Interview: Mark Dery “Vive la presse”

Getting an interview with Mark Dery, is like running after a train, with “the meaning of it all” on board. Admittedly, a lot of faith to put into a “culture critic”, media specialist, teacher and author who lives 2000 miles away. In his essay entitled "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs"(1993), he portraits a corporate controlled news media and its revolutionary “culture jammers” (see also Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Ch.12). We spoke to him about Media morals, and the environment.

Albert Camus said in his articles about the 'nouvelle presse' in the France of 1944 that 'the press before the war [WW2] was lost in its principle and in its morals. The appetite for money and indifference to important issues except for a few rare exceptions, meant the media had no other goal other than to increase individual power and to debase the morals of everyone.'

- Do you think this analysis of the press could stand true for all Peacetime democracies?

MD: Why just "before the war," I wonder? And what's morality got to do with it? (This is Camus the recovering Catholic talking, I suspect!) I'm no authority on Camus, and deeply ignorant when it comes to the French news media, but if it's anything like the U.S. press, its failings are what complexity theorists would call an "emergent property" of the Hobbesian ecosystem known as globalized capitalism.

Morality is a liability if you're a corporation struggling to be the fittest survivor in your market niche in a global economy. Pardon my vulgar Marxism, but Camus's amorality sounds, to my American ear, like business as usual. Corrosive to the fabric of democracy? To be sure. But it's more a product of untrammeled capitalism than individual venality.

The U.S. newsmedia, for its part, has always been torn between its warring impulses to play watchdog, attack dog, and lap dog. In the States, the postwar decades witnessed the corporatization and monopolization of the media industry, together with the steady erosion of the cultural influence of the morning newspaper by TV, now the primary source of news for most Americans. Corporate overlords, ever eager to maximize opportunities for synergistic cross-promotion of their media products, insinuate product placement into network news.

Conservative media kingpins (Rupert Murdoch, white courtesy phone...) use networks like Fox and Clear Channel as bullhorns for their right-wing ideologies. Politicians bought and paid for by press barons like Murdoch allow lobbyists to write communications legislation, sweetheart deals that trample on the public trust. MBA-holding executives with zero experience in journalism but well-armed with MBAs insist on profit margins that bleed news divisions white. Investors demand stratospheric profits even as newspaper readerships and TV audiences wither away, forcing news executives to downsize their staffs to skeleton crews and shutter foreign desks (a catastrophically short-sighted decision that virtually ensures America's geopolitical ignorance at the very historical moment that our cowboy Caligula, George the Second, has armed himself with a nervous-making doctrine of "American exceptionalism" and declared pre-emptive war on anyone fool enough to reach for his six-gun first.)

As for the costly, time-intensive, advertiser-unfriendly investigative reporting that calls power to account and ensures a citizenry well-informed about Weapons of Mass Destruction or horrors closer to home? As we say in New York, forget about it.

So are the newsmedia more lapdog to power than public watchdog? No question. But there are still inspiring exceptions to that unhappy rule, such as England's John Pilger and Robert Fisk, The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, The New Yorker's Sy Hersch, and vigilant media critics and rogue reporters such as Michael Massing (New York Review of Books), Robert McChesney (author of, Norman Solomon (AlterNet), Marc Cooper (LA Weekly), Jack Shafer (Slate), Amy Goodman (Pacifica Radio), Eric Alterman (The Nation), and FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting).

Despite all the "scare talk" and the simulated pictures of NYC under water...people (the developed countries) aren't necessarily waking up to their responsibility of taking care of the world's environment.
Was just wondering if you thought any form of visual media could truly rock the boat? Propaganda campaigns have worked before...

MD: Apocalyptic environmentalism is *the* political issue of next thousand years---if we survive to tangle with it, and don't find ourselves living in the pages of J.G. Ballard's disaster novel, THE DROWNED WORLD. Maybe I'm a left-wing Jeremiah, but sweet reason doesn't seem to be winning the day in an America ruled by craven plutocrats who will keep denying the reality of global warming, heads deep in the sand, as the rising tides lap at their gated compounds. The United States, early in the 21st century, makes Caligulan Rome look sane by comparison. I mean, Caligula was rumored merely to have appointed his beloved horse Incitatus a senator; we've handed the imperial presidency, and with it the world's biggest nuclear stick, to a smirking chimp. Now, he's behaving just as Jane Goodall might have predicted, terrorizing the world with his threat-posturing and his territory-marking. Meanwhile, the polar caps are melting merrily away, driftnet fishing is pushing edible species to the brink of extinction, and Xtreme Weather is here to stay. Katrina was only the beginning; we'd all better move our beach chairs a few hundred miles inland, because the world's coastlines are going to be radically redrawn if current climatological trends continue. Fact-based appeals to reason don't seem to be getting much traction among world leaders whose decisions are based on the Machiavellian calculus of their own short-term political fates---specifically, the need to curry favor with their corporate benefactors in the petroleum industry---or their devout belief in the consoling fictions of Bronze Age cosmologies, or both. My great worry that is even the rising tides won't instill some sense of "planetary awareness" in our Dear Leaders, to resurrect a moldering phrase from the eco-conscious '70s. Do they have an escape plan, equal parts DOCTOR STRANGELOVE and SILENT RUNNING? Are they planning to hit the eject button when the going gets tough and send their gated communities, well-staffed by small persons of a brownish hue, hurtling toward the stars, in search of new worlds to colonize? Somehow, we have to deny them that failsafe, and make them understand that, like it or not, we're all in the same leaky little POSEIDON lifeboat together. Demanding a green plank in every political platform might be a more effective way of impressing that on our politicians, as opposed to placing our faith in images that would presumably shock us into action.

Mark Dery is a cultural critic and the author of _Escape Velocity_ (a seminal critique of digital culture published in French by Flammarion as _Vitesse Virtuelle_) and, most recently, of _The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink_ (Grove/Atlantic).

When he's not teaching media studies and literary journalism at NYU, he's writing _Don Henley Must Die_, a book about the cultural psyche of the Southern California borderlands, where he grew up.

He blogs at www.markdery.com/blog.html.