Socrates and the Media

We shouldn’t pretend that in the course of a short lecture we can establish a foundation for media ethics. But we can move towards a foundation if we first clear up one thing: there is no such thing as a depository of “media ethics” in the sense of there being some kind of filing cabinet labeled “Ethics” containing different files for Law, Medicine, Journalism, and so on. Just as the legal and medical professions must work out what’s right and wrong in the light of their own requirements to serve justice or health respectively, so must the media works things out in the light of their requirements to serve the truth.

What I suggest here is that as a starting point we could take a fairly basic experience we all have in some way or another—talking to a friend in a pub, at a match, or over a meal. What goes on in such exchanges is the raw material of the media—someone trying to communicate with another. What can distort and undermine communication, as it can any other aspect of a human relationship, is the intent of the more skillful or the better informed to take advantage of the weaker. Once this happens, we have a perversion of communication into a form of trickery in order to control or instrumentalize the other by the lie.

Chris Hirte was an East German student at the Humboldt University in what in 1970 was still East Berlin. He and I met while I was there studying German. He was by no means starry-eyed about the quality of West Berlin TV programs, yet felt he could filter out what was propaganda easily enough. But he experienced a consciously lying DDR media as an attack on his dignity as a human being:

“Being forbidden to travel to the West or to choose the kind of work I’ll do isn’t what bothers me the most. What really gets me down is being lied to so much.”¹

As R. D. Laing put it once, “I’m sure that truth deprivation can wreak as much havoc . . . as vitamin deprivation.”²

So all communication can be seen first of all in terms of the communicating person’s respect for his or her audience. Second, the people receiving the communication must keep up their end of the conversation by responsibly paying attention to the communicator. And third, there’s the resulting community of trust brought about by these actions of respectful talking and listening.³   Following political philosopher, Eric Voegelin, I would like to speak of genuine truth-sharing as substantive communication, its opposite as intoxicant communication, and a kind of half-and-half form as pragmatic communication.⁴

Substantive Communication

In his Seventh Letter, Plato spelled out what he considered to be at the heart of true communication between human beings:

“One statement at any rate I can make in regard to all who have written or who may write with a claim to knowledge of the subjects to which I devote myself [philosophy] . . . Such writers can in my opinion have no real acquaintance with the subject. I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in the future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies . . . After scrutinizing [philosophical issues] in benevolent disputation by the use of question and answer without jealousy, at last in a flash understanding of each blazes up, and the mind, as it exerts all its powers to the limit of human capacity, is flooded with light.”⁵

For Plato, then, communication wasn’t a matter of dominating or using other people, it was a matter of a shared quest for truth. And his preferred medium for this was the living dialogue, of which his written dialogues were only the record. But there’s a price to pay: Socrates’ presence in almost all of the dialogues is a reminder that achieving and communicating the truth may be at the cost of opposing socially dominant lies, an opposition that may demand losing one’s shirt, if not one’s life. And the audience too will have to be prepared to suffer if it wants to take on the consequences of truth over against the lie. That’s why we can speak of genuine dialogue as substantive communication, a communication of the substance of our humanity leading to what Plato speaks of in the Gorgias (508a) as koinonia or communion.

What comes over from the Gorgias is that Socrates is only interested in helping his audience arrive for themselves at the truth. Socrates also invites them to help him to get beyond any intellectual blocks or errors he may be making himself, showing his awareness that the work of communication is a two-way affair. There is on the one hand what we can call “communication from above,” which is the side of communication initiated by the media professionals. As an example, let me select from some pieces Michael Kelly has been writing for the Washington Post [articles written just before Fr. Purcell’s lecture was delivered—ed]. In “I Believe” (4/2/1998) he writes:

“I believe the president. I have always believed him. I believed him when he said he had never been drafted in the Vietnam War and I believed him when he said he had forgotten to mention that he had been drafted in the Vietnam War . . . I believe Paula Jones is a cheap tramp who was asking for it. I believe Kathleen Willey is a cheap tramp who was asking for it. I believe Monica Lewinsky is a cheap tramp who was asking for it . . . I believe the instructions Lewinsky gave Tripp informing her on how to properly perjure herself in the Willey matter simply wrote themselves. I believe that The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News and World Report, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, PBS and NPR are all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Especially NPR.”

And, from the article Kelly wrote a week later, “Making Liars of Us All” (11/2/1998):

“Assume for the sake of crazy, far-fetched argument that President Clinton is lying about Monica Lewinsky. The line from the president’s increasingly cornered defenders is that this doesn’t matter . . . No. The Lewinsky matter is not about the minor and personal question of whatever an individual does in pursuit of happiness behind closed doors . . . It is about the largest, most central and most public of questions: whether we demand that the president obey the law, whether we accept that the president lies to us . . . [I]t is this fomenting of corruption that is the great problem with Clinton…The problem with Clinton is not only that he lies; it is that he makes liars out of everybody else. The problem is not only that his moral standards are low; it is that he requires that everybody else lower theirs to meet his. By the time he is finished, so too will be the quaint idea of a higher ground in politics.”

Finally, from this week’s article, “Would You Believe He’s a Victim?” (18/2/1998):

“[Kelly responds to an Arkansas journalist defending Clinton, who had said: ‘If you take someone like the president, who a lot of women would find attractive if he came to fix their garbage disposal, and you make him the president of the United States, the Alpha male of the United States of America, and you sexualize his image with a lot of smears and false accusations so that people think he’s Tom Jones or Rod Stewart, then a certain irreducible number of women are going to act batty around him.’] The poor man. The poor victim. My God, how he must have suffered. Stalked through the halls of his own home, and nowhere to turn for protection. Nothing standing between him and a 21-year-old stalker . . . Nothing except for his wife, his chief of staff, his deputy chief of staff, his secretary, his personal assistant, his special assistants, his National Security Council, his Marine guard, three dozen or so Secret Service agents and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What’s a president to do with a stalker but give her gifts, find her a lawyer and advance her career?”

What I find in journalism of this quality is an appeal to my own sense of truth and of justice. Michael Kelly is asking his readers to ask themselves what a democracy is about, what citizenship is about. Even when perhaps a majority of those readers, and the editorial line of the paper printing his articles, have tended to support the president through thick and thin.

In response, there’s “communication from below,” which is the audience’s reply to the communication from above. I’d suggest that without that response, in the minds and hearts of his readers, Kelly’s journalism has no effect whatever. Because communication ‘from above’ is intrinsically related to communication “from below.” Not only as responding to it, but also, very often, as providing the very basis for journalism in the first place. If Kelly didn’t know that there were at least potential democrats out there, people who care to maintain a democracy, something he knows both from conversation and ordinary experience, he wouldn’t write those articles in the first place. In this interaction between the two aspects of communication, from above and from below, is a shared contribution to the substance of our common humanity.⁶

Intoxicant Communication

In our humdrum days often the nearest thing to poetry are the tabloid headlines, a kind of haiku form with strict limits of expression and concision:

SIAMESE TWIN

SLAYS BROTHER

IN BUNGLED

SUICIDE BID!!

So let’s not complain about tabloid coverage as such. Most media communication is in the area of what used to be called morally neutral – it’s got to do with undemanding information regarding everyday matters. This undemanding information includes political and legal information, commercial and sports news, advertising – overt or concealed – gossip about entertainment and other figures, popular entertainment, and so on. While there’s nothing wrong with most of this in itself – it probably accounts for three-fourths of what goes on in the media – there is a danger that it can slide over into what we will call intoxicant communication.

This danger of intoxication, quite apart from any question regarding content, propriety, or whatever, occurs in at least three areas. First there is the danger to the media people of trivializing themselves when they confuse the partial or pseudo-reality of their public self-presentation with whom they really are. As Paul Weaver wrote:

“Why do reporters accommodate themselves so comfortably to the requirements of the genre and the pressures of bosses and newsmakers? . . . Because they have a weak sense of self and a correspondingly strong need for the validation of others, especially powerful others. In other words, we are courtiers . . .” ⁷

Second there is the danger that their “products,” the public personalities who are the subjects of media coverage and who keep the media people employed, will themselves suffer an acute loss of capacity to differentiate their media personae from themselves. Quoting Weaver again: “Newsmakers almost always accept the news story’s invitation to posture and lie.”⁸

And third there is the danger of trivializing the media audience. Reflecting on how Austria sleepwalked itself into the First World War, Karl Kraus wrote about the effect on an audience habituated to trivialization, in his Last Days of Mankind:

“Were not all the realms of imagination evacuated, when that manifesto proclaimed the War to the inhabited earth? In the end was the word. Normally the one who kills the spirit only gives birth to that deed. Weaklings become strong, in order to bring us under the wheel of progress. And it’s they, and they alone who’ve made that possible, who betrayed the world with their prostitution. Not that the Press got the machines of death going – but that they hollowed out our hearts, so that we couldn’t imagine anymore how things were: that is their war-guilt!”⁹

Let us examine a bit more fully this loss of a sense of self accompanying self-amplification through media, both in journalists and in “newsmakers.” Dostoevsky’s novella, The Double [1846] is a penetrating treatment of Mr. Golyadkin, a pathetic minor bureaucratic functionary. Golyadkin works in the human desert of the mid-19th century Russian capitol St. Petersburg, a city focused on the externals of social position and utterly indifferent to the uniqueness of each person. In this icily courteous bureaucracy, each de-individualized cog is replaceable by another.¹⁰

Golyadkin, in an anguished search for at least one human being with whom he can relate and experience his own identity, feels constrained to construct an imaginary “double” and ever narrower “worlds” around himself, none of which satisfies his inner need for relationship with others. Due to the inevitable friction with the real world, his imagined existence redivides into smaller and smaller “worlds.” Golyadkin’s “double” at first “betrays” him, then disintegrates into an infinite number of temporary “doubles”’ Finally, his imagination can no longer construct further, smaller “worlds” immunized from the anxiety induced by reality. His ability even to manipulate his own inner fantasy world has broken down.

Odd as Dostoevsky’s Golyadkin may seem to us, in society today both the entertainment and political worlds continually thrust to prominence people whose incapacity to relate to a real world of persons results in fantastic second realities which ultimately evaporate, sometimes with tragic results. This aversion to reality results from what Eric Voegelin has spoken of as “a peculiar compound of insight and intellectual dishonesty,” or “honest dishonesty.” It is the construction of an imaginary world “which will confirm the self in its pretense of reality . . . a Second Reality . . . to screen the First Reality of common experience from his view.”¹¹

There are similarities between the second Self/second Reality of someone suffering from schizophrenia and the second Self/second Reality of the person averting himself from truth.¹²

While I’m not trying to make capital from the death of Princess Diana, at least some of these stages may be seen as applicable to her life:

Stage 1: Presentation to public of second self or media personality

Stage 2: Beginning of domination of first self by second self

Stage 3: Apparent loss of control by first self to second self

Stage 4: Apparent more or less complete disintegration of personality.

Why should a public personality, or whoever allows himself to be presented by the media, slide into such a dangerous loss of control? Pascal offered his notion of divertissement, of a fundamental lack of seriousness with regard to the attainment and expression of difficult truth, as the debased social context which welcomes pragmatic communication:

“We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to live an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one.”¹³

This “aversion from the truth,” easily slides from self-deception into hatred of truth, whether that truth originates in self or others:

“It conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and convicts it of its faults. It would like to do away with this truth, but not being able to destroy it as such, it destroys it, as best it can, in the consciousness of itself and others; that is, it takes every care to hide its faults both from itself and others, and cannot bear to have them pointed out or noticed.”¹⁴

However, journalists and their willing or unwilling accomplices, the “public personalities,” aren’t the only ones who may want, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, to be “distracted from distraction by distraction.”¹⁵ To quote from one response to Princess Diana’s death:

“It misses the point to say that she manipulated the media or sometimes sought media attention. She was used by the media, and more to the point, by the readers and viewers and listeners, by us, to provide surrogate intimacy, a substitute emotional life to fill up the emptiness of our own lives.”

The public was emotionally addicted to feeding off her – they exploited her. It was not the media, but the intimacy-starved emotional addicts who created the media demand for public intrusion into her life, who killed Diana.¹⁶

And mirroring the loss of differentiation between public and private in media professionals or their “public personalities,” there may have been a corresponding response from a significant portion of the public. One can discern several stages in the public response to her celebrity:

Stage 1: The public’s acceptance of Diana’s second self.

Stage 2: The public’s increasing involvement with Diana’s second self

Stage 3: The public’s addiction to Diana’s second self.

Stage 4: The public’s mass-hysteric identification with Diana’s second self.

This doesn’t matter all that much in situations like media hyping of characters from the sports, fashion or entertainment worlds, with mass-adulation on the part of millions if not billions. Still, the danger of pragmatic communication slipping over into something much less morally neutral seems high. A culture in which no critical questions are asked, in which there’s disproportionate emphasis on the peripheral aspects of existence served by pragmatic communication, can lead to the essential trivialization of public life, which we shall consider next.¹⁷

Pragmatic Communication

As we know, what is often referred to as “the fourth estate,” the institution of a free and uncensored press, arose as a corrective to an older establishment of power. But the fourth estate is no freer from the desire to say l’état c’est moi than was Louis XIV.¹⁸ It is evident that there can be disintegrative communication as well as substantive communication. Some media professionals express a systematic underestimation, if not downright contempt, for their audience. But that underestimation, as we’ve suggested, may be colluded in by an audience that doesn’t want to be addressed at the full level of its humanity. The result of such collusion is a pseudo-community grounded in the lie. Let us first look at attempts at manipulation by advertisers and politicians who themselves wish to instrumentalize the media.¹⁹

In his textbook on advertising, Ernest Dichter advises on how to flatter the customer:

“One of the strongest elements of a doctor’s self-image is his perception of himself as a rational scientist…He is particularly resentful, therefore, whenever a pharmaceutical house makes and disguises the emotional appeal to him. He is being treated no differently from the layman. He’s being considered a gullible consumer…In any communication with the doctor, pharmaceutical houses should therefore conceal emotional appeals beneath a cloak of rationality.”²⁰

And, in the conversations with John Erlichman that President Nixon so thoughtfully tape-recorded for posterity, we get a fascinating glimpse of the ordinariness of attempted media management:

P: I was talking to Bob – and Bob made the point . . . In a sense it will be the evening news basically…You know—you see a man looking honest and earnest, etc., denying it in a public forum. ²¹

E: We are at kind of an ebb tide right now in this whole thing, in terms of the media, as I see it. They are all a little afraid to get too far out on a limb on this . . . and there’s no new news breaking, and so they are kind of—

P: Waiting . . .

E: Well sure, but now is a good time for us to fill that vacuum.

P: Oh, yes—a little news. ²²

. . . .

We must maintain the integrity of the White House, and that integrity must be real, not transparent. There can be no whitewash at the White House.²³ Advertisers and politicians, as President Nixon found out to his cost, aren’t always successful, thanks to the alertness of the very media they attempt to manipulate and of the audience for whom they show such contempt.

If we remember the Grand Inquisitor’s comment in The Brothers Karamazov that nothing has ever been so burdensome as freedom, a freedom we can never jettison quickly enough, then it follows that media domination is often possible only with mass collusion from their audience. A few years ago BBC Newsnight carried a retrospective report on Lyndon Johnson’s 1963 election campaign. This included a very effective TV commercial which showed an innocent girl picking the pedals from a flower, followed by the sudden appearance of a mushroom cloud from an exploding nuclear bomb—the famous “Daisy” ad. The clear implication was if Barry Goldwater were elected, he would start a nuclear war. Mr. Tony Schwartz, who had crafted this rhetorical flourish was later asked if he didn’t think he was manipulating people. “Manipulation?” he replied. “No. Partipulation. The people wanted to be manipulated.”

What happens when the audience taken in participates in its manipulation? Then there occurs an intensification of the original vicious circle of stupefying, being stupefied and community disintegration, now initiated by the public, dumbed-down to the dehumanized level to which they’ve been consigned by their media.²⁴ In Plato’s dialogue, The Apology, Socrates is being tried by a court of 500 citizens on trumped up charges of atheism and corruption of the youth. What is interesting to us is Socrates’ awareness that it is much harder to defend himself against the gossip-generated perception of him (the equivalent of modern media) than against the particular charges. Aristophanes, a comic playwright had created in The Clouds an image of Socrates as just another idiotic and unprincipled intellectual.²⁵

Without direct contact with his life and works, the Athenian public was subjected to 25 years of attacks on Socrates. As a matter of fact, he’d spent his life opposing the kind of irresponsible intellectual he was portrayed as being by his acusers. Nevertheless the citizens voted for his execution. And it is this vicarious participation in the more or less deliberate lies of others that marks out the shared ethical disorder of the media and its audience: that disorder colluded in by an undemanding audience achieves an amplified viciousness when certain sectors of the public give it concrete expression.²⁶

Plato has diagnosed what is happening here as well as anyone. In The Republic (362a), he takes the situation where the most unjust man can hire the best “media experts” to present him as the most just person, at the same time defaming the most just person as the most unjust. While the just man wants not to seem, but to be, just, the unjust man wants to seem, not be, just. It is Plato’s commentary on what happened to Socrates, since in Athens he was presented as worthy of death, while those who had been involved in politically motivated murders, could present themselves as his just judges. Eric Voegelin has commented on this:

The accent of reality has shifted so far from truth to the socially overpowering appearance—the dream tends to become reality . . . “[T]ruth,” in the sense of conformity of a man with himself, is achieved by the will to be unjust in order to harmonize with society…[T]o live in truth against appearance when the power of society is thrown on the side of appearance is a burden on the soul that is impossible to bear for the many, and hard to bear for the few. The pressure for conformity penetrates the soul and compels it to endow the doxa [appearance] experientially with aletheia [truth].²⁷

On a lovely Sunday evening in Nuremberg last September, I stood at the podium where Hitler had addressed his huge rallies in the ’30s. It was the place to reflect on communication as intoxicant—a kind of contagion of the spiritual immune system, in which the radical disorder of one individual is echoed by and evokes in others an equivalent inner darkness. Albert Speer, who organized these rallies and stage managed their presentation, has left a few remarks that, despite his own self-serving agenda, ring true. Speaking of Hitler, he writes:

He gave the impression of a man whose whole purpose had been destroyed, who was continuing along his established orbit only because of the kinetic energy stored within him. Actually he had let go of the controls…There was something actually insubstantial about him. But this was perhaps a permanent quality he had. In retrospect I sometimes ask myself whether this intangibility, this insubstantiality, had not characterized him from early youth up to the moment of his suicide. He simply could not let anyone approach his inner being because that core was lifeless, empty.²⁸

Speer recalls Leni Riefenstahl’s studio refilming some of the principal speakers from the 1935 Party Congress due to technical failures during the actual rally. He remarks of Rudolf Hess’s performance:

“With his special brand of ardor, he turned precisely to the spot where Hitler would have been sitting, snapped to attention and cried: ‘My Leader, I welcome you in the name of the Party Congress! . . .’ He did it all so convincingly that from that point on I was no longer sure of the genuineness of his feelings. The three others [Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg and Hans Frank] also gave excellent performances in the emptiness of the studio, proving themselves gifted actors.”²⁹

So the individual hatewaves of the hollow men in control of communication were radiated to the public. What kind of a public? Søren Kierkegaard in 19^th century Copenhagen brilliantly diagnosed the anti-community of the lie constituted by the kind of manipulative / partipulative intoxicant communication indulged in by the National Socialist regime:

“In order that everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage – and that phantom is the public. It is only in an age which is without passion, yet reflective, that such a phantom can develop itself with the help of the Press which itself becomes an abstraction . . . Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction ‘the public,’ consisting of unreal individuals . . .”

“A public is everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant: one can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public, and still the public will be less than a single real man, however unimportant . . . More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to being nothing at all—in order to become the public . . . The public is unrepentant, for it is not they who own the dog—they only subscribe. They neither set the dog on any one, nor whistle it off—directly . . . And if the dog had to be killed they would say: it was really a good thing that bad-tempered dog was put down, every one wanted it killed—even the subscribers.”³⁰

Could we have such a “public” here? Karl Kraus compared the service of the leading Viennese paper, Die Neue Freie Presse, so perfectly in harmony with the spiritual atrophy of the day, to that of a “young, powerful, sympathetic masseuse.”³¹ Then there is the virtual homogenization of the Irish weekday print media and of RTE’s “psych-jockeys” ³² and commentators at a level of human flatness perhaps comparable to that of the Neue Freie Presse.³³ The cheerful harmony within this wasteland of cliché is a reminder that the Neue Freie Presse created, served, and was deserved by its spiritually concussed audience.

Restoring Genuine Conversation

However impermeable the anti-world of the lie generated by disintegrative media can seem, it is always possible to recover true public conversation again.³⁴ Socrates died but the dialogue as a lived form of open democratic discussion survives. Ignazio Silone, Karl Kraus, the East European samizdat writers, all showed that even under Fascist, National Socialist or Communist repression, it was still possible to maintain and restore substantive communication. And writers like Albert Camus in France, G. K. Chesterton and George Orwell in England, Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy, contributed as much as any to keeping open critique alive in their societies. Encouraged by their work, it might be possible to formulate a Code of Conduct for the Well-Tempered Journalist:

1. Being a journalist doesn’t excuse me from being a person-in-dialogue.

2. Belonging to the audience for media communications doesn’t excuse me from being a person-in-dialogue either.

3. Don’t economize with the truth to others as you wouldn’t want them to economize the truth to you.

4. A Brno journalist, Blanka Pinosova, supplied me with a fourth point, from the Czech writer, Jan Werich: “It’s not possible to overcome stupidity, but neither can we stop trying to struggle against it, otherwise stupidity will invade the whole world.”

5. To learn off by heart the Prophet Ezekiel, Ch. 33, Verses 7–9: “So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your soul.”35

Notes

1. Eric Voegelin’s clarifies of the meaning of the lie, which for him can range from:

“the straight lie concerning a fact to the subtler lie of arranging a context in such a manner that the omission of the fact will not be noticed; or from the construction of a system that, by its form suggests its partial view as the whole of reality to its author’s refusal to discuss the premises of the system in terms of reality experienced.”

In The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 28. Eds. Thomas Hollweck & Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 113.

2. The Facts of Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 136.

3. We could present this schematically as a ‘happy circle’ of i) communicator’s respect for audience; ii) audience’s attentive reception; iii) community of truth and of trust. Note 7 below further develops this “happy circle” of communication.

4. Cf. Eric Voegelin, “Necessary Moral Bases for Communication in a Democracy.” In: Problems of Communication in a Pluralistic Society, ed. R. C. Seitz et al. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1956), 54–68.

5. Cf. The Collected Dialogues of Plato , eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 1588f, 1591.

6. That is to say, there is a mutual intersection of i) communicating; ii) assimilating; iii) community-building, with “happy circles” of communication being initiated both “from above” and “from below.” See Claude-Jean Bertrand’s La déontologie des médias (Paris: Que sais-je [PUF], 1997), 83–103 which considers, among other things, Media Accountability Systems and which opened this author’s eyes to the enormous diversity of expressions of “communication from below.”

7. Paul H. Weaver’s News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works at p.148 (New York: Free Press, 1994), Weaver was a writer and editor for Fortune magazine.

8. News and the Culture of Lying at p. 87, the opening line of Chapter 4 [entitled ‘Wayward Heroes’].

9. Karl Kraus, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, II (Munich: DTV, 1975), 230.

10. Easily available from Penguin, 1972, in Jessie Coulson’s excellent translation.

11. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 28. Eds. Thomas Hollweck & Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 112, 115.

12. Cf. Silvano Arieti’s four stages of schizophrenic contraction in his Interpretation of Schizophrenia , (New York: Robert Brunner, 1955), 321–78.

13. Pensées (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 270.

14. Ibid., 349, 348.

15. Collected Poems , 1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1974), 192.

16. Joe McCarroll, ‘The Princess and the Saint,’ The Irish Family, 12/9/1997.

17. One can infer a collusion between inciting media and incited audience in preferring passionate intemperance to rational reflection and just action.

18. Chapter 5 of Weaver’s News and the Culture of Lying, is called “Editocracy.” But the chastening account of President Kennedy’s”‘coldly mercenary relationship” towards the sycophantic Newsweek and later Washington Post editor, Benjamin Bradlee, indicates, perhaps, where the power really lies. (pp. 129–133)

19. As opposed to our earlier “happy circle” of genuine communication “from above” we can speak of a manipulative communication from above in terms of i) stupefying; ii) being stupefied; and iii) community of the lie. Weaver notes that “The central fact about the interaction between news media and the people they cover is that the people being covered know the media are watching and behave accordingly . . . For their part the news media are aware that newsmakers are performing, but they nonetheless treat newsmakers’ fabrications as authentic actions.” (News and the Culture of Lying, [Weaver’s italics] p. 6)

20. Ernest Dichter, Handbook of Consumer Motivations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 211.

21. The White House Transcripts. ed. Gerald Gold (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), 419.

22. Ibid., 445.

23. Ibid., 803.

24. The corresponding vicious circle of manipulation “from below,” can be not only the desire to be manipulated, but also the dumbing-down effect of this on the media themselves. Then that manipulation “from below” can itself take the dominant role of dumbing-down the media. Both media and audience can thus be caught in a mutual vicious circle or double-bind of i) stupefying; ii) being stupefied; and iii) community of the lie.

25. A classic study of media-lynching is, of course, Heinrich Böll’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (Munich: DTV, 1986). In the light of Professor Schönbach’s examples, Böll’s ironic opening disclaimer is as relevant as ever: “The characters and events in this story are fictional. If the description of certain journalistic practices are similar to those of Bild newspaper, these similarities are neither intended nor accidental, but unavoidable.” (Ibid., 5)

26. Professor Schönbach’s statistics on the rise of attacks on immigrant workers following media coverage of earlier attacks amply illustrates this effect.

27. Eric Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 79.

28. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Sphere Books, 1979), 62ve9.

29. Ibid., p. 105

30. The Present Age (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 59-66.

31. Die Fackel, 36, March 1900, p. 15. (Reprinted in Die Fackel, Vol. 2, Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1968)
32. A phrase used by Walker Percy. His “Last Donahue Show” in Lost in the Cosmos (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984, 48-59), is hilariously relevant for the Irish “public.”

33. Some would find the differences between say, RTÉ and the Irish Independent, or between The Irish Times and independent newspapers in general, more a matter of style than substance. Too many opinion-formers working in Irish media exhibit a rather uniform cultural orientation roughly characterizable as 18th century anti-religious, 19th century progressivist-scientistic, 20th century ostensive compassion. It is a mixture with which a reasonably large slice of the Irish public is comfortable.

34. Recalling Michael Oakeshott’s understanding of civilization as a conversation, where the relations ‘are not those of assertion and denial, but the conversational relationships of acknowledgement and accommodation.’ (In: Rationalism in Politics, Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991, 187)

35. Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, U. of Missouri Press, 1999, translated by Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell, at p 201.

This excerpt is from Media in Ireland: The Search for Ethical Journalism (Four Court Press, 1999)

Print