There’s a scene in Ulysses
in which we get a taste of early 1900’s newspaper culture. Leopold Bloom, one
of the two protagonists of Ulysses,
works here and is in charge of the advertisement end of the business. As is
typical of James Joyce’s masterpiece the chapter is modeled after a scene from
Homer’s Odyssey, this being the
episode in which Odysseus looses the bag of the winds. The winds of Odysseus,
wild and untamed, manifest in Bloom’s news-office as the clitter-clack of the
typing and printing press, the setting and re-setting of the fonts and
characters, and the boisterous bustling about of the men who work in the
news-office, discussing politics, newspaper chatter, and the Roman Empire.
It should be to no one’s surprise that the political
commentary of the newspaper office of Ulysses
is so familiar to us, despite its distance in time. The media is a mass
swirling of noises and winds, voices and churnings, ideas and non-ideas.
Political commentary and social commentary are interwined and bantered about by
old Latin professors and stodgy newspaper editors, and their discussion feels
very disconnected from the Dublin that Bloom perceives as he wanders about the
city and sees as it really is. If we pay attention to it, the newspaper office
in the fictional Dublin of 1904 isn’t too different than the real “newspaper
office” of our modern mass media.
While the media of our day is wrestling with itself as to
the definition of “fake news,” and while the American public are particular
dissatisfied with the American media system, there is an assumption governing
our present discussions: that is, that the media ever existed as a legitimate
source of truth. Across the political spectrum – and I speak from the views of
my politically-diverse friends – there is more than just a significant distrust
in “the news”; there is an incredible disgust with the untrustworthiness of
that news. This reaches far deeper than the “shock” that both conservatives and
liberals had upon the revelation that the Democratic National Convention had contrived
against Bernie Sanders using their connections with the media powers-that-be
(we all knew this anyways, right?). The voters of the Right and the Left, at
the ground / local level, feel that the media do not understand their stakes
and their interests, and that they only cater to their own needs. This disgusts
these voters.
But what Joyce understood better than us is how the media is
a money-making scheme. It is driven by advertisements, printing designs, and
newspaper sales. One can only walk into our modern bookstores to get a sense of
which printed matter sells and which does not: how big is the harlequin romance
section? how big is the philosophy section? and, my big question, where in that
bookstore would you find a copy of Cicero’s Republic?
The real question at the heart of the present “fake news
crisis” – the one that the social forces of Facebook and CNN are taking very
seriously – is not “What qualifies as fake or true news?” but “Why are we so
surprised that the news is fake?” This is like if you met a middle-aged man who
loved WWE wrestling as a child, and he was shocked when you tell him that it
was all a show and a form of entertainment. The confession of ages past has
been that the newspapers are not a reliable source of knowledge.
Or, to put it in a more pressing manner, newspapers (re:
today, mass media) have no epistemological foundations. This is not to say that
the whole journalistic enterprise is a celebration of falsehood, of course; we
have always had our good journalists and our solid sources. But it is to make
clear that the tacit assumption implied by many that the media is implicitly
beholden to the truth is plainly unfounded. In our society, as in Joyce’s, the
news is beholden to its advertisers, and what sells is what gets written. It
should not be surprising that in our society, with its relativism on the Right and
on the Left, that what sells is the vastly untrue and the incredibly biased.
But what makes the phenomenon of “fake news” emerge then?
Are they simply a demonstration of our epistemological relativity, of the
triumph of postmodernity, of the politically-contrived upsurge in unreliable
and untrustworthy information? All these claims fall short, because they imply
a newness to “fake news” that is deceptive and unconscious of the news media’s
history. The news has always been epistemologically empty.
Instead, I would suggest that the phenomenon of “fake news” is
really a symptom of the growing presence of the news media themselves. By
manifesting on our devices, at our workspaces, in our home lives, the news
media aim to increase their revenue through the constant bombardment of
advertisement and continual presence. This has always been their goal, of
course, albeit unconscious for some medias and unintentional for others. The
news media, for both liberals and conservatives, have constituted themselves as
mediators of truth not by making truth-claims but by becoming a religious presence. To read the news
is the secular society’s form of piety and prayer, and it is the advent of
technologies of presence – namely the smartphone – that enables the news media
to have a shocking level of epistemological valence, despite its historic
untrustworthiness.
To frame this in a different language: it is not agnosticism
or atheism that are the new religions of our modern secular culture. Rather, it
is the ever-present news that has become our religion, and, thus, our expected
source of knowledge and truth. We are not surprised that men are deceiving us;
we are appalled that our gods are deceiving us. Or, to return to Aeolus, we are
appalled that the bag of winds blows in every direction, as though staking our
lives upon the wind was wise in the first place.
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