Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture

by James Bowman

Book Overview

James Bowman provides a scintillating and fast-paced anatomy of the mainstream media self-generated demise. The Mind of the Media looks behind the headlines to examine mainstream media's governing myths. Writing with acerbic wit, Bowman shows how the mainstream media's embrace of a spurious notion of objectivity, combined with its addiction to scandal, and an unshakable conviction of its own moral superiority have done irreparable damage to the media's...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594032122
• ISBN13: 9781594032127
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Length: 130 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

The myth of objectivity

With skill and wit, Bowman identifies the malady afflicting the US mass media. It's not the bias but the pretense to objectivity that is sinking these purveyors of groupthink. He points out symptoms like hypocrisy, moral posturing, sneering condescension and dogmatic relativism that permeate their message. Intelligence has become the highest virtue at the expense of character, integrity, courage and common sense. The most complicated issues are reduced to a simple good-evil dichotomy in order to remove them from scrutiny and debate. Context has disappeared from the vocabulary, hyperbole has become the norm and victims are cynically used for maximum emotional effect. News and opinion are becoming indistinguishable as the media promote their ideological agenda. Those who disagree with the narrative du jour are demonized, belittled or ignored. In a parasitical symbiosis, the fatuous opinions of celebrities - most of whom are ignorant & uninformed - are served to the public to reinforce the bias. The situation of the print media - not the BBC - is different in the UK where newspapers openly proclaim their political allegiances. Bowman observes that the narrative of the mainstream media in the USA is a form of utopianism. The morality is sentimental, arbitrary and intolerant despite claims to the contrary. Emotion has become more important than truth. Artists and intellectuals frequently express their "piety" in hysterical fits of morality. The relativism, rage and selectivity betray it as mere posturing; it is moreover demonstrably contradictory in the way it clings to moral absolutes whilst insisting that none exist. Declining circulations and revenue have made no difference, demonstrating how entrenched and pervasive the hubris is. Consumers of opinion and infotainment are migrating to the Internet where a greater variety of voices can be found and where allegiance is frankly stated. Moreover, the Blogosphere has been highly successful as a watchdog of the dinosaur media, for example in the cases of Dan Rather/CBS and the photoshopped pictures of the 2006 Lebanon War. There are blogs dedicated to specific newspapers & news services with an impressive track record of exposing errors and spin. Other valuable books on media bias include Spin Sisters by Myrna Blyth, Give Me a Break by John Stossel, Weapons of Mass Distortion by Brent Bozell and The Other War by Stephanie Gutmann.

The only book to read before that chic Upper Westside dinner party

In this scathing, intelligent exploration of media bias, James Bowman's cool plays well to Bernard Goldberg's hot denunciations. Bowman, the media columnist for the New Criterion, moves well beyond the media's tired refrain to present day criticism of "objective reporting" by carefully and logically dissecting the elitist, scandal driven, celebrity based emotionalism of the news business. Often writing in long weighty sentences, some in need of parsing, Bowman, in a book less than 120 pages, strives for accuracy and analysis over catching name-calling and bloviation. Identifying newspapers, reporters and columnists, his argument is not a defense of George W. Bush or an attack on the liberal media's screed his administration endured for the last five years as it is a contemplative exploration of the corruption of the body politic, the debasement of the market place of political discourse and the American culture by our media.

Through The Journalist's Peephole

Henry James spoke years ago of the "house of fiction" through whose windows writers must necessarily peer out at the visible world. James added that while these windows were of varying size and breadth, it was the duty of any conscientious writer to attempt to be "one on whom nothing is lost." In other words, if a God-like "objectivity" is not fully granted to any writer, he is still obliged, after recognizing his angle of vision, to search out truth and be as fair to the realities he treats as possible. In attacking the oft-repeated claim by movers and shakers from our mass media to possess a complete and superhuman "objectivity", James Bowman argues most persuasively that journalists should recognize and admit they too look through vision-limiting windows at the events they report. His position here is similar to the noble one of Henry James. In acerbic, witty prose, Bowman shows in case after case that our self-described, "objective" journalists, in fact and unfortunately, look at life not even through a large living room window, but at best through a peephole. They are these days by and large ignorant of or deceptive about their own easily identifiable and widely shared biases. These include a devotion to multiculturalism, utopian fantasy, and moral equivalence, among others. Such biases are embraced with complete, uncritical dogmatism. People opposing the views of such journalists, consequently, can't be ill-informed or simply mistaken, but are deemed necessarily "wicked." Bowman's conclusion is that such practices have led to the corruption not only of the mass media and its reporters but of "our political culture" at large. Not all readers may share Bowman's out in the open, on-the-table political views, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to assessing the value of his book. As a well-documented analysis of current "media madness," it is indispensable. In my view, it should become required reading in college composition and journalism classes.

A Wake-up Call for the Media and its Consumers

Looking at America's cultural and political elite, it sometimes appears that this country has the stupidest smart people in the world. This, however, is an illusion. It is simply a matter of how they get their information. The so-called "main stream media" has slipped its traces to reality and woe to the gullible consumer who believes what he's told. James Bowman calls this disconnect from reality "media madness" and, in this important work, dissects the nature, origins and future of this phenomenon. He begins by analyzing the nature of the media's claim to "objectivity." Thinkers at least as far back as Montaigne have expressed doubt about the ability to acheive objectivity, but the current cult of objectivity among journalists has morphed into something far worse. Mr. Bowman shows how what began as a search for the "truth" has developed into both an ego trip for reporters who claim a monopoly on what the truth is and a herd mentality among them, making them unwilling and unable to buck the party line, lest they find themselves separated from the media's own unreal vision of reality. In chapter after damning chapter, Mr. Bowman shows how the media has lost the ability to do what its consumers want it to do - report the news - and he shows why they lost that ability. He shows how the "cult of feelings" among journalists has made describing how people react to an event more important than reporting the event itself and he explains how sensationalism has rendered the media unable to determine the importance of events, by giving priority to the eye-catching over the significant. This has led to the media's valuation of intelligence over character and common sense, a therapeutic approach to analysis and the moralization of politics. Opposition to all of this has accelerated the rise of alternate media at the expense of the main stream media. The author is one of those rare commentators who is able to view the world through others' eyes and he understands, even as he is appalled by, the reasons why the media has taken the route it has. He writes with a wonderfully dry sense of humor, which leavens a serious topic. He also has a rare sense of intellectual responsibility. Although initially an opponent of the war in Iraq, now that the country is committed, he criticizes the outspoken opponents who have done so much to hamstring our efforts and embolden the insurgents. Although Mr. Bowman is a man of the Right - and like any clear thinking student of the media, notes the bias of the media toward the Democratic Party - he has not written a polemic. His observations have been endorsed by Thomas Edsall, a man of the Left, but one as clear thinking as Mr. Bowman is. And the Left should be even more concerned about the state of a media biased in their favor than the Right should be about the bias against them. Some academics have calculated that media bias costs Republicans about 5% of the votes in an election, but that is merely an incentive to campai

A Must Read: Our Lost Legacy

The scandal of our creeping propaganda that threatens the entire society is what the author focuses upon - that should be critical to anyone who wonders where our democracy went. Since the advent of JFK and the publicized debate, America has gone downhill, swept away in a mass of politically advantaged clips meant to obscure if not deceive its public on personality and character of the political performers, and every issue of importance known to mankind. A timely offering of no small measure since the airwaves and the newsprint is often owned by the same entity, and no news is not always good news. What he gets at is that if there were no corruption, America might not have any eruption at all; we could all live our small lives of peons that media is meant to and configured to ignore - as political process. And who would be the wiser? Or who would care? Our politicians could go on shawdowboxing forever on the pretense that they are the best leaders for the nation, and then do what they have done for 50 years, use the powers of office to enrich themselves and their friends, far and wide, at public expense. An enterprising look on how it happened, and continues to happen by an author with more than enough knowledge and experience in the industry of public communication to offer the precautions of "buyer beware," and why.