Maybe those snail sucking dweebs are OK
As my readers know, I avoid going to France, because those barbarians are not even cultured enough to serve Cheese Whiz. If I feel an urge to misconjugate strange verbs through my nose, I’ll do such things in Tahiti, where the shocking dearth of Cheese Whiz is counter balanced by the delightful dearth of bikini tops on the Wahines.
The Wahines aren’t shy about letting it all hang out, so to speak, but the French media is going to find itself under tighter wraps. Media wonks (and I consider myself one of their wretched ranks) are all abuzz about a new French law that dramatically clamps the freedom of the press to report–or, some would say, smear and misreport–certain things.
The law forbids things like showing pictures of untried defendants in handcuffs, and other undignified type of stuff.
The media, of course, in knee jerk fashion, roundly condemns anything that curtails their compulsion to say or show whatever they want.
But where does free speech end, and slander begin? What’s reporting the news, and what’s a smear job?
Americans love to blabber about free speech, but I don’t think the idea is taken very seriously. Most people just want to hear what they want to hear, and don’t want to hear what they don’t want to hear. There is no fundamental concept of the “truth” or freedom at issue. In the United States, just like a lot of places, if you say certain things, you can go straight to jail. America might even be harsher on that note than most countries. So all the tongue clucking that will be aimed at France’s apparently draconian media muzzling is as hypocritically American as you can get.
Which sure doesn’t change the fact that the media holds awesome power, particularly now that television has morphed news with entertainment, fact with opinion, and opinion with propaganda. Newspaper readers at least need the innate intelligence necessary to read; television watchers, by contrast, can be virtually hypnotized with images and sound. And that’s no exaggeration. The next time you see some slack-jawed stoolie watching the boob tube, you’ll probably notice he’s in a low grade sort of trance.
If you gave me the strings of the television medium, I could easily have America launch a war against any country you would name, could easily incite neighbor against neighbor, could accomplish any social aim I wanted to. I could create heros and villains at will. I could define who, and what, the masses love, hate, fear, trust, like, and dislike. Using the crude tools of mere prose, I can sway an occasional mind or two if I’m so inclined; but if I had the atomic bomb of television, there would simply be no stopping me.
So we have to give the French credit, at least, for publically acknowledging the power of pure nuance, the receptiveness of the average psyche to media suggestion, and the utterly pathetic nature of the masses’ inability to grasp even the simplest truths at the simplest levels. And a case can certainly be made that the worthy should not be at the gutter call of the crude. People who use bidets are fundamentally different than the rest of us, but you’ve got to give them some grudging credit for trying to flush the dirty nuance out of some of the media’s darker cracks.
