Pump Up The Volume2010-09-20

 Be honest. When was the last time you read, watched or listened to something you knew in advance would be in diametric opposition to your beliefs? 

 

In an era of shrinking media profits, there is no more sole newspaper of record in the United States and the term “cocooning” has become an accepted fact of the media landscape. Want “fair and balanced” from the right? Watch Fox. Want health care stories and prescription drug commercials? Watch the CBS Evening News. Just aggregated headlines with links? Twitter’s got what you need.

 

The Pew Research Center recently completed another study of American news consumption showing that with more ways than ever to get news, Americans are spending more time monitoring it. The results also show another seemingly unique American trend: mistaking quantity for quality.

 

Clearly, we are utilizing all the tools at our disposal. Fully 44 percent of Americans said they got news through either the Internet or a mobile digital source yesterday, double what it was near the beginning of the decade. 

 

More compelling, however, were the statistics on how ideology is shaping our news. Eight-in-ten Americans who listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Sean Hannity describe themselves as conservatives, while the New York Times and MSNBC have twice the proportion of self-described liberals than in the public at large.

 

These statistics are hardly earth shattering and have been well documented (although not as conclusively as the Pew Study), but they are worth discussing because of how these calcified opinions are affecting our nation’s discourse in an almost Orwellian way.

 

It has become de rigeur to talk about bypassing the media to get your message out--and it’s never been easier to do it thanks to the proliferation of niche and social media--but at what cost?

 

In the nearly quarter of a century I’ve been part of political campaigns, 2010 has been a low-water mark in the number of candidates brazenly refusing to be held accountable to voters or the media in their role as watchdog. Debate challenges from candidates of both parties go unanswered or brushed off with the flimsiest of excuses (read: the dog at my homework), while other candidates and incumbents have refused to share their so-called public appearances with the public, opting instead for staged events with supporters. 

 

Counterintuitively, even with voters’ anxiety levels off the charts, polling indicates they aren’t punishing those who are ignoring them.

 

The public has seemingly accepted the concept of two opposing monologues that never meet. Want proof? Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer wins the Worst Debate Performance of 2010 hands down with a gap of silence in her opening statement so cringeworthy that rumor had it Dan Quayle was her debate coach. Yet after her disastrous performance and subsequent announcement that she wouldn’t be availing herself of any more debate opportunities, her lead in the polls actually grew.

 

Likewise, BP is leading the corporate world in mirroring this trend. Having decided they weren’t going to get a fair hearing,  Tony Hayward’s company spent a record $400 million this summer alone carpet bombing the public with full page newspaper ads, TV spots and trending Twitter feeds extolling their work cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, BP’s “competence” numbers on the cleanup have improved from six to 33 percent--not enough to win an election, but good enough for PT Barnum to be smiling in his grave.

 

Netizens tout the web as the cure all to the poisonous ascendency of competing shock and awe campaigns, claiming that search engines have democratized the landscape. To some extent they are right; the Internet can be part of the solution, but too often this version of democracy looks suspiciously like a low rent off-Broadway production of the real thing as like-minded surfers go to their ideologically compatible sites to watch bloggers hurl invective at their enemies while trolls spew their unedited replies. 

 

Social media can also be a force to help open up an exchange of ideas, but many of those who have rushed in to take advantage of this trend--candidates, corporations and non-profit groups--have tried to apply the same carpet bombing ethos to today’s tools. Here’s a tip: if your name isn’t CNN, President Obama or Kim Kardashian, and you have a Twitter follower to following ratio of more than 1,000 to 1, you’ve missed the entire point of the medium.  

 

Communication implies a two-way street--foibles and all--just like basic human interactions. Pumping out endless pronouncements proclaiming your innate goodness or vilifying others without being forced to justify your point of view may build numbers, but it doesn’t build the ultimate ROI--trust.

 

When Pepsi swore off Super Bowl ads earlier this year and instead used the money to underwrite a campaign allowing their customers to crowd source by submitting online ideas and voting for worthy projects eligible for grant money, they showed how a dialogue can not only increase market share, but make consumers feel good about their choice.

 

For the same reason, I’ve come to embrace Facebook as a trust tool because it allows people to easily foster a sense of community among friends, family, coworkers and clients. Mind you, Facebook gets abused too by those stuck in the missile launch mode, but the format makes it much easier for them to be called to account for their words and deeds.

 

The Gulf oil spill will undoubtedly be voted the Top News Story of 2010 (with the economy and the emergence of the Tea Party rounding out the top three), but I’ll be more curious to see the tableau upon which it’s written. 

 

What frightened us In Orwell’s “1984” was the power to rewrite history to fit the propaganda of the moment. Eerily, the one news agency that’s defying today’s financial meltdown in the media is China’s state owned Xinhua, precisely because they’ve learned the propaganda game is no longer about suppressing the news, but rather about overwhelming it as they’ve opened up outlets on every continent. This leaves us with a basic choice: do we choose to exercise our 1st Amendment responsibilities to hold those in power to a higher standard of give and take, or will Xinhua become the lowest cost chronicler of the next generation under the banner “All The News We Choose To Print?”

 

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