VIEWPOINT: What News Matters?

Over the months I have hoped to find one or more contributors to my blog who could bring not only a viewpoint of unique orientation but of voice as well. Published writer and artist David Chorlton, who will be gracing our datapages now and then, has offered the following essay for our consideration. I welcome his contribution as I hope you will too.

January 26th, 2005

This is a European’s view, albeit from one who has spent little time on his native continent in recent years. Overall, for anything I miss there is a compensation here, but of late I have become increasingly aware of a quality that is noticeably absent in the USA: candor.

I’m not talking about the blunt speech of an ideologue happy to unload whatever is on his/her mind, and not the president’s Texas style of tough talk before an obedient camera. That is self-serving crudeness. No, what I miss is hearing somebody in an official position actually come out in public and say something real. We only have to tune in to a White House press conference to hear all meaning being wrung from language as it is issued in the official, unemotional, corporate, ass-covering tone of a well trained spokesman. This despite the fact that what is being discussed is loss of life, threats to the public, or policy meltdowns. This tactic enables the guilty to slither free of accusations of misconduct by simply talking as if nothing is wrong. This suggests that the supporters of the White House are listening but not thinking. We are subjected in public matters to language that is so far from the one we use in our private lives that it is surprising we understand it at all. The sanitizing of American speech in media and politics can only mask misdeeds. The machine grinds daily. Newscasters. Advertisers. The experts on the talk shows bantering back and forth in a verbal mist. No wonder the FCC is enjoying so much attention for trying to ensure the air waves remain untainted by spontaneity or, Heaven and Heather Wilson forbid, obscenity.

Back to the Europeans: I enjoy listening to Austrian radio over the internet. The orf (Austrian Broadcasting) has a fine range of serious cultural and news programming. Around 6 PM Alpine time the other day, I heard a music show the subject of which was American songwriter/singer, Adam Green, whose CD Gemstones is popular in Austria. Europeans are interested in culture outside their own borders by the way. What I found especially appealing was the way the announcer, a woman, followed the song by articulating some of the lyrics very slowly and deliberately, not flinching when, after shaking hands with George W. Bush the singer “choked on some cock.” As indecency goes, this was mild stuff. As politics it doesn’t say much, but the moment of candor gave me the satisfaction of knowing that the mainstream media doesn’t have to constantly monitor itself lest it sound like a real person. Moreover, I am concerned that behind every example of blandness there is a real horror we should know about. Take Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches as an example of reporting what goes on in Iraq with pictures that show what the war really looks like with its skin peeling away and skeletons bared.

David Chorlton