American Media, 2007

This post at the FDL blog digs into the issue ...

Neutrality, Gaslight, and the Truth: The State of American Media

Remember the first time you read Joseph Conrad? Remember that amazing sensation of seeing all sorts of comforting veils ripped from your mind, the strange sort of harsh three-o'clock-in-the-morning floodlit-crime-scene-video clarity that makes your inner eyes squint from the unaccustomed harshness?

That's what Terry Eagleton was like for me. I didn't agree with everything he said, but that didn't matter — he got me and everyone else in that classroom to think, seriously think, about the underlying assumptions of the cultural matrix in which we lived, had grown up and were nurtured.

The first thing Eagleton did was to step right up and say that he was a Marxist, and an unabashed one — something that caused a frisson of tittering amongst the students, in this era when Marxism was a dirty word and liberalism would soon join it on the dirty-word heap.

The second thing he did was to say that there was no such thing as "neutrality" in the Northrop Frye (and Western journalistic) sense of the word. Everyone has a viewpoint and a bias, we cannot exist otherwise, and the honest thing to do is to state the biases clearly so people can use them to gauge what you say. In Eagleton's view, "neutrality" as stated by Frye and by the Western media establishment was a cop-out used to avoid confronting various uncomfortable truths about Western society.

Which brings us to American journalism, circa 2007.

Bonus quote: (btw, I am not saying that American media accepts what is stated below .. I just like what he has to say as an idea)

"Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman other or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader."

                    Terry Eagleton

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