A double rose deception
Caught the eye How journalists bend reality to celebrate neoliberalism. And how this results in newspapers that look young but read old.
Column How journalists bend reality to celebrate neoliberalism. And how this results in newspapers that look young but read old. The cycle from rebellious design to product is getting shorter in late capitalism. While it took 20 years for advertisers to take Ché off the walls of their children's rooms and put him in advertisements for knick-knacks and trinkets, the French Non on the European Constitution was already being used in three advertisements ten hours after the vote was counted. In the past, it seemed that journalists matured leisurely from a stormy phase into feature writers (it was different for female journalists, women are born with brains) - today, editors leap from adolescence straight into old age.
There is no other way to understand how young many newspapers look and how old they read.
With the gesture of a beer drinker shooting at night-time rioters with an air rifle, people are held up to the unemployed, the marginalized, civil servants, strangers and other threats. Rigid with fear, but well camouflaged. In the name of modernization, conservative incrustations are to be broken up, obstructions are to be removed, the caring state dragged down, the way paved for the strong and initiatives. A right-wing revolution, in other words.
But what manifests itself here as a will to change is only, at least among the better minds, a sense of the precarious moment, i.e. the fear of soon becoming one of the unemployed. The reflex is old: by excluding the weaker members of society, we hope to maintain our own social status for longer.
You almost want to feel sorry for them: they celebrate the neoliberal awakening - and don't realize that it was canceled long ago. They fervently adhere to a dead religion.
That would hardly be worth mentioning. Not even that their credo, although refuted by economic realities, has now become mainstream. Mainstreams pass away, and brain workers have a great tendency to be subservient to the wishes of their time. One can therefore hope.
Were it not for a less banal circumstance: the bending of unwieldy reality towards neoliberal dogma can only be achieved at the price of the complete devaluation of all concepts.
It would be interesting to argue and write about how society should be renewed, how obstacles should be broken, how solidarity should be reorganized. In thinking, movement is the principle. Of course, one would have to have a concept of what drives a society. For example, that individualism can only develop in a functioning society where the individual is adequately protected from imponderables. For our early-aging editorial staff, however, there is no such thing as society - in this they are in line with the whole squad of new-right thinkers.
In this way, the coldness of the global market is reinterpreted as the coldness of the welfare state. New Speak is rampant, and not just in Weltwoche, the stomach of the agitated petty bourgeoisie: war is peace. Surveillance is freedom. The dictates of the market are democracy.
In the industry, this trickery is known as the "double whammy". It goes like this: You are privileged, you are mainstream. But claim to be the helpless victim of a greedy state and its
To be a welfare recipient. You can, with a revolutionary gesture, declare your own privilege and the mainstream to be the goal of human emancipation.
This is how the meaning of words disintegrates. This devalues the debate as a means of democratic confrontation. This is how reality becomes illegible.
The media, which were supposed to create publicity, are now contributing to its destruction.
PS: Mr. K. from Z., who has discovered media ecology, announces in an inflamed letter to the editor that he has just founded the "Association of Victims of the Stultification Industry". He wants to sue private television and is confident that "organized dumbing down" will be equated with bodily harm. I wrote back to him saying that prohibition might be the wrong approach. Perhaps it would make more sense to take care of the media, which still pretend to serve to inform and enlighten the world.
> Oliver Fahrni is a freelance journalist and media ecologist.
There is no other way to understand how young many newspapers look and how old they read.
With the gesture of a beer drinker shooting at night-time rioters with an air rifle, people are held up to the unemployed, the marginalized, civil servants, strangers and other threats. Rigid with fear, but well camouflaged. In the name of modernization, conservative incrustations are to be broken up, obstructions are to be removed, the caring state dragged down, the way paved for the strong and initiatives. A right-wing revolution, in other words.
But what manifests itself here as a will to change is only, at least among the better minds, a sense of the precarious moment, i.e. the fear of soon becoming one of the unemployed. The reflex is old: by excluding the weaker members of society, we hope to maintain our own social status for longer.
You almost want to feel sorry for them: they celebrate the neoliberal awakening - and don't realize that it was canceled long ago. They fervently adhere to a dead religion.
That would hardly be worth mentioning. Not even that their credo, although refuted by economic realities, has now become mainstream. Mainstreams pass away, and brain workers have a great tendency to be subservient to the wishes of their time. One can therefore hope.
Were it not for a less banal circumstance: the bending of unwieldy reality towards neoliberal dogma can only be achieved at the price of the complete devaluation of all concepts.
It would be interesting to argue and write about how society should be renewed, how obstacles should be broken, how solidarity should be reorganized. In thinking, movement is the principle. Of course, one would have to have a concept of what drives a society. For example, that individualism can only develop in a functioning society where the individual is adequately protected from imponderables. For our early-aging editorial staff, however, there is no such thing as society - in this they are in line with the whole squad of new-right thinkers.
In this way, the coldness of the global market is reinterpreted as the coldness of the welfare state. New Speak is rampant, and not just in Weltwoche, the stomach of the agitated petty bourgeoisie: war is peace. Surveillance is freedom. The dictates of the market are democracy.
In the industry, this trickery is known as the "double whammy". It goes like this: You are privileged, you are mainstream. But claim to be the helpless victim of a greedy state and its
To be a welfare recipient. You can, with a revolutionary gesture, declare your own privilege and the mainstream to be the goal of human emancipation.
This is how the meaning of words disintegrates. This devalues the debate as a means of democratic confrontation. This is how reality becomes illegible.
The media, which were supposed to create publicity, are now contributing to its destruction.
PS: Mr. K. from Z., who has discovered media ecology, announces in an inflamed letter to the editor that he has just founded the "Association of Victims of the Stultification Industry". He wants to sue private television and is confident that "organized dumbing down" will be equated with bodily harm. I wrote back to him saying that prohibition might be the wrong approach. Perhaps it would make more sense to take care of the media, which still pretend to serve to inform and enlighten the world.
> Oliver Fahrni is a freelance journalist and media ecologist.
