by Pete Wright
National Public Radio’s Juan Williams is funny.
No, you can’t tell from the picture. Here he looks angry. Brooding. Somber. Morose. He came out on stage and sat in the chair awaiting his introduction for nearly a full minute looking just… like… this.
Scarey.
But then, the humor came, delivered secretly in that NPR monotone taking us all by sweet surprise. Jokes about drugs and penises. Jokes about Chautauquans and good manners. But mostly, he joked at the expense of the media.
His message, of course, was not to be funny. He came to Chautauqua to talk about the many messages of the media, the many masters served in the business. Interestingly, while the previous speakers leading up to Williams focused on what they were doing to change the way they do business, to make media better, his message was far more empowering: if you don’t like what you’re watching on TV, what you’re reading in the papers, what you hear on the radio, turn it off. Write letters. Make calls. When demand shifts, the market will change to follow it.
Williams’ take on the primary pain the media causes our culture is rooted in fragmentation. Many of these concepts that drive immediate access to focused and filtered information on the web — RSS, portals, subscriptions, etc — naturally drives consumers of media to be generally less informed than their predecessors. It’s narrow-casting, not broadcasting, he says, and this fragmentation of signal is mirroring the fragmentation of our populace as well.
Once, we were a melting pot, culturally diverse Europeans just wanting a place to fit in. Now, we’re a stew, made up of Mexicans, Asians, Latin-Americans, Africans, all coming to the US with one agenda or another, looking to reclaim cultural heritage or identity, to celebrate, rather than fit in. And the media, in search of ratings and circulation, is catering to all those angles at once.
Fragmentation is happening along age lines as well, Williams says. Media latch on to stories about medicare, social security, and the high cost of prescription drugs, catering to the fifth of the American population now over age 65. In the mean time, a fourth of the population are under 18. These are the drive-by media consumers, targeted with flash and drama by the media, anything that will grab the attention of their cell phones, their instant messaging applications.
The conservative-liberal divide is the third media rift: Rush Limbaugh plays host to Vice President Cheny on his show exclusively, narrow-casting directly to the administration’s right.
“Honesty doesn’t play in this media picture, because it doesn’t comfort the audience,” Williams said. “It doesn’t allow them to feel secure in thier opinions when you stand up and tell them something they may not want to hear.”
Yes, Williams got serious. He is, after all, a serious newsman. Listening to his comments, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that he was on track to much broader exposure. If there’s a chance to rebuild an aging media infrastructure into a new, relevant broadcast medium, Williams will be at the front of it.
Then, he called in the “Network” reference, the legendary Howard Beale call to action, driving a nation to cry out, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Of course, that movie’s over 30 years old. What are we doing carrying on about the same message, the same frustration, three decades later?
To me, it’s because the better speech of that movie won out in real-life America. It’s Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen scolding Howard Beale and extolling the meaning of the universe. It’s one of the greatest, most compelling monologues in cinema thanks to the brilliant expository of writer Paddy Chayefsky and as much as I want to repost it here entirely, I’ll just point you in the right direction to watch after a snippit:
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T & T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime.
Arthur Jensen on YouTube
Arthur Jensen MP3
And this may be Juan Williams’ legacy, the same as Howard Beale’s, the same as Don Quixote. But, like Huffington yesterday, the world needs its radical flagwavers, the smart rebels, challenging the norm. He is an oasis in the desert, if the masses can take a minute to stop and listen.
