April Media Rant: My Favorite Media Criticism Books

The column below will appear in the April issue of The Scene. --TP

My Favorite Media Criticism Books

Media Rants

By Tony Palmeri

In celebration of the Second Annual Fox Cities Book Festival (April 14 – 19), I pay tribute to my five favorite media criticism books. My picks were all penned by middle-aged or older white guys, a fact that media critics of the Media Rants column might peg as Palmeri’s patriarchal tendencies. To such critics, I say that while I do find the work(s) of Barbara Ehrenreich, Naomi Klein, Adolph Reed, Jr., Amy Goodman, Cornel West, Kathleen Hall-Jamieson and many others insightful and thought provoking, I refer back to the five listed below so frequently that it’s only fair that they make the top 5.

In no particular order:

*Witness to a Century by George Seldes (1987). When Gorge Seldes passed away in 1995 at the age of 104, he left behind a rich legacy of work representing the ultimate role model of media criticism as an anti-fascist and pro small-d democracy activity. The Media Rants column owes more to Seldes than any other author. Seldes newsletter In Fact, reviled by the press chains, remains the prototype of that all too rare form of journalism dedicated to telling the truth, exposing lies, and calling out the mainstream press for its shameful capitulation to power. Seldes’ autobiography Witness to a Century is a gem for conscientious media critics looking for encouragement in what often feels like a lonely and thankless task of taking on the goliath that is the mainstream press.

*The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (1967). The late Dr. McLuhan gained notoriety in the 1960s as one of the first television-era public intellectuals. Whereas most television critics viewed the medium as a mere channel through which content travels, McLuhan introduced popular audiences to the provocative idea that media technology radically transform human modes of thinking and acting. To this day he is misquoted as saying “the medium is the message,” but he actually meant something much more powerful: “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments.” The Medium is the Massage, featuring brief bites of wisdom interspersed with photos and defying all linear rules of print literature presentation, was a kind of twittering blog decades before anyone knew anything about blogs or Twitter.

*Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (1985). In 1985, students of communication studies (me included) were mystified and even angry that President Reagan, who rarely displayed a firm grasp of his own administration’s policies, could somehow become known as the “Great Communicator.” Turns out that understanding Reagan required understanding television. Following in McLuhan’s footsteps, Postman argued that the technology of television had radically transformed our information universe: “Television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.” Reagan in his time was the most televisual president in history, on our screens daily, yet we paradoxically “knew” little about him other than that he made some people feel good about America. Perhaps the same is true for Obama. In 1985 it was easy to think that Postman may have exaggerated his case, but by the time of the early 1990s and the reduction of war to a video game (i.e. the First Iraq War), it became clear that he probably had not gone far enough.

*The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian (1983). I agree completely with The Nation’s Eric Alterman’s observation that “No book on the media has proved as influential to our understanding of the dangers of corporate consolidation to democracy and the marketplace of ideas as The Media Monopoly.” Like George Seldes, Bagdikian writes from the perspective of a working journalist fully aware of the difficulties of telling the truth in a media universe governed by the value of private profit. In a later edition of The Media Monopoly, Bagdikian wrote prophetically that, “As the world prepares to deal with the twenty-first century, United States society as a whole and the country's mass media find themselves in the same conflict-between what is good for business and what is good for the quality of life in society.”

*Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988). This book presents the most compelling analysis ever written of the social, political, and economic forces constraining corporate news media. The five-step “propaganda model” provides consumers of media with a rigorous tool for understanding how the news we receive is filtered through ownership values (i.e. profit motive), advertising pressures, reliance on establishment sources, the threat of “flak” against truth-telling agents in media, and a rigid anti-communist (or uncritically pro-market) ideology. A must read for media ranters everywhere.

See you at the book fair!