Again, the Media's members constitute a new "Free Speech Class." They now have rights that average citizens do not: the First Amendment has thus been selectively rationed.
One need only look at the "protest lottery" held by the city of Chicago last August 22 to determine which groups would be able to peaceably assemble outside the Democratic National Convention to redress their grievances. More tha 60 groups petitioned for rally permits. Only seven were granted, and those by lottery.
One of the central reasons why citizens were so limited in their Free Speech rights is that the city of Chicago was hosting 15,000 members of the news media that week. This elite corps occupied hotel rooms, function halls and significant areas of street and sidewalk outside the convention center. They had press passes and access to the events that average citizens did not.
And yet, the "Free Speech Class" is made up of individuals with less "Free Speakership" than the population as a whole. The Daily Life of a media worker is one of chasing deadlines, with little time to think about the consequences of his and her products, and even less time to enjoy life or stumble onto something NEW: thus, the term "NEWS" has become a hollow shell of what it was in the early days of the First Amendment.
Specialization has also come to plague the Media industry: no journalist or creator can see his or her creations through to unmediated completion. Every writer is subject to editors: the larger the audience, the more editors between the writer's words and the readers. The same is true for radio hosts, TV reporters and even "new media" workers. This is also the case for entertainers, muscians, visual artists and performers.23 The trade-off is clear: Free Speakership is traded away in exchange for audience, and a resulting commodification of all words, sounds and images. There is no more "press" -- only product.
Journalism is dead as a living art-form. 24 It now generates mere filler for all that remains: the daily advertising assault that keeps the culture obsessed with consumption and production.
The word "Media" is used most effectively in the context of the word "Middlemen." Our project has already found great success using this technique. the public's distrust of Middlemen has found more root in language than has its equally-severe distrust of Media. When the public begins to view all Media as the work of Middlemen, a greater receptivity to these ideas generally follows.
In our continued efforts to elude the mistake of creating dogma, we also stress that this use of language, like any other, has limits; there will be some, who will, no doubt, take this aversion to Middlemen to extremes that beg our ridicule. After all, is not the homeless beggar a "Middleman" of sorts between you and the curb? Is not every sentence a mediation? See, no phraseology is perfect or permanent.
And not every mediation equals an imposition (ironically, developing a consciousness of how a thing or person mediates may actually make it more possible to find pleasure in some mediations). The line of demarcation is not fixed; there are as many points of attack as there are events in each individual's day. But we have enough experience with the strategy of linking Media and Middlemen, and with the tactic of refusing to be mediated in creative endeavors, to feel confident that creative people are quite able to discern the uses appropriate to each's Daily Life.
22. A reference to August 1996, and the problem has grown increasingly worse in the years since.
23. Around the time that the first edition of this document was published, Hollywood directors lost the right to list the name "Alan Smithee" as director of their movies (traditionally, the fictional name Alan Smithee had been used as a safety mechanism when directors did not agree with how the studios mediated or censored their films). With the loss of this tradition, now even the most "powerful" of Hollywood filmmakers still can't control what appears or doesn't appear under his director's byline.
24. More than three years after writing that journalism was dead, your writer began to doubt that absolute statement. It was the work of many Latin American journalists, in Spanish, and particularly that of Mario Menéndez Rodríguez (who coined the term "authentic journalism") that I began to consider that maybe there's still a hope for resurrecting the craft in English, too. From that inspiration came Narco News.
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