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Editor's Note:With sadness, denial and ominous, pre-Littleton-like dissociation, we note that this is James Poniewozik's last column for Salon. As befits a writer on mass media, he is going on to Time magazine to write about television -- and you can't get much more mass than that. As those of you fortunate enough to have read him in this space over the last two-plus years know, James has brought to his work a powerful intellect, an agile style and a frightening, eyes-taped-open knowledge of the media universe. It has been a rare privilege to rub virtual shoulders with him, and we wish him all the best in his inexplicable return to the world of cuneiform tablets and stone money. Bon voyage, James -- keep the denizens of America's dental waiting-rooms squirming.
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June 28, 1999 |
The dying, however, at least have the excuse of ill preparation and understandable stress. The living, compelled to offer a sign-off, are on the hook. All of which is to say that I have no proper, Wildean or Wellesian last words to offer you in my last media column for Salon: no big catchy answer, grand wrap-up, fiery, Old Testament jeremiad. Partly because I'm too young to have the perspective and too old to have the arrogance to do it. Partly because I'm not retiring, just moving on to do related writing for a different master. But it's also because the world is becoming full of big explanations regarding the media that are reductive, tin-eared and wrong. Popular media -- news, entertainment, print, online, broadcast, cable, radio, publishing -- are so all-encompassing that, I believe, having an overarching theory of the media is like having an overarching theory of the weather. Is it good? Bad? Dangerous? Indispensable? Sure -- all of the above. James Poniewozik's column has appeared in Media, every Monday and Thursday Like the weather, the media form an environment we can't escape if we wanted to, one that we affect even as we're affected by it. In the simplest sense, the media are all the forms by which people in a society share information and thoughts. To "hate the media" is not just pointless, it's misanthropic. I've done enough crabbing in this space the past two years that I doubt anyone reading my archives would consider me a Pollyanna. But I love the media in all their excess. There have been times, cranking out this column, that I've felt my brain shriveling and wanted never to look at another men's magazine or cable-news show again. But thank God I live in a time when there are entire cable channels dedicated to houseplants, when I can download Serbian protest music composed while B-52s drop my tax dollars on the artists from 40,000 feet, when I can pull up news wires from my bedroom or flip through a magazine for remarrying brides. Any world without handy Internet resources for Brazilian fingernail fetishists is not a world I want to live in. But today this is a love that dare not speak its name. Make a statement like "TV Is Good," like ABC did, and you'll get jumped like a playground dope-pusher. A media writer who doesn't particularly like the media, though, is worse than useless. Likewise, anybody who purports to cover politics or society and doesn't get popular media, and there are plenty of them, is wasting the audience's time. You can learn more about this country watching one night of Comedy Central than you'll discover in a half-dozen Campaign 2000 stump speeches. When I started this column two years ago, I was tired of "media criticism" that was either biz gossip or critiques of news coverage -- the sort of earnest yawn you still see on "The PBS News Hour." The great thing about writing on the media is that it means writing on everything: religion, music, literature, politics, sex, money, art, technology, business, food and gardening. The drawback about it, too, is that it's about everything: The media form a big, sloppy amorphous blob -- one of those handy, fuzzy bugaboos like "society" or "the system"-- and, to boot, one that's all about the transmission of ideas. From there it's a short step to the argument that the media are controlling the way we think.
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