Interesting take on the Arizona shootings

Matt Taibbi has received a lot of praise lately--deservedly so--for his high-quality investigative writing with Rolling Stone. He wrote insightful pieces on both Goldman Sachs and the Tea Party, both of which received a fair amount of recognition and accolades.

Earlier this week, he wrote a very level-headed response to the Arizona shootings on his blog, wondering aloud whether the media had a role in the incident--and whether there was anything that could be done to change that role going forward. I do recommend reading the whole thing (it's not particularly long), but I'll excerpt it here nonetheless.

Watching the coverage yesterday I was genuinely revolted by the reflexive ass-covering efforts by virtually everyone involved in either the politics or political media businesses. I turned on Fox just out of curiosity last night, and saw one pundit after another point out that Jared Loughner was probably a schizophrenic, a statistical aberration, and that no wider conclusions can or should be drawn by the actions of one lone nutcase. We can already see that the "Jared Loughner acted alone" defense is going to be widely employed. But I don't think that explanation is really going to fly...

If we're being honest with ourselves, we in the media understand that our job descriptions do not entirely overlap with the requirements of good citizenship. If you're in a marriage, or are a parent or living with parents, or have brothers or sisters or close friends, when you argue over a difficult issue, you don't just take out all the weaponry in your arsenal and blast away. In the interests of preserving the relationship, and because you respect and love the other person as a human being, you argue as politely and respectfully as possible. And your goal in arguing is always to fix the actual problem -- there's no other, ulterior motive.

That's just not the case in either journalism (and I should know-- more on that momentarily) or politics. In politics, you don't need to treat everyone with decency and humanity, just 51% of the crowd. Actually, given that half or less than half of all people don't vote, the percentage of people who require basic decency and indulgence is probably even lower than that, maybe 20-25% of the population. There's plenty of power and money to be won by skillfully stimulating public anger against some or all of the rest, and there are few rewards for restraint.

In the media, the situation is even worse. You can make vast fortunes riling up mobs. And because it's a fiercely competitive market, there's an obvious and immediate benefit to using superheated rhetoric -- it's more entertaining, gains more attention, and definitely gets more viewers and listeners and, er, readers.

And not only is there no incentive for restraint, there's actually a huge disincentive for restraint, because for many of us in the punditry world, our livelihoods depend upon cultivating audiences who come to expect a certain emotional payoff for tuning in. If you've trained them to expect to have their prejudices validated and their sense of Superiority Over the Other stroked every time they turn on your program, they're not going to like it when the show comes on and the editorial storyline is completely opposite.

Of course, any discussion over whether the media has a role must ultimately fall back on the consumers of the media's products--all of us. We can whine and complain all we want about how much we hate reality TV and the incendiary tone that political coverage has taken, but we watch it nonetheless.

I've spoken many times here about how much I hate the college football machine that has made untold millions for the NCAA and its institutional and corporate partners, but at the end of the day, I still tuned in for the BCS title game on Monday night, even as I railed against it on Facebook and via text messages to friends. I can blame the NCAA and ESPN all I want, but let's be honest--it's my fault.

The only power we all ultimately have in life is the power to walk away, to choose not to run. TV sucks and the networks are all throwing in the towel? Don't watch. They'll get the message. But as long as we are willing to watch, listen, or read the inflammatory rhetoric that continues to be spewed out by the national media, we'll simply get more and more of it.

Corporations are just collections of people, nothing more. And they don't have any power at all unless we as consumers give it to them. I'd love to blame this on the media or on the politicians, but all they're doing is responding to what their audience is asking for. We got what we asked for, as plain as that.

If we want our media outlets to begin behaving responsibly, we all as consumers and citizens need to behave in a way that ensures that their profitability and responsible citizenship go hand in hand--in other words, punish them in the pocket for behaving in ways that make America worse. We can't just expect the media to change their ways; we all need to look in the mirror and ask whether our own actions have helped fuel these societal shifts (and of course, they have). Until we do that, we can only blame ourselves.

[Rolling Stone]