DOWN WITH "MEDIA"!

By Henry Grunwald

THE professor meant well. Morris Forkosch of the Brooklyn Law School was defending the press against attacks from Spiro Agnew, among others, and urging journalists not to take these assaults lying down. The issue, said Forkosch, would be decided by "the information media, by how it fights back."

It?

On all sides, ostensibly well-educated people in full command of the English language talk about the media in this singular fashion. "The media is to blame for all the trouble," "The media carries only bad news," or (on rare occasions) "The media is the first defense line of American liberties." Webster's, that horror of permissiveness, allows the usage. It is, of course, illiterate: "media" is the plural of "medium"; hence the media are. The point may seem merely pedantic. But how people speak suggests a great deal about how they think and feel; language shapes philosophy, culture and destiny.

The mental habit of reducing plural words to the singular has been evident before. A case in point is "data," beloved of all social scientists. Data no longer are; they is. "The data is incomplete" or "the data is compelling" turns the concept into a kind of glob--a paste or putty that can be applied to any rickety argument. The origin, quality and meaning of the individual figures are easily forgotten; one data is as good as another data.

To appreciate the damage that this sort of sloppiness can do, it is useful to invoke the late Count Alfred Korzybski, inventor of general semantics. Korzybski was a Polish-born mathematician and physicist, part crank and part genius, who regarded his theory as a whole new science of life. Our language, argued Korzybski, does not reflect reality, and its structure does not correspond to the seen or unseen world. Its grammar, based on Aristotelian logic, implies primitive philosophical concepts tied to the prescientific past. All this leads to emotional disturbances and frustrations, known as semantic shock. Korzybski prescribed some mental tricks to guard against this disorder. Take, for instance, the old hit song: "Falling in love is wonderful, it's wonderful . . . in ev'ry way." A general semanticist following Korzybski's rules to the extreme would render the line thus: "Fallings in love3 are wonderful, they are wonderful [to me] in a great many ways."

"Fallings" is necessary because there are many different kinds of falling in love. Love, like most other terms, has many different meanings; hence Korzybski taught that mentally at least, one ought to "index" words, so that love1 might stand for love of God, love2 for love of country, love3 for love between men and women, etc. The bracketed "to me" indicates that love is not equally wonderful to everybody, and the "great many ways" recognizes that virtually nothing in the world happens "in every way." All this may seem obvious. Nevertheless it contains a significant relativist philosophy and much wisdom about the errors, even the insanities, hidden in everyday speech.

Korzybski, where are you now that we need you?

To speak of the media in the singular tends to obliterate the differences between them; it encourages the dangerous habit of not distinguishing a billboard from a painting, the telegraph from the radio, a magazine from a television station, a large magazine from a small one. All sources of information become a great, shapeless monster. One recalls Alexander Hamilton's "Sir, your people is a great beast." More than a grammatical difference lies between this statement and saying "Your people are . . ." There is a philosophical difference as well. "Is" describes the people as a mass, a thing to be manipulated; "are" acknowledges the people as the sum of many individuals.

In his forthcoming book Extraterritorial, George Steiner, literary critic and philosopher of language, recalls the llth century theologian Peter Damian who believed that man fell into paganism because of a grammatical flaw: "Because heathen speech has a plural for the word 'deity,' wretched humankind came to conceive of many gods." The logic of this argument may be questionable, but not the perception that connects language and belief, the word and the Word. Using "media" in the singular reverses the phenomenon Damian observed. It ignores the variety among the many oracles of information and replaces them with one big oracle, or demon. Thus their individuality is obliterated and their separate effects on the public become muddled in vast generalization.

It would help a little if people once again used the plural, recognizing that all media are different. But it would not help enough. The very word medium is wrong, even when correctly used. It is impersonal, disembodied. As British Journalist Katharine Whitehorn observes, it "is a word no human being would naturally use." Its one merit is that it accommodates both print and electronic journalism. But is that really a merit? Even "the press" is a too-collective noun, ignoring variations in the size and spirit of publications. Yet over the centuries, it has become a living term. The press makes noise; it roars and clatters. The press smells of printer's ink and sweat. It has been literally smashed by its enemies and literally saved by its defenders. Somehow reporters who have never seen a composing room, editors who have never set a stick of type (or, these days, punched a computer keyboard) still feel a strong bond to that noise, that smell, that struggle.

A television station, to most laymen, is a little more mysterious, with its invisible signals coming and going. Yet it is a real and adventurous place, halfway between technology and theater, a place of dials and optics, props and makeup. Television stations are seized in revolutions; they are manned and controlled by people. But a medium--what is a medium? What is its sound, its smell? What is its electronic circuitry? Who can seize it? Who and where are its people? In its incorporeity, it is a ready scapegoat word, like State, Establishment, the Right, the Left.

"Medium" is an advertising term, a Marshall McLuhan term. The point of McLuhan's taxonomy was to differentiate between the various "media." But the word, singular or plural, now obliterates the differences he so imaginatively catalogued. TV triumphs and sins with the eye and ear; print journalism triumphs and sins with the mind. The strength of the TV news program is immediacy and presence; its weakness is the inability to look behind the surface. Even the more slowly produced TV documentary has a hard time using images to express concepts, which are often reduced to mere pageant and pictograph. The strength of print journalism is the ability to analyze, to traverse time and space for background and meaning; its weakness is a certain lifelessness compared with the kinetic video screen. TV finds it difficult to see a pattern in events even if one exists; print journalism sometimes insists on finding a pattern even if none exists. Both TV and print journalists edit. Because the camera proclaims "I cannot lie, I only show what is there," TV editing is less obvious, but for that very reason it can also provoke more resentment, more of a sense of being fooled, when it is noticed. All these (and more) are distinctions too readily ignored.

The press and TV have been blamed for everything from seducing women into having too many children (in an ad for a book, The Baby Trap), to driving Author Erich Segal out of the academic life (in a recent interview). Using the word media somehow makes such specious protest easier.

When people complain about media prejudice, they usually mean that their own prejudice has not been served. When people demand objectivity, they usually want support for their own views. Objectivity is unattainable; to pretend otherwise, to argue that information can be separated from analysis or opinion, means fostering an illusion. What the public does have a right to expect is fairness and professional competence. These are individual qualities, individually practiced or betrayed. To speak of the media in the mass is to ignore that individual responsibility. It allows people to complain without defining their complaints; it allows the self-indulgence of feeling wronged without saying why.

It is probably too late to extricate "media" from the American vocabulary. But let us at least follow Korzybski and "index" what we talk about: medium1, perhaps, for television, medium2 for newsmagazines, medium3 for large city dailies, medium10 for the underground press, etc. Let us also index critics: critic1, the troubled reader who is truly confused by some of the vagaries of journalism; critic2, who has the precise information to expose an error or a distortion; critics for whom the automatic attack on journalism becomes the last refuge of a scoundrel; critics4-40, who blame the "media" for the unpleasant realities of the world. Neither TV nor the press should in any way be immune to criticism, but let them be criticized (and praised) for the right reasons.

qed Henry Grunwald

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