If you haven’t already seen it, Paris Hilton is featured in a new spoof of McCain’s “celebrity” ad. Between that mock-ad and Obama getting heckled in Florida by some young black activists, this week might have provided us with two of our most conspicuous examples of the electorate/audience striking back.
That is probably just wishful thinking, but I’m sticking to it (for now).
Of course, the candidates are already well aware of the fact that they don’t totally control the terms of their own media representations. They try to “stay on message” and to redefine their opponent in unflattering ways, but none of that matters unless media outlets take the bait and concede to framing their stories within anything close to the parameters suggested by campaign spinmeisters.
What makes this all the more fascinating is the fact that broadcast and print journalists (as well as high-profile bloggers) still insist on talking in almost completely reflectivist terms about the media’s impact on the election. We know about their traditionally understood (and well-researched) role as agenda setters, but they seem to embrace that mandate with nefarious abandon come election time, to turn the screw just another rotation or two. Almost every FOX or CNN pundit can too-easily invoke what “Americans” are saying/thinking about the candidates this week, offering those thoughts up as realities stumbled upon (as opposed to incantations for consideration and internalization).
I am always interested in the extent to which particular talking heads actually believe themselves to be flagging a reality or (in a more disingenuous way) self-consciously concocting that phantom aggregate with the specific intention of creating a reality out of thin air and memorable rhetoric, bluffing and pretending so as to purposefully change the contours of the public debate (even for only a second).
Of course, the Hilton ad and that CNN-covered heckling moment aren’t exempt from this dynamic. The only reason why we know about Hilton or those hecklers is a function of mass mediation’s ubiquity, its inescapability. There is no outside. No Neo to liberate us from this Matrix. And we have all signed the selfsame Faustian pact with those machines. Even a relatively inconsequential blog like this one can’t convincingly extricate itself from the reification that goes by the gloss “mass media.”
So, if escape is futile, what are we do to?
These are old questions, I know. And media scholars have been able to hazard some interesting answers. For now, I want to imagine that embracing the parodies and peanut galleries that pock-mark our too-sanitized public discourse might be a short-term tactical advantage for anybody trying to remember how important it is NOT to treat mass media offerings as transparent windows into our social world.
