Watch or Read ‘Old News’? What a Snore!

Be honest. Would you rather be watching MTV than reading this? Are you watching MTV as you read this?

It’s old news that traditional reportage is losing its audience. The March 5 Rolling Stone attempts to explain why so many young people say they get more from Murphy Brown than Dan Rather.

“Straight news--the Old News--is pooped, confused and broke,” Jon Katz writes. “Each Nielsen survey, each circulation report, each quarterly statement, reveals the cultural Darwinism ravaging the news industry. The people watching and reading are aging and dying, and the young no longer take their place.”

Instead, Katz says, young people--those under 30 for the most part--turn to Public Enemy videos, Oliver Stone films, Guns N’ Roses lyrics, Entertainment Weekly, and made-for-TV movies for their informational sustenance.

Meanwhile, “The Old News seems bewildered and paralyzed by the dazzling new technologies competing for its audience, clucking like a cross old lady chasing noisy kids away from her window . . . “

As an example of where the New News thrives while the Old News fails, Katz examines two areas of coverage or lack thereof: the presidential race and race per se.

“Still overwhelmingly owned, staffed and run by whites, and white males in particular, the media are stymied and discomfited by racial issues. After decades of ignoring brutal racism, they seem to have lurched from one extreme to the other.

“Now they’re so desperate to avoid the appearance of racism that they seem frozen by the subject . . . they’re unable to advance the country’s understanding of ghetto fury, to portray and represent the view of the black middle class or to explore white anger and confusion. Few issues in American life generate so much mythology, yet the intrigues of the White House chief of staff are covered in far greater detail.”

So far, so good for his argument (except the part about “ignoring brutal racism,” which is silly). But Katz wobbles when he contrasts the astutely defined failings of the Old with the supposed virtues of the New.

For example, in his support of Oliver Stone’s “JFK” he makes the same bonehead mistake many Old Newsters made in condemning it--that is, he compares what Stone and his crowd do with what Peter Jennings and his cronies do.

Put aside the question of whether it’s wise to base this sort of comparison on popularity rather than on more judgmental criteria such as accuracy. Does Katz really think that Axl Rose or the folks who create the kids on “Beverly Hills, 90210” rely on a virgin muse untainted by the media?

Ask any Old News journalist where most producers and presumably songwriters get their ideas. Rap and film pack a powerful punch, but even Ice Cube would probably get dizzy if he had only Spike Lee movies to draw upon as source material.

Katz thinks a final showdown of sorts between Old and New News may be unfolding with the presidential primary.

But anyone who buys Katz’s modest proposal that Spike Lee, Oliver Stone and the Geto Boys might offer more meaningful election coverage than the traditional journalistic sources may want to check out a relatively brief story in the March Harper’s.

“Playing the Primary Chords,” reprinted from Boston Review, examines the old Marshall McLuhan aphorism, “the medium is the message,” in light of political manipulation.

Oliver Stone, for one, needs no education in what writer Jay Rosen says here--that with the now all-encompassing nature of electronic media, messages are no longer communicated, but rather “a package of stimuli” is presented “that will ‘resonate’ with what is already and continuously communicated.”

Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign seems downright substantive compared to what George Bush’s handlers did with Willie Horton in 1988, Rosen says. In fact, when it comes to using stimuli packages, Bush is in a league with Madonna.

“With no self to reveal, he can have others, more gifted with language, strike the right chords with the audience. . . . It’s not even correct to say he’s a man without principles, for he believes in a principle that reduces ‘reality’ to a quaint concern of the weak minded.”

Rosen concludes: “Ultimately, this is the shift that should worry us. Not the waning of print and the rise of television, not the triumph of visual imagery over the word, but the victory of the resonance principle over the reality principle, the substitution of an electronic commons for the world we actually have in common--the world where bridges decay, ozone evaporates, people suffer, and economies collapse.”

REQUIRED READING

Redbook is the last place you’d expect to find the memoirs of a child molester. But there it is, all 3,000 words of it, in the April issue.

The idea for the article arrived with a Brownsville, Tex., prison as the return address. The editors tracked down the author--a 60-year-old man who molested boys for 40 years--and agreed to let him have his say.

Why Redbook made this decision will be apparent to any rational reader. What the man says is appalling, remorseless, and often disgustingly self-serving, but it also offers invaluable insight into his deviant behavior, his methods of approaching his victims, and ways to protect children from a pedophile, who often may be the last person a parent would suspect.

“If, as a parent, you can be a friend to your child, a compassionate soul who will listen to him and take him seriously, you’ll make him less vulnerable to a man like me,” the man advises.

The author, who is doing 20 years, says, “Prison solves nothing.” No parent who reads the article will agree.