Most of the way through Billy Bragg's July 31 performance at Northampton's Calvin Theater, someone in the balcony urged the folk singer to stop lecturing and start singing. Bragg had taken a few minutes to introduce a song. Doing so, he urged his audience to continue to be politically engaged and to be vigilant against cynicism in this new Age of Obama.
My offended neighbor, just a few seats away from me, insisted he was there to be entertained, not lectured. The show stopped dead in its tracks and there was an awkward silence.
Thankfully, the audience wasn't silent for long, and they began to boo the heckler. After a moment to compose himself, Bragg planted his feet wide apart, and borrowing a line that Pete Seeger and his folk brethren have been using for decades, he said he wasn't there to sing songs; he was there to save the world.
The audience's jeering turned into a standing ovation.
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Oh, if only we, the American consumers of news and entertainment and politics, were as collectively insightful as that audience the other night at the Calvin.
After the euphoria of the Bragg show, I read an Aug. 1 New York Times piece about an alleged rapprochement between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly, news magazine show hosts with famously opposed ideologies who've been trading pointed verbal attacks for well more than a year. The peace talks, the Times reported, were "hosted" by PBS interviewer Charlie Rose—the ostensibly neutral pontiff of late night commercial-free television—and didn't involve the two newsmen or representatives from their respective newsrooms. Rather, the Times reported, Rose sought and achieved the accord with their respective corporate chiefs, Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation (owner of Fox) and Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman of General Electric, owner of NBC. "[The] session hosted by Mr. Rose provided an opportunity for a reconciliation, sealed with a handshake between Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch," the Times reported.
"Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs," the Times reported. "Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal. & The reconciliation—not acknowledged by the parties until now—showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A GE shareholders' meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O'Reilly's producers) last April."
That may be how the Times saw it. It took online scribes like David Sirota on HuffingtonPost.com and Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com to get to what the new d?tente really showcased: in the name of civility, Charlie Rose paved the way for the suits at NBC and Fox to breach a divide between editorial and business interests that both corporations and their news divisions at least claim to respect.
"[The] real story is the heavy-handed intervention by the CEO of General Electric effectively forcing MSNBC's news team off a crucially important set of stories—namely, Fox News' politicization/Republicanization of media," writes Sirota. Like Greenwald, Sirota puts the MSNBC/Fox episode in the context of broader evidence over the last decade and a half of corporate parent companies exerting pressure and imposing limits on the newsrooms they control, as well as, Sirota writes "the even more nefarious and arguably more widespread practice of these same corporate media outlets promoting as 'objective' voices reporters and editorialists who have secret financial interests in the news they cover—all without any disclosure."
To stop it, will we all, en masse, shut off our televisions, stop buying GE products, and send some resolute signal to the boardrooms who would meddle in the newsrooms upon which any healthy democracy depends?
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Walking to work, I regularly see a car in Northampton emblazoned with three bumber stickers. Each one alone is fairly uninteresting. Together, they illustrate the conflicted modern mind, the mixed messages that we send and receive. One bumper sticker asks, "How bad does it have to get?" One is Obama's campaign logo. The last one says, "I [heart] shopping."
We may not want our journalism—even the colorful commentaries of folks like Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly—to be pitched as an effort to try to save the world. Maybe we can leave that to Billy Bragg. But surely we don't want our journalism to be filtered by corporate interests, by people who are more eager to sell you something than tell you what's happening.
