Whereas I have no idea what the individual biases of the average American writer are, so I have no idea what to be skeptical of. For some famous writer, I can know that Nedra Pickler focuses on the most trivial comments and can hence safely be ignored, that Judith Miller is too credulous of high governmental sources, that Seymour Hersh is too credulous of cynical middling governmental sources, and so on. (Incidentally, the last, while true, is nowhere near as egregious as the first two. That’s my American journalism standards creeping in—I must have balance! Truth is always at the middle of any debate, of course.) That’s great, for their articles, I’m better-informed. But what am I to make of the relatively anonymous newspaper writer? Nothing of his specific individual biases; merely that he is most likely a member of certain demographic groups and hence probably has these views…Whereas, with the European system, I can be much more certain about the views that I can ascribe to him, creating what I think to be a better system.

Now part of the problem with comparing the two nation’s news systems is the difference in the people. The French are, Cecilia Sarkozy notwithstanding, far more serious about their news and that’s reflected in the seriousness of their news reporting. Whereas I’m not sure that were the European system imported to America, we wouldn’t get a partisan trivialities flung at one another. Which would be an improvement—now we get partisan trivialities dressed up as “objective” reportage (Is Hillary Clinton’s Cleavage a Problem?), but well short of the standard that we should be holding ourselves to.

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Worst-dressed: This man wasn’t exactly poorly dressed, but it was an odd choice to wear a blazer, a sweater-vest with dress shirt and tie, and socks with cartoon cats. Because the socks were so at odds with the rest of the outfit, I wonder, was that some sort of concession? (“Honey, you always dress so conservatively. How about spicing it up a little?” “Sure, let me put on my cat socks.”)

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From the quotes coming back to haunt you file (this is somewhat paraphrased). Sarkozy, in his autobiography: “Cecilia and I have gone through some difficulties, but now I’m sure we’ll be together forever. I’m more sure of that than I’ve been of anything.”

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And, just because I didn’t have enough fun the first time, there’s another strike on November 20th.

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There’s a beggar who seems to have made the RER B his stomping ground. I’ve seen him the last three days in a row. He’s trying to sell guide books. I always say “pas de monnaie” (no change). I think he’s catching on to me; he asked today, “Avez-vous le monnaie aujourd’hui, n’est pas?” (You’ve got change today, right?) with the tone that there’s no way I’d unburdened myself of change three days in a row before I made it to his charming mug, right? Well I just said, “Non” (Nope), and he was quite frustrated.