Revenge of the Paramedia

I wrote last week about some elements of the deep campaign: mobilizations and countermobilizations churning along beneath the visible surface, adding up to a spotty but real revival of politics. Today, a quick look into another sector of the subterranean depths – the paramedia, rivulet media tunneling under the mainstream. This is the new post–postmodernism with a vengeance.

The visible surface, of course, is what the establishment media render visible: the smash–mouth commercials, the sound–bites, the newspaper horse–race coverage and what you might call the handicapping coverage in which pundits comment on hairdos, swing states, strategies and tactics, and not least, rumors. (“Postpone the elections to cope with terror attacks? Dump Cheney?” No and no, if you ask me, but these tidbits were good for a few days’ bulletins and even a newsless hunk of the front page of the New York Times.)

To say “visible” means televised, mainly. American newspapers circulate more than television news, but television is still the 800–pixel elephant in the public’s room. When the campaigns want to go national with Big Statements, they either invest in network commercial time or – more cheaply and much more cleverly – target a jurisdiction or two in a swing state or two, hoping that the networks will report them as news, thus giving them national reach for free.

So does the stupendous corruption of politics proceed – corruption as usual. The largest single cost of campaigning, and thus the fattest single root of the overwhelming presence of money in politics, is television time for political commercials. Hundreds of millions of dollars line the coffers of the selfsame TV stations that are ungrateful beneficiaries of state largess. For the licenses that entitle them to occupy the people’s frequencies they pay not one red cent.

But as carriers of what someone once called the national séance, the network news shows are leaking badly. The ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts have seen their combined ratings sink by 34 percent in the course of the past decade and almost 44 percent since 1980, when cable news started. Even the audience for the early evening local news – the fires, drug busts, and celebrity promotions – fell 17 percent between 1997 and 2002. Litening up hasn’t salvaged the network news. The audience grays away. The gee–whiz medical stories, now featured several times a week, aren’t packing in younger viewers, at least not enough to stem the steady hemorrhage.

The other day, a producer from one of the big three network news departments called yours truly for advice as to how his company could remedy growing public mistrust of the networks. My easy prophecy was that the disaffected left and right are going to keep on leaving the flabby bulletins that the networks call a broadcast, but the one departing population segment he had a chance to win back is the curious and reasonably intelligent public that won’t be satisfied with the snippets and shredded sound–bites that now pass for “in depth” on the evening broadcasts. Give them some serious documentaries and they might – might – stick around. But such a sharp turn wouldn’t come cheap, and it’s hard to imagine ABC/Disney, CBS/Viacom, or NBC/General Electric diverting valuable network real estate from reality shows, cop shows, and such in prime time in order to investigate loose Soviet nukes, counterterrorist strategies in the chemical industry, the drug war, Bolivian uprisings or why the U. S. gets worse health for more money than other wealthy nations.

What’s striking is how much paramedia is at work, and how fervently. By “paramedia” I don’t mean those adorable protozoa with funny little mouths. I mean a series of unconventional communication blitzes, side channels for arousing one public or another, of which the most effective to date is naturally “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which ought to cross the $100 million gross proceeds line this coming weekend. Whatever the movie’s demerits, of which I don’t need to remind you, it’s become a political fact by dint of sheer exposure – it’s probably been seen by more than 10 percent of the electorate in less than one month. But consider too:

• The quick and the dirty. I refer here to a new wave of documentaries distributed via the Internet, house parties, and other informal means. Moveon.org is selling DVD’s of “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” Hollywood lefty Robert Greenwald’s effective docudemolition job on America’s nonstop propaganda network, for $10. What a distribution model – fund the film with political money, then sell direct to customers, doing an end run around sluggish theaters. After a few months of ardent work, for some $300,000, “Outfoxed” puts interviews with a half–dozen former Fox News employees and excerpts from various management memos on how to rig the news of the day into the hands of activists. Sooner or later, someone will figure out how to generate shorter exposé digital films even faster and get them around.
• The kiss of comic death. Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” on “Comedy Central” four nights a week (and also at comedycentral.com), takes down the media fatheads and blowhards sometimes so slickly they don’t know what happened to them. “Talking points: they’re true because they’re said a lot,” concluded Stewart on the subject of conventional wisdom the other day. His sneak attack on CNN’s Wolf Blitzer for blowing the run–up to the Iraq war was so smooth that Blitzer didn’t even miss his wallet until he got home, I’m sure. All this in a couple of nights.
• The endless update. There are the blogs, especially the reportorial ones, of which the standout is Josh Marshall’s, from which I’ve been cribbing all year. There’s the indispensable, pioneering Moveon, which has demonstrated itself capable not only of raising millions of dollars for political ads but – to take a recent example – of drumming up 250,000 signatures (in a couple of days) on a petition to the Federal Trade Commission to strip Fox News of the right to use the slogan “fair and balanced”: false advertising if ever there was any. There are Ruy Teixeira’s poll studies and Stuart Eugene Thiel’s compilations, a. k. a. “Professor Pollkatz’s Pool of Polls”. In New York and some smaller towns there’s Air America Radio. Blogs are like newspapers: there are better and worse ones, more thoughtful and shriller ones. Amid the unevenness, a smarter beast is straining to be born.

And not least:

• Making tracts
• . The heavy–breathing political books, some of them best sellers (notably Michael Moore’s on the populist left and Ann Coulter’s on the wacky right), go on lining the windows of bookshops. These are, as Alan Wolfe recently wrote in the
• New York Times Book Review
• , a return to the pamphleteering tradition of anticolonial America. Most of them are transient. Some are scurrilous. Some read like ouija boards, displaying the wild projections of unconsciousness twisting itself up in knots. Some are even intelligent.

All of the above are tumbling into the world out of disgust, vigour, fury, and a desperate hope to rebuild a political culture worthy of free people. There are misses galore to be found among these initiatives – smugness and sloppiness running neck and neck. There’s also vitality, brains, and a sense of fun that could make even young people feel young.