What, no "damn dirty apes"? Mainstream media will have to suffice.

Even if he recently declined an assembled crowd the pleasure (and hilarity) of a re-enacted "Planet of the Apes" monologue, actor Charlton Heston came armed with moral umbrage no less dramatic. Addressing Northwestern University journalism students, the celebrity conservative and NRA apparatchik warned, "The media has become theatre, and I will ask you to do what you can to bring down that curtain." In "Heston shoots down biased press in speech," Erin Murphy of The Daily Northwestern reports that Heston, himself a Northwestern alumnus of sorts (he dropped out to enlist in the war effort), urged his listeners to become more adept critics of the media. As Heston lamented, "There's so little respect for the written word and so much aversion to free thought that truth causes can't be championed."

You don't have to be journalism major to recognize that Heston's jeremiad is nothing new. In fact, it's more like the cautionary refrain which accompanied the nineties American media scene, in which one mass media event followed another--OJ and the varied heirs to Watergate fame--like some sad parade of reject soap opera pilots. The media is a particularly dear target to ideologues like Heston, who see in it the permissive and prurient scent of the Left; as a result, today we owe to such conservatives wonderful neologisms as "limousine liberals."

More recently the media debate has taken on a different tenor, if not a different stage, to borrow Heston's metaphor. In the debate's earliest dispatches, the Internet was held aloft as a holy grail of revelation: the re-democratization of the news as we in the West knew it. It was supposed to realize a once quaintly sarcastic remark, by AJ Liebling, the father of media criticism, that "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Now, as the online landscape grows as a viable medium for commerce, market forces have accelerated the commercialization of the Internet that was already underway. In "Why the latest news about online news ain't so good," Media Channel's Danny Schechter examines recent MediaMetrix statistics that demonstrate web users are straying less and less from top-ranked, global conglomerate-owned sites. As new media begins to take on all the appearance of old media, with all its attendant problems, Schechter is right to be concerned: "But what kind of medium is the Internet as a place to keep in touch with a changing world?"

His answer for getting "news that's not in the news" isn't much different than Heston's. "As individuals," he writes, "we also have to take responsibility for our own media choices." Responsibility is a favourite term of the media, particularly of established newspapers, who wax euphemistic about their role as the public trust; irresponsibility is quite easily the most typical charge laid against them generally. Liebling, who wrote a column for the New Yorker called "The Wayward Press," related the idea succinctly. Today, in the converging landscape of news and entertainment, print and image, and commerce and culture, the provocative changes and challenges to our information-dense life are occurring ever more commonly in the so-called new media. In recognition of this climate and equal deference to the critical heritage of the media punditry that tries to make it intelligible, today's due concern is The Webward Press.

When Columbia Journalism Review opines that "media critics are blossoming like flowers in spring," it's not an idle observation. A recent issue was devoted to the increasing relevance for media experts-who may be as academic as commercial, as Malcolm Gladwell's discussion of information mavens in "The Tipping Point" makes clear. Never has media been so central to so many aspects of cultural, political, and economic life in the much-hyped global village. Never has Hollywood spanned and spoken for so much of our world. Not unlike Schechter, Max Rust contends that the utopian possibilities that the web would liberate modern consumers and revitalize democratic principles are fast diminishing. Rust quotes one pessimist's analogy: "'It was thought of as a library. Now, the Internet is a television, shopping mall and porn theater all in one building. Imagine the Mall of America with lots of porn theatres. It's that Net that's going to carry us into the coming decades.'"

Most of all, pundits and everyday people tend to have a predictable knee-jerk objection to commercialization when it affects media, because of its ideals of journalistic credibility and fairness. Such ideas read as fanciful to consumers of my generation, and perhaps as irrelevant to the hyper-consumer adolescents of the coming generation Y set. Still and all, one doesn't need to indulge Heston's "truth causes" rhetoric in full to feel a general affinity for its sentiment: if journalists can't be watchdogs to corporate indifference, who can? Every lingering doubt is additional fodder for a legion of social prognosticators: cultural reactionaries, the dons of postmodernism, and the authors of sundry Gutenberg elegies.

But, as in most times of crisis, there are signs of genuine response to these dark forecasts for the media. In some media quarters there's a steely resolve--somewhere on the far side of fawning celebrity reportage, political rainmaking and muckraking, and bullish business analysis--that there's respite from the acquiescing mood that characterizes "the essential and little-discussed backdrop to the New Era of journalism." In a recent column for Online Journalism Review, Matt Welch suggests considerable room for possibility against the tide of mass commercialization:

"My hope is based on the market. Consolidation of expression (print journalism, music, film, broadcasting, books, Web publishing) creates giant companies that become more inefficient and out-of-touch with each new employee. This conformism in turn breeds backlash, and nourishes the soil for independents. It's a well-established cycle in all businesses catering to the public tastes: Prohibition begets jazz, suburbia begets rock & roll, corporate rock begets punk. There are too many weirdos with energy in this country to allow a handful of bland, patronizing COOs to define our common media experience."

Maybe this is the news that's not in the news, but should be. Certainly there are appearances of it from time to time, and more often than not, these sightings are happening online. The Pulitzer people ignored Feed, Salon, and others this year, but realizes it can hardly delay paying new media the recognition it deserves: "Many, many of the stories they published would have been exemplary Pulitzers," Online Journalism Review argues. New Media will never be the figurative New Jerusalem some moral zealots have envisioned; nor will it ever be simply the Sin City of our new millennium. Others, like Welch, hint that it won't be Disneyworld either.

Copyright © 2000 Jeffrey MacIntyre All Rights Reserved

Jeffrey MacIntyre is a Vancouver writer whose recent work has appeared in The Ubyssey, the loop, and On Hoops.

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