On July 1, 2021 I turn sixty years young. Fun Fact: I was born the exact same date and year as the late Princess Diana. Unlike Diana I never became royalty, though at my best during these 60 years I have been a royal pain in the neck to established powers. In a small way, the Media Rants column serves as a vehicle for that kind of pain delivery.
To celebrate my 60th, I thought it might be a good idea to summarize what are--for me anyway--the most important media strides made during each decade of my life. The list is purely subjective, but anyone who bothers to look further into the strides mentioned will come to the conclusion that each has had a major impact on the way media is practiced and/or the way we think about media. Some of the strides have had transformative impacts on humanity (for better or worse).
For purposes of space, I will only list and describe four strides per decade. Also, I don't include anything from the 2020s because we are still too early in the decade. If you don't like my list, please come up with your own!
Here we go . . .
1960s: The Birth of "The Media"
To this very day, if you ask 20 people to define what is meant by "the media," you will get 20 different answers. Though media has been practiced and studied for many millennia, it was not until the 1960s that academic studies of the topic began to proliferate. At the same time, uses of the media--for better and worse--start to become more sophisticated in the 1960s. Against that backdrop, here are four 1960s media milestones:
*FCC Chair Newton Minow's May 9, 1961 speech on "Television and the Public Interest." Delivered before the National Association of Broadcasters just shy of two months before the birth of Baby Tony, the speech introduced the phrase "vast wasteland" as a description of the quality of commercial television. Though acting in the "public interest" had been a condition of earning and keeping a broadcast license since the 1930s, it really was not until Minow's speech that popular and academic discourse began to grapple with just how far from that standard the networks had strayed. Sixty years later the problem persists, making Minow's words as vital as ever:
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| In 1961 Newton Minow called TV a "vast wasteland." Today that phrase can be accurately applied to a range of media. |
When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.
*Richard Nixon's 1968 Campaign For President. The 1968 Nixon For President campaign broke new ground in how it managed to take a profoundly despicable and unpopular politician (i.e. Nixon) and--using techniques then considered cutting edge in the public relations industry--made him just likeable enough to win the race. Joe McGinniss' classic campaign memoir, The Selling of the President 1968, introduced the world to the young Roger Ailes. Ailes marketing savvy on behalf of Nixon was a precursor to the kind of divide and conquer approach to media he would late go on to pioneer for the Fox News Network. I consider Nixon's 1968 campaign a media milestone because it introduced and perfected methods of media manipulation that have been used not only in every succeeding presidential campaign, but most partisan campaigns at all levels of power.
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| Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968 was a classic narrative of how the public relations industry transformed a nasty, paranoid loser (Richard Nixon) into a winning candidate. |
*The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel Boorstin. Professor Boorstin taught history at the University of Chicago for 25 years and then served 12 years (1975-1987) as the Librarian of Congress. The Image, Boorstin's classic 1962 book, was one of the earliest attempts to document the extent to which politics and politicians had become equivalent to entertainment and entertainers. Though the book did not predict the emergence of a Trump White House, its argument that successful politicians now had to be "media stars" certainly suggested the Orange One.
*The Birth of Free Form FM Rock Radio. Contemporary commercial radio is so goddam awful that it's difficult to believe there was a time when it was vital. The late Tom Donahue, a radio giant who should be a household name, pioneered the "free form" FM radio format in the late 1960s at KMPX and KSAN in San Francisco. In 1967 a classic article by Donahue appeared in Rolling Stone called "AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves." His free form alternative made FM radio into a space for creative music, community activism, and youth culture.
KSAN Newscast*The Death of Free Form FM Rock Radio: By 1975, Tom Donahue's dream of the FM dial as home of the free form format was already on the way out, done in by the same surrender to commercial pressures that had made AM radio so horrific for so many decades. Maybe it was never realistic to think that the "underground" vibe of the 1967-1975 free form could last in a commercial environment. A good book on this topic is Richard Neer's FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio (Mr. Neer was a popular DJ on New York's WNEW-FM at the height of its free form days.). The death of free form FM radio had devastating consequences not just for rock music, but for youth culture in general. I think a good argument could be made that the emergence of the vapid, conformist, money obsessed "yuppies" (young urban professionals) of the 1980s had at least something to do with the dismantling of spaces--like free form FM radio--that encouraged creativity and nonconformity.
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| Richard Neer, a popular DJ for New York's legendary WNEW-FM during its high point of creativity and community engagement, wrote a great memoir about the rise and fall of rock radio. |
*Watergate and Scandal Coverage: Without question, Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's Watergate reporting for the Washington Post in 1973-1974 was a rare example of how bold journalism could topple a corrupt presidency. Unfortunately, in the media world Watergate became the template guiding all scandal coverage, some trivial.
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| Woodward and Bernstein established the template for covering political scandals. Unfortunately too many of the "gate" scandals have been trivial, badly sourced, or mere partisan propaganda (think "Russiagate," for example). |
*FCC v. Pacifica. This 1978 Supreme Court decision held that the Federal Communications Commission does have the power, in the name of "protecting children," to regulate "indecent" language on broadcast media. The case originated when a man traveling in his car with his 15-year-old son did not appreciate hearing George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" on the air. The Court had the opportunity to say, in legalese of course, that the man could just "change the station or turn the fucking radio off." Instead, the Court made the FCC into our National Nanny, which has ended up stifling legitimate free speech and provoking ridiculous attempts to get by the FCC censor (such as replacing "Fuck You" with "Forget You" in TV broadcasts of movies or editing out swear words entirely in musical recordings.).
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| In one of the worse Supreme Court decisions ever issued, the Court in FCC v. Pacifica endorsed a view of the Federal Communications Commission as some kind of National Nanny empowered to protect our ears from "indecency." |
*The Golden Age of Film. The 1970s were a great decade for film. Directors/Writers Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and many others made groundbreaking strides in narrative development. Scorsese's controversial 2019 claim, that "Marvel movies aren't cinema," is really not controversial at all for anyone familiar with the best movies of the 1970s. Money quote from Scorsese's 2019 op-ed:
For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.
It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form. And that was the key for us: it was an art form.Classic Film Clip: You Talkin' to Me?
1980s: Corporate Domination and Response
Though media lost its innocence in the 1970s, we left the decade still feeling that for all its faults, media would never become primarily a vehicle for money making. In other words, by 1979 hope remained realistic that "operating in the public interest" was an attainable goal even for profit-driven media. Those hopes were almost entirely dashed in the 1980s, as the Reagan Administration's articulation of profit maximization as THE supreme human value became the value system of a range of institutions including media. Against that backdrop, here are four 1980s media milestones:
*The Rise of Cable Television. In theory, the rise of cable television should have been the answer to Minow's "vast wasteland" critique. With so many channels to choose from, the crapola should be balanced out with high quality offerings, right? Anyone who subscribed to cable in the 1980s probably ended up feeling the same way Bruce Springsteen did when he sang about "57 channels and nothing on."
*Music Television (MTV). If you think of music videos as advertisements for records, then MTV in the 1980s became the first network in history to feature ads literally 24-hours a day. Add in the sexism and misogyny of much of 1980s music video and MTV goes from being an interesting experiment to one of the lowest points in the global history of corporate media.
*The Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. There's been much confusion about what the Fairness Doctrine actually did, and I've written about that here. The caricature of the Fairness Doctrine is that it mandated targets of criticism on broadcast news stations to have some kind of right to respond. The Fairness Doctrine was never that powerful; still, there is no doubt that its repeal contributed to the rapid growth and development of ultra one-sided, mostly right wing talk radio and cable pundit shows.
*Classic Media Criticism. From an academic perspective, the 1980s were groundbreaking for the release of some seminal works of media criticism that set the standard for that genre of writing. Some of my favorites include Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly (1983), Noam Chomksy's and Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent (1988), Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), and Herb Schiller's Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression.
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| The late Neil Postman's 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death was one of a number of brilliant works of media criticism released in that decade. |
1990s: Wasted Opportunities and Dreams Deferred
In part because of the corporate control of politics, the 1990s was a decade of wasted opportunities and dreams deferred. The fall of the Soviet Union could and should have been a rallying cry for democratic reforms all over the globe. Instead, the United States spent most of 1998 and 1999 consumed with the earth shaking issue of whether or not the President of the United States lied about getting a blowjob in the oval office. Against that backdrop, here are four 1990s media milestones:
*The Internet Revolution. Obviously the most transformative technological development since Gutenberg's printing press in the 1400s, the Internet in the 1990s immediately impacted every area of human existence. A number of scholars and pundits treated the new technology with optimism, thinking that the digital age would bring about democratic participation on a scale never seen before. While such optimism might still be justified, democracy activists have learned over the last 30 years that the Internet is more easily coopted by corporate powers and their lapdog politicians than we initially thought possible.
*Hip-Hop Culture. If we look back to the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, we can see that rock-and-roll exerted a dramatic impact on culture, from language to fashion to gender roles to pretty much everything. Today the same can be said about hip-hop. But whereas rock-and-roll was primarily an American phenomenon, hip-hop from its earliest days had a global reach, in the 1990s becoming worldly in extraordinary ways. Hip-hop at its best, like rock at its best, unifies people at the street level and challenges top-down power structures. The establishment always fights back, which is why hip-hop like rock is always in a position of having to rediscover its most pure form.
Video Clip: Evolution of Hip-Hop
*Telecommunications Act of 1996. In 1996 the US Congress and President Clinton "updated" the Communications Act of 1934. A whopping victory for big media corporations, the 1996 act set in place a media consolidation mania that has led to more than 90 percent of media content being controlled by six companies (Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Viacom/CBS, Sony, and Fox). Media consolidation has had devastating impacts on journalism, and created "news deserts" in most of the country. Proponents of the 1996 Act laud it for creating the "free and open" Internet, but increasing consolidation and the assaults on "net neutrality" prove that consumer protections in the law were never strong enough.
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| President Bill Clinton, joined by VP Al Gore, digitally signs the Telecommunication Act of 1996 into law. The Act opened the door for media consolidation and corporate domination of the Internet. |
*Third Wave Feminism. In politics, popular culture, the workplace, and other areas, women in the 1990s challenged structures of power more forcefully than at any time since the 1960s. Feminist defenses of Bill Clinton during the impeachment probably undermined the progress of the movement by ceding moral high ground on behalf of a slimey but powerful man. Still, there is no doubt that the third wave feminism of the 1990s raised consciousness in a way that continues to impact women's progress as demonstrated by the #metoo movement, challenging gender stereotypes in film and other media, and the election of more women to public office.
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| Sparked by the treatment of Anita Hill during the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, activist women announced a "third wave" of feminism. A record number of women were elected to office in 1992, making it forever the "Year of the Woman." |
2000s: The Crisis of Legitimacy
In the first decade of the new millennium, perceptions of mainstream media (especially news) started to decline precipitously. Some of that was the result of the nonstop media bashing by right wing radio and other "conservative" sources that for years had made "the media" into the ultimate straw man. But I would argue that some media advances in the decade were more responsible for undermining the legitimacy of "the media". Against that backdrop, here are four 2000s media milestones.
*The War on Terror. George W. Bush's declaration of a "war on terror" in 2001 had terrible impacts on media. Every administration since Bush has applied archaic statutes (like the Espionage Act of 1917) to go after journalists and whistleblowers. Mainstream media's failure to stand up to and call out the bullying of their own has probably done more to undermine media credibility than any so-called "fake news."
*Embedded Reporting. In the Vietnam era, media for the most part succeeded in covering the war independently. Determined to never again allow the public to see the real costs of war, the Pentagon since the 1980s has slowly but surely co-opted war reporting. In the 2000s, "embedded" reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in a shameful pattern of Pentagon talking points presented as truthful statements about the conduct of the war(s). During the 1980s, as the Soviet Union was bogged down in Afghanistan, the Russian people received nothing but bullshit from Soviet media about the conduct of and progress of the war. In those days American leaders had no problems labeling Soviet reporting on Afghanistan as pure propaganda. In the 2000s the majority of American reporting on Afghanistan and Iraq--especially in the crucial early years of the wars--came straight out of the old Soviet playbook. Truly shameful.
Clip: Robert Riggs Embedded Reporter 552ADA Iraq Under Fire in Iraq 2003
*YouTube and Viral Media. The sheer number of hours that people (of all ages) spend consumed with YouTube and other viral media is astounding. In the early days of YouTube, we laughed at how viral videos tended to focus on cats or weird forms of human behavior. As time has gone on, we have seen YouTube become a safe space for conspiracy theories, "alternative" news and various forms of quackery passed off as serious analysis.
*Wikileaks. Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange has been incarcerated for almost 10 years now--even though he has never been tried and convicted of anything--essentially for the "crime" of releasing information that proves the dishonesty and crimes of the US and other world governments. World leaders may succeed in silencing Assange, and might destroy Wikileaks, but those efforts are like trying to bury water. Truth and transparency, whether it is being put forward by Assange and Wikileaks or similar actors, like water will keep seeping back up at you if you try to bury them.
BBC News Clip: Who Is Julian Assange?
2010s: The Era of Tribes, Trolls, and Trumpism
When I was born in 1961 the White House was occupied by John F. Kennedy and a spirit of optimism animated the nation. As I closed in on my 60th birthday, the White House was occupied by a buffoon (initials DJT) who was followed by a man (initials JRB) best known for almost fifty years of political hackery in Washington. Can we blame the political de-evolution that has taken place in my lifetime on "the media"? Not completely, but there's no doubt that media played a role in making the mess, and will play a role in cleaning it up too. Against that backdrop, here are some media milestones from the 2010s:
*The Death of Local Journalism. It's hard to exaggerate how destructive the death of local journalism has been not only to communities, but to the entire nation. Where I live in Oshkosh, WI we have to rely on a retired professor of journalism (publisher of The Oshkosh Examiner) to do serious research on critical issues facing the community. Most communities in the country do not have even that much. In the 2020s we HAVE to do something to address the journalism crisis lest we continue our descent into a culture of uninformed, divided tribes more concerned with trolling than teaching.
*The Rise of Social Media. In the 2010s we saw what happens when a culture becomes addicted to digital communication. Sherry Turkle's 2012 book Alone Together was a clarion call urging more mindfulness on these matters, but even she may have under estimated the extent to which the addictive qualities of digital communication make reform difficult.
Clip: Sherry Turkle on Alone Together
*Podcasting. Like the Internet generally, podcasting has the potential to make small-d democracy something real. The 2010s saw a surge in the sheer number of podcasts on every topic imaginable. My own podcast (Running on MT with Matt King) tries to discuss serious issues in a way that anyone can understand. Podcasts like that tend to have limited listenership, while sensationalist podcasting hooks millions. Is there a way to reverse that trend in the 2020s? I'm not optimistic, but anything is possible if people of goodwill do the work necessary to make it happen.
*Hate, Inc. Matt Taibbi's 2019 book Hate, Inc. is not the best work of media criticism that I've ever read, but he did capture the central premise of mainstream news media in the 2010s: if consumers of ideologically diverse media can be trained to despise each other, profits will follow. Playing off of Chomsky and Herman's "manufacturing consent," Taibbi calls this state of affairs "manufacturing discontent." In the 2020s I don't think we need to strive to make everyone love each other, but we should at least be able to consume--and maybe even accept on occasion--the viewpoints of others without being made to feel that we have "betrayed" a tribe.
Clip: Matt Taibbi on how the profit motive has destroyed the media
So there you have it. Sixty years of media milestones. What a long, strange trip it's been. For me anyway.
