These are 'Good People': On Left Media
In this essay, R.C. Roberts gives a scathing review of Left Media; they are not worth the wager, as they are not 'alternative media' but 'auxiliary media'.
There is a story that I am quite fond of, concerning the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the misanthrope who had the nerve to tell Richard Wagner to stop writing music. The veracity is, I must say, questionable but I am going to ask the reader to exercise their imagination for a moment, disregarding the psychotic adherence to 'facts' that plagues us now.
The story goes like this: Arthur Schopenhauer was known to frequent a restaurant that had a detachment of British soldiers who spent some of their day at the establishment. Whenever Schopenhauer came into the place and saw that the redcoats were in audience, he took out a coin and placed it in the center of the table. When he had finished reading the paper and eating his meal, he would place the coin back into his pocket and head on out. So the story goes, a waiter became curious (and, it seems, brave) about this tendency. Summoning the gall--and the balls--to approach the cantankerous philosopher, he asked Schopenhauer why he did this. Schopenhauer replied that he had put a wager to himself; if the Brits talked of something other than horses, dogs, or women, he would take the coin and put it into the poor box. And, as of that moment, he had yet to drop it into the poor box.
If our current cyberspace was something more of a restaurant, (more organized and leaving one with some subsistence) I would find that every time I entered through one of our social media platforms, I might too perform this wager. Of course, I would not have to limit myself to the British, silly as they are, nor would I be wagering about the talk of horses, dogs, or women. No no, I would be wagering this: whether I can go without seeing someone praise the media outlets on the Left, or fanatically suggest them to this or that straggler as a form of enlightenment? And I can tell you that this wager would end the same; I would verifiably be a Republican, as I would never donate to a poor box or charity.
Left Media. It is the circus that came to town but never left. Filled with clowns, elephants and jackasses, media personalities walking tightropes of heresy, and jugglers who throw up talking points and lackluster theater, juggling them with all the coordination of Sully Sullenberger. What started out as an earnest performance in the face of the ever encroaching casinos of mainstream media, Left Media has become a tent city where every two bit 'personality' set up their tarps and and lights, hiring clowns to keep up with the places that offer you great popcorn and dirty seats. Different, hand cranked versions of "Entry of the Gladiators" play over each other, melding their music into a gray milieu of noise that drowns out dreams. This harlequinade is not complete without seeing that, on the other side of the river where our skirmishes are re-enacted, there exists the same circus, tent cities and all, with slightly different music--something like a marching song written by an illiterate for the stupid to goose step to--that is the inversion of us on this side. They sit on the Right side, and we sit on the Left--and not even Caesar would consider it a good idea to cross that river.
Now, I might be something of a crank, sneering as I do; after all, some people cannot get enough of the games, the smells, the almost disorganized and badly dressed humor of the circus. They would sleep under the tent flaps and wander the fun houses forever, to the point of taking a job here. And they are encouraged to, as all of us are; it is truly a crime of our technological prix fixe that we made the podcast so easy to assemble. Now every person with someone else's opinion can voice it, freely badgering those who have our own opinions, wanting us to give up on thinking and just consume their cobbled together nonsense. We should have had all the podcasting equipment manufactured by IKEA--at least we could bar some of the more ridiculous by merely stumping them with instructions.
Of course, one can learn from the media, if one is observant. C. Derick Varn sits, a dark clothed mime, in the corner of this circus, willing to scare the children and pop their balloons. He encourages only the brave or foolish to his place, where he dazzles people with explanations of how a light switch is not needed to make a light bulb glow. Sam Seder and his The Majority Report, when he is not sniffing the air for a 'debate' to join so he can go splashing in the river in faux-combat, can be helpful by talking with experts: he gives you a pamphlet to read while you watch the elephant routine, and the massive shits they leave behind. There are those like The Young Turks, Rising or The Bad Faith Podcast, who do not know they are clowns, but think they are actors destined for Broadway when they are not even destined for the imaginations of their audiences. Every once in a while, they get caught in the current of the river and end up on the Right side of the riverbank. And some, like Brihanna Joy Gray, set up their tents there, and one wonders if they are thriving or if they are drowning.
Alas, I have begun my rant on Left Media, mistakenly, in medias res. Let me place my coin back in my pocket, having failed my own wager, and begin a-new my diatribe against this circus.
* *
Being quite the Sybarite myself, I am not an enemy of having fun with entertainment and enjoying oneself. I am forever the enemy of the Adorno anchorites who scowl at all things from culture, rejecting them with a puritan's grimace. I am an acolyte of hedonism, believing wholeheartedly the words of H.L. Mencken, that immorality is merely the morality of those having a better time of things. Indulgence is fine with me.
Media often provides this, purposefully or on accident. This is something we now search out, starting with when we went looking to comedy shows like The Daily Show or This Week with John Oliver, a tendency that is in our near past. It is quite an American thing, truly; the news we are informed by requires the spice of distraction to make us focus. Frankly, the ability of a comedian to tell us what was going on without seeming to dress it up made people feel informed. It seemed to differentiate itself from the mainstream media through ridicule, giving us a view of absurdity while allowing us to be immune to it. We were in the know. Or so we assumed.
This setup should sound familiar; it is the same formula that is currently used in Left Media. Personalities in studios, with the same make up and monkey suit, crack wise and joke and talk about this or that 'dumb' conservative, usually their counterpart in the Rightist circus across the river. From their position, uttered most clearly in the incantation 'Left is Best' (as though this is a game), you are meant to feel beyond the mainstream media, outside of it. When Ana Kasparian scoffs at Ben Shapiro or Ben Burgis rasps out some talking point against a tin-hat libertarian he dug up at the bottom of the barrel, or Sam Seder calls into Dennis Prager's show, you are expected to scoff, rasp, and hope along with them. You do it from a position of superiority. It is homiletics for those who believe themselves beyond the mainstream, even as you are drowning in it.
This auxiliary media, however, is not doing this sort of thing, only appearing to. You are not beyond the fray at all. In fact, if there was no mainstream media, there would be no Left Media. As a good friend of mine, Dwayne Monroe, has noted; the role of Left Media has become a way to track reactionaries and know exactly what they say. Our media personalities have become ambulance chasers on a NASCAR racetrack, following sirens that are following sirens, with dying patients in their box. This epidemic of being a xerox is mildly mitigated by the corraling of 'experts' to talk on this or that topic. Sometimes, these experts are quite impressive, but oftentimes it is a reach around for a different personality, brought forth for some air time. If you talk about one thing on enough podcasts and talk shows, you will be mistaken for an expert. As the auxiliary media continues, you see it beginning to resemble the mainstream media it claims to despise. The creation of a sports news show on The Majority Report should surprise no one; they are expanding their audience to include those who only want entertainment, with the news being a break in the coverage on their favorite football team.
As far as I can see, there is little to nothing alternative about Left Media; it is the tumor on the ass of the mainstream media, and one realizes it is not cancerous but benign--it will never kill anything, only scare it a little.
* *
Now there is nothing wrong with sports (I am an Eagles fan, for better or worse), or making wisecracks--although one should consider the words of supreme wit Dorothy Parker, who noted that wit and wisecrack are quite distant from each other. One has a little truth, and one is words doing calisthenics. And the jokes of Left Media are a verbal yoga session.
But Left Media is often quite righteous, in that it is convinced of its indignation as something more than mere entertainment. They are not doing yoga, you see, they are doing a 'spiritual awakening', or channeling 'the power of meditation', or are in the service of some charismatic yogi or guru. Each circus tent has its star and leading acts. You are encouraged to invest some part of your faith in the acts of performers, and are compensated with treats and autographs…if you are lucky.
But where, exactly, does this righteousness come from? To what do we owe such exalting? 'The audience' is not here to exalt, but to be treated to exaltation. The human desire for power requires something to lord over or someone to lord over oneself, so that it might be satisfied. And thus it is not from 'the viewer' that the power and righteousness of our Left Media comes from. It is not from mere ideology; the Left is more quarrelsome than Christians, and just as sectarian. To say words like 'justice', 'revolution', 'proletariat' is to start a fight rather than to unite our chain-breakers.
I found my answer while considering something Gore Vidal wrote in his infamous essay, written for Esquire in 1967 called "The Holy Family". In this essay, Vidal does a wondrous breakdown of the Kennedy family and their place as heroes in American culture. Yes, those Kennedys, who only recently had their pasty heir repulsed from their home turf by Ed Markey. In this essay, Vidal makes many good points, as always, but one sentence stood out to me:
"The death of a young leader necessarily strikes an atavistic chord. For thousands of years, the man-god was sacrificed to ensure with blood the harvest, and there is always an element of ecstasy as well as awe in our collective grief." (Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, p. 319)
Here, I will put my finger on a nerve; the righteousness of Left Media is, in no small part, a product of the afterlife of their very own man-god, Michael Brooks. Much like John F. Kennedy, who Vidal spends his time humanizing and dragging away from the legend that protects him, Michael Brooks is swaddled in legend and atavism. Whole sections of our progressive Left are militants about him and his legacy, and any slight lèse-divinitè is met with a rabid anger that only a saint could stir up from beyond the grave.
This is where I might put my hands out to catch myself, waving a bag of treats to try to stay the growls of the rabidly faithful. I might note that I have no qualms with Brooks as a person, since I do not know him. I would say, in words that will be forgotten, I am not saying Brooks himself is evil. Or I would plead with the audience to realize I am more concerned with the use of his legacy than his own career.
But I would have to follow this up with my disbelief in his legend, which is all the faithful will care about. Like the fact that, from what I have seen of Michael Brooks or read of him, he appears as little more than a middling pundit with the lukewarm charisma of a movie bartender. Or the fact that his slogans, like 'be ruthless with systems, be kind to people' ring empty to me, like the insides of the head of a Funko bobblehead. Or my dismissal of his tendency to pretend complicated issues have simple solutions, or his use of the term 'cosmopolitan socialism'--an exercise in tautology.
And so I shrug, and I continue; the righteousness of Left Media is born almost entirely out of the death and afterlife of Michael Brooks. The sudden death of a young pundit means that those in the media, particularly those who knew Brooks, can mine forever all the potential Brooks will never be able to achieve. His broad, vague premises or slogans can be used to make people believe he would have believed their particular vision of what the Left ought to be. They can, say, be used by Ana Kasparian to tell you how Brooks 'moved her Left', which apparently lasted only as long as she did not see a grainy camera angle of someone hitting someone on a subway platform. Brittle stuff, these sorts of legends; man-gods live on, but only through their curators.
But, curated as the Michael Brooks legend is, it is used to cover up the auxiliary manner of which Left Media now functions. We have remembrances of Michael Brooks' birthday, of his death, and moments in between where his name is evoked in starry eyes and pretentious spoken sotto voce. If you push members of Left Media about their beliefs, they will always make some cursory note towards Michael Brooks, even those who did not know him. People point to The Michael Brooks Project, while sneering at the charities that function in much the same way--and sneer as they should.
Between collective grief and moments of ecstasy, Left Media commits to nothing but entertainment, even when it claims otherwise. They are the heirs of the comedy shows that attempted a synthesis of humor and seriousness, but their synthesis is veiled in the rote religion of dead man-gods, who gave their life for the future of the Left. A future as vague as the slogans that keep it buoyed.
* *
Here we are, back again at the table, the coin put in its center. The wager begins again. Of course, the response to all of this has been uttered only recently by Burgis in his rehabilitation of Ana Kasparian from her reactionary take on criminal justice in LA; you see, she is 'good people'. Given the fondness of people on the Left for The Sopranos, such thinking is a funny coincidence that I want to take advantage of. This Left Media, which paints its auxiliary and entertainment-driven style with the broad brush of atavism, has formed its own group of 'good people'. People who, buoyed by association or acceptance of the Brooks legend and what it entails, are seen as beyond the system of the Left Media.
The audiences are not quite as stupid as they act; if pushed, they will admit that the media is not quite a place of revolutionary spirit or progressive activism or whatever driver of ideology is their bread and butter bad faith. But they will sweep under the rug the systematic issues of Left Media, of the way it requires the mainstream media to exist, or the fact that it seems more geared towards entertainment while claiming otherwise. All is hand waved by mere reference to the fact that its hosts 'mean well' or are 'good people'. Where the media personalities themselves mean 'good people' in a clannish manner, the audience mean it in a sense of morality. They truly believe in these people, who they ought to be the most skeptical of; be it people like Sam Seder or Jason Myles or Jimmy Dore (for our yellow socialists) or anyone else. But personality is more important, as the basis of legitimacy in Left Media is a pundit who has been canonized as a saint.
I would say that Left Media, if it wished to be serious, could continue their entertainment enterprise but could attempt to revive the notion of 'citizen journalism'; or, as I prefer to call it, 'street journalism'. In America, a great number of people have ways of documenting the world on a ground level, away from the reporters of the mainstream media. If one were to develop a media outlet built on the use of a network of street journalists who report things on their own, we might not have to endure day after day of outrage driven watching of Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro. We already waste our time using 'Callin' or having people call in at The Majority Report from all over the nation; could we not use this interconnectedness to have people around the nation who could be asked to turn in video, documents, photographs, etc. about places that are important? Give Left Media its own perspective on the world, seeing it and interpreting it for itself, rather than interpreting trash from the mainstream?
Alas, I pick the coin up from the center of the table and put it back in my pocket; street journalism is opposed to the righteous personalities of our Left auxiliary media and the 'good people' who have made their life out of a streaming punditry, sitting astride podcasters and bloggers. They want their crowds and their makeup and their monkey suits. They want to do their tightrope acts and have their reenactment battles in the river against their cousins on the other side. Every day is a day to cross the Rubicon, and they cast their die--onto their hair, of course.
And just as it was with Schopenhauer, so it is with Left Media; there is no money going into the poor box from this wager.
Street journalism is unlikely because the media incentives for it don't exist, romantic affectations aside.