MSM Depression

Two of my Sanity Squad colleagues have recently devoted some attention to the impact of the MSM on the zeitgeist.  Dr. Sanity, in an iteration of a point I have made many times, refers to the MSM function as a societal sensory apparatus and notes that when the voices continually tell us everything is terrible, it becomes difficult to fend off despair:

A PSYCHOTIC DEPRESSION WITH ECONOMIC HALLUCINOSIS

Americans are hearing voices in their heads. And like auditory hallucinations experienced by psychiatric patients, these voices whisper continual doom and gloom. They tell the American consumer that prices are too high. That the economy is tanking; that poverty is on the rise; and that everything is bad bad bad.

These voices have been persistent and continuous ever since the evil Republican came to dwell in the White House. They are unrelenting--no matter what the actual facts are. Recently, they have been extremely frightening, predicting a 30's style depression with (even for them) unusual enthusiasm and glee.

And, like the command hallucinations that torment many of my patients, they are complete and total distortions.

It is very rare for such voices to say anything at all positive. They have a specific goal--and that goal is the distortion of reality.

So why do patients believe them? Especially the one's that are bizarre and so obviously out of touch with any known reality? You know, the ones that say aliens have implanted electrodes in your brain and are monitoring your thoughts and things like that.

It is a triumph of false perceptions over reality. It is testimony to how profoundly and fundamentally people trust their perceptual faculties and let their peceptions rule, even when those perception come in conflict with common sense, truth, or reality.

We, the American people have come to have a similar trust in the voices of the MSM. Over the years, they have almost become an additional perceptual faculty that we rely on--simply because life has become too complicated and overwhelming, that the use of our ordinary senses is insufficient in the modern world.

Siggy agrees with Dr. Sanity's diagnosis and extends the explanation in The Self Loathing Of Journalists:

We see things on a parallel track. We wonder if the media is depressed as the result of being unsure of themselves and dissatisfied with their role as observers in society at large.

It would appear to the casual observer that media is assuming a role that has nothing to do with journalism because they are uncomfortable with who they are and with the role they have as journalists. By assuming this other role, the media indicate their very real psychosis, as Dr Sanity makes clear.

This kind of thinking is nothing new. We see it in children and we see it in political candidates.

The media have become exemplars of the children who cannot and will not behave or follow the rules by which they must abide. They want what they want and they want it now. They care little about the negative and destructive effects their behavior might have on others. They are concerned only with what affects them. Like those unruly children, journalists are not satisfied with the rules by which they must abide. Strict rules may apply to others, but never to them. Like children, they want the right to embellish and even deceive without ever getting called on their behavior. Question that behavior and you are partisan and your behavior and your motivations are called into question (”You hate me!”).

Siggy directs his attention to the narcissistic aspects of modern journalism, the inability of journalists, even when they aspire to objectivity, to assume their political views are coterminous with reality, rather than an outgrowth of their own particular ideology.  (Many journalists don't even recognize that they are espousing ideological points of view; they believe they are simply reporting the news.)

I would like to further extend the discussion to include a particular psychological effect that I was recently heir to in one of my posts.  It is a fairly well known observation that one's emotional state colors one's perceptions, yet this is rarely applied to the Media as a whole.  Siggy alludes to one aspect of MSM depression when he notes that the media is "unsure of themselves and dissatisfied with their role"; it is actually a little worse than he implies.  The people who are in charge of the MSM today came of age at a time when the intrepid investigating reporter, "speaking truth to power" was in his audacious youth, powerful, with the feelings of invincibility and righteousness of youth.  The late 60s and 70s were times when the MSM, in their own narrative, stopped an unjust war against oppressed brown people and brought down an incipient fascist president.  Those were heroic times.  As happens with most revolutionary movements, liberalism never noticed when they won and when the excesses of liberalism proved to be problematic, rather than reassess their ideology, they did what most movements do when they approach merely evolutionary rather than revolutionary success, they moved the goal posts. 

None other than E. J. Dionne notes the success of 60s liberalism:

From the death of John F. Kennedy in November of 1963 until the congressional elections of November 1966, liberals were triumphant, and what they did changed the world. Civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, clean air and clean water legislation, Head Start, the Job Corps and federal aid to schools had their roots in the liberal wave that began to ebb when Lyndon Johnson's Democrats suffered broad losses in the 1966 voting. The decline that 1966 signaled was sealed after April 4, 1968.

While the public may have begun to repudiate liberalism in 1966 and 1968, the MSM never did the same.  This began the long estrangement of the liberal MSM from the public, an estrangement that accelerated with the advent of conservative talk radio and further accelerated with the explosion of the Internet and its multiple points of view.  Even today, it is well understood among the cognoscenti that a politician cannot be elected President running as a liberal, hence the race by Barack Obama, who has the most liberal voting record in Congress, to escape the "liberal" appellation.  Liberalism has won, but in reaction to its victories it has lost touch with reality and moved the goalposts far from its roots of ensuring equal opportunity to previously marginalized groups to requiring equal outcomes for favored minorities (or majorities masquerading as minorities, such as women, to the disfavor of minorities seen as being part of the majorities, Jews and Asians, for example.) 

In addition, there is one more extremely important factor that drives the bleak views of the MSM that is at least as significant as ideology. 

Consider this recent poll reported in the New York Times and note the key take-away, which I have helpfully high-lighted:

Weak Economy Sours Public’s View of Future, New Poll Finds

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed that “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2003.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say that the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.

The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low point only in the months and years after an economic downturn, not at the beginning of one. Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape.  [Emphasis mine-SW]

Only 21 percent of respondents said that the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992, when the recession that began in the summer of 1990 had already been over for more than a year. In the latest poll, nearly two in three people said they believed the economy was in recession today.

If people say their own finances are still in fairly good shape yet they think the country is melting down, it can only mean that their perceptions of the greater country beyond their front yard is bleak. Since our perception of the country necessarily is filtered through the MSM, who after all are the ones showing us, through their eyes, what the country looks like, it is worth wondering if our sensory apparatus, the MSM, is showing a distorted picture of reality.

The MSM is, in fact, facing a depression, or perhaps, more accuratley, already in a depression:

Sometime, within the next twelve to eighteen months, the average circulation of the weekday edition of the New York Times will drop below one million. This event marks the continuing decline in the fortunes of what had been the U.S. newspaper of record as the New York Times' average circulation has been well above this level for decades.

We base this prediction upon data recently provided by the New York Times Company in its annual report, which it released earlier this year. Combined with circulation data provided by the Grey Lady's parent company in its previous Securites and Exchange Commission financial data filings, we've updated our charts showing the trend in the New York Times' weekday circulation since it peaked in 1993:

What is happening to the Times, the leader of the MSM, is happening throughout the industry, an industry that is failing and has not yet figured out how to stop their decline.  When facing such a bleak future, anger, resignation, and despair, especially when you feel particularly poorly suited to earning a living in any other way than through your words, are expectable reactions.  When people are depressed they tend to view the world through the filter of their depression; everything begins to look bleak and uninviting.  We do not expect depressed people to see the beauty in the world; all they can see is the despair that their own inner state imposes on their perceptions.  Our depressed media can only show us the worst and hope for utopian change ushered in by their favored candidate.  They still cling to the hope that if they continue their policies of "if it bleeds, it leads" people will buy it, despite all evidence that their currents efforts are failing; once such perceptual disturbance meshes with ideology, seeing recession and depression in even the most positive data, just as seeing failure in Iraq in every data point, is not only expected but, for many people, assumed.

If we fail in Iraq and the country falls into a Bush/Republican depression, it not only promises the triumphant return of liberalism but also ameliorates feelings of failure.  Success in Iraq and an economy insufficiently damaged so as to assure a President Obama victory in the fall will continue the decline of the MSM (which will continue in any event since the forces working against the MSM, to which their behavoir is contributory, are not likely to change anytime soon.)  The MSM depression is deserved and can only continue to color their reporting, further marginalizing them in a vicious cycle of despair.