In the U.S., the ongoing exposure of Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s escapist holiday plans last week in the midst of a weather crisis in Texas, during which people in the State not only suffered loss of power and water but actually suffered to the point of death in freezing conditions, provided a good opportunity to examine the role of these media facilitators as not only conveyors of information, but shapers of public opinion.
Accountability and a conscious sense of responsibility by elected representatives would indicate an awareness of the social contract we all enter into as citizens of our country. It would mean that we forego our private preferences at times, in order to honour our public commitments and undertakings.
In contrast to this high standard of conduct and integrity, we saw the Senator attempting to portray himself as a family man, saying he had wanted to leave freezing Texas for sunny Mexico to please his daughters. Which surely the electorate would understand. And it is important that they should, because the voice of the people, particularly in a democracy, is the voice of the only God in which many politicians truly believe. But the voice of the people frequently expresses thought processes which have been profoundly interfered with.
Marcus Aurelius in the original Republic and Capitol had this to say about opinion: ‘Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is perspective, not the truth.’
We can keep this insight in mind as we review the daily onslaught of what are known in America, Australia and England as ‘shock jocks’: talkback radio and television commentators who make vast profits from airing their ‘divisive’ and ‘controversial’ opinions, which usually involve racist, sexist and xenophobic attacks on vulnerable or marginalized groups in society.
Controversy and provocation prompt the human penchant for battle: and many of these opinion mongers regularly go too far in their personal attacks on the target du jour in an attempt to satisfy the blood lust and tickle the funny bones of their compulsive listeners.
In the U.S., the recent death of Rush Limbaugh indicated just how much he was loathed by a large section of the populace. It is generally regarded as being in bad taste to express happiness at the death of any human being, but this was a person who had caused harm to the reputation and dignity of many people in his career. His exit from the world was met with elation, in many quarters.
Howard Stern is another example of inexcusably monetized vulgarity. David Letterman and Larry King have been capable of some gross insensitivity, although now Letterman is seemingly somewhat repentant and looking like Old Father Time. And now Tucker Carlson is riding the debris of the recent election, attempting to panhandle for profit in the wake of the misbegotten attempted overthrow of the sitting government. Candace Owens, black and female, can be relied on to play the race and gender card against her own community and identity group to leverage the widening gap caused by partisan politics.
In Australia, generally a far more decent and less brazen society, we had Alan Jones, kingmaker for the major conservative political party, and Stan Zemanek, who it was said had people attending his funeral to make sure he was really dead. The baby-faced Zemanek once even became verbally abusive and physically threw a book at a female fellow panellist on the show ‘Beauty And The Beast’, a long running television talk show in Australia where issues of the day were discussed in a combat which pitted a sexist and superior male (‘The Beast’) against some well known Australian women (‘The Beauties’). It was like watching bear baiting in the Renaissance.
Looking back today, in 2021, on the long careers of these commentators in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, we can see how those in management of their commercial radio and television stations constantly ignored their worst offenses in order to keep their high rating shows on air. The producers actually at times hired voice actors to ring in to the ‘talkback’ radio shows, pretending to be genuine examples of certain representative stereotypes, for the entertainment of the public.
It was manufactured opinion and faux outrage that was being expressed. But people listening in on a daily basis were not aware that they were being targeted, demoralised and played to. Most thought that what was being said in these exchanges were the real opinions of real people. And the citizens began to find the common ground they shared being eroded, and their society becoming polarized.
In Britain, the grandiosely repellant Piers Morgan glories in being ‘politically incorrect’, and he shares this ‘anti PC’, ‘provocative’ platform with one of the few female shock jocks, Katie Hopkins, who adds to the high levels of verbal violence against women in the U.K. by shaming women who she feels are ‘fragile’ and ‘playing the victim’, for which she as a ‘strong woman’, victorious in what she believes is the combat for the survival of the fittest at the heart of modern life, expresses contempt. Characteristic of their conduct is a pattern of accusatory and inflammatory language.
Several major male media identities have been summarily sacked from their shows in recent years: for obscenity, for defamatory remarks, and for a pattern of abusive and inappropriate behaviour with staff and guests, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
Aligned with these men - but not seen as so openly malignant and destructively violent as they were permitted to be - are the famous female celebrity interviewers, like the lisping Barbara Walters and the passive aggressive, pseudo genteel, saber-toothed arachnid Diane Sawyer, who interviewed a sad Britney Spears, a drug-dependent Whitney Houston and the traumatized daughter of Elvis Presley and got them to erode their own self respect on syndicated network television.
Nothing was off limits, apparently.
The lines of questioning created and sustained by these helmet-haired media moguls, as they interrogate young women in vulnerable and unstable situations, disrespecting their personal boundaries while creating facsimiles of emotional intimacy to get exclusive insights into human pain they have no empathy for, are truly reprehensible. They seem to glory in evoking tears or causing the interviewee to become agitated or distressed.
These personages in their roles as media commentators shaped public opinion and impacted our perceptions and the reputations of public figures for decades. In their compulsion to get people to ‘open up, exclusively’ to them, these vultures scoured out essential elements of people’s characters in quest of a juicy scoop.
They are responsible for a lot of harm, under the cover of free speech and enabling and honouring the ‘public’s right to know’.
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