On the media patina and ethics and aesthetics of airbrushing

Is it just me or has the whole world become airbrushed? At least in the way we perceive it through the lens of media. The rampant manipulation of pixels and layout is rendering reality more manageable, more slick, and more ... "glossy" is the word that comes to mind. This isn't coincidental, since the glossies, monthly magazines, were progenitors of this now generalized glossifying tendency. This visual sanitizing distorts the manner in which the world is absorbed by many of us.

Consider the front page of The New York Times, whether it is in digital or print format. For sure, a more beautiful and aesthetically assured representation of the world isn't possible. I admit I myself visit the webpage of The New York Times at least once a day on average, maybe some days I skip it, but I can't deny its attractiveness as a narrative and a representation of all the "news that fits to print." A more visually satisfying arrangement representing the state of the world as of yesterday (or a few hours ago, on the Web) is hardly fathomable. Whether it's word choice in the headlines, or the headlines' relative size one to the other, or whether it's in the arrangement of the page elements, or the mere abundance of the words, images and columns cascading on the well-designed page-- the point is the overall impression transmitted is of harmony: chaos contained, reality reined in by master designers and wordsmiths.

I wonder if reading the newspaper these days is less about being informed and educating oneself and more about feeling relief in seeing that someone is taking all the chaos of the world and painting it over with order. Oftentimes the cover photographs on The New York Times front page will correspond to one another like clothing accessories in a Spring fashion show-- they will somehow match, even if depicting utterly different scenarios: an earthquake in China, a U.S. presidential campaign, a societal trend in Japan. Perhaps a spot of color in each of the photos will resonate, or a compositional element will be repeated. There is a master hand at work. The New York Times (and other newspapers, although I would argue that the Times is more guilty of this wannabe omnipotency than other dailies), is like God interpreting the world. It says: look at all this chaos, and see how I make sense out of it, make something palatable and even aesthetically pleasing out of it. Much of this effect is rendered by the beautiful photographs of death and disaster and political stagecraft that are reproduced, but again, the word choice, the play of fonts and column space, sub-headlines, etc.-- all these elements play a role, as does the reassuring retro quality of newspaper mastheads.

In The New York Times, even the most horrific war is made pretty. It's true that individual reporters (I remember Steven Erlanger's visceral reports from the bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s) will go out of their way to describe in graphic detail the impacts of war. But often not only is their prose too gorgeous, but so is the work of the designers and the photographers framing their words. It may be useful to recall that the best books about war might be singled out for their tendency toward dissonant, understated or lackluster prose. This is true about The Red and the Black, The Naked and the Dead, War and Peace (which has more than just a dollop of grotesqueness, off kilter description, and jerky movement in every battle scene), The Red Badge of Courage, and Farewell to Arms. These are books that ring true about war not because of over-revved description, but because of a mass of detail that seems right because it is so odd.

In the magazine world, the warm aesthetic bath effect is the rule. Of course, unlike newspapers, magazines have always been more about serving up fantasy than reality. So we shouldn't be surprised to read an extensive profile in The New Yorker (which itself specializes in being a factory of pretty, authoritative, and effective prose, in serving up a certain sterile and safe view of the world, as bien pensant as anything else, even when its journalism is at its most potent and critical) about a pixel specialist who is hired by fashion magazines and other glossies to doctor images in their ads, shoots and photo spreads, in order to render each of them as visually appealing as possible. After the treatment applied by this magician of the 21st Century's benday dots (if Roy Lichtenstein were alive today, he might find a way to show up the layers of hypocrisy and complacency compacted into your average magazine cover image), there is nothing amiss in any of the images in the magazine's pages. Your eyes glide right over them-- satisfied. All is seamless, an imperturbable patina applied over everything, an inevitable varnish of "as it is," except it's not what it is at all.

Likewise, it seems to me, the better written a magazine article is, especially if the subject is something that should get citizens up in arms, then the less likely that it will have any impact at all.

A friend and I would often talk with one another about the "patina" that coats everything in prosperous communities. The patina is a result of comfort, affluence, and a certain self-satisfied assurance that enlightenment is in fact an abundant quality in one's very fortunate community. The patina means: clean environments, attractive facades, new appliances, slick packaging, intelligent signage, smooth transitions, etc. There is nothing jagged, nothing too obviously out of step, nothing jarring. This patina is the environment of The New York Times (perhaps ironically, smaller and less prestigious newspapers don't achieve it to quite the same degree), the shopping mall, the average Hollywood film, TV in general, mass circulation magazines, etc.

I remember a few years ago there was a controversy about a Reuters photograph of Israeli bombing in Lebanon because it turned out it was retouched beyond acceptable ethical standards: the smoke was made blacker and more voluminous, the sky lightened to bring out the contrast, etc. But I would argue this kind of digital and design tinkering is done everyday, in our media, and in our visual culture generally, in less blatant ways, and the aim is not at all to make reality sensationalist-- but instead to create a cocoon-like, reassuring visual environment. Look around you: especially in areas and media designed for general consumption and mass observance. Doesn't everything seem too cleanly made? And it's not a question of publishing photos with dead bodies and blood, or "shock" strategies of any sort, or punching holes in walls or throwing rocks through chain store windows. The element that is missing isn't blood or a healthy streak of yellow journalism, or overt protest, it's the willingness to indulge in the incongruent message, the dissonant image, the un-resolvable juxtaposition, the friction of images that don't and won't respond to the eye's and brain's addiction to sense-making.

I would argue that most visual art today, especially in the rich nations, in part lacks any real power because it doesn't truly address these facts, and instead of seeking actively to rupture the cocoon of an airbrushed visual culture falls into the trap of also seeking seamlessness, flawless craftsmanship, some brand of slickness.

As a counterexample to the bumpless texture of our visual culture, I submit the political cartoons of Carlos Latuff, a Brazilian cartoonist. Apparently, his website has been repeatedly visited by U.S. government agencies like the Pentagon, State Department and individual military branches, because of his cartoons' popularity in the Arab world. To me, it is irrelevant whether you support the Iraq War or not, what his cartoons do (and I haven't even reproduced some of his more controversial ones) is thrust us directly into the heart of the matter, without making us wade through the overstuffed prose and analysis of newspapers and websites, and without having to distill tragedy from the flawless composition of a newspaper's front page photo, which may be showing a bombing casualty's funeral, whether it is a U.S. victim or an Iraqi, but which for some reason has to strive to emulate the compositional mastery and deft lighting effects of a Caravaggio. In our visual culture, that amounts to a trivialization of the subject (a war death, a civilian death, a soldier's death) and only an aggrandizement of the newspaper's and the photographer's ego.

Probably it's not coincidental that the winning image in the World Press Photo awards recently was of voyeurism amidst the ruins after Israel's bombings of Beirut (one of the photo's subjects holds a handkerchief to her nose, she can't stand the smell; meanwhile another takes a photo of the ruins with her cell phone, and another looks out from behind gold-plated sunglasses; it wasn't the only image of its kind to become famous in the wake of this news event: another widely-reproduced photo was of two comfortable-looking Lebanese on a rooftop taking pictures of surrounding smoke and destruction, also via a cellphone).

It's my theory the World Press Photo award-winning image didn't strike a chord necessarily as a statement on Lebanese society, but because of its depiction of our voyeur culture, and how we've become spectators inclined to see even the most destructive and morbid events as shows.

So it's media's job now not to indulge us. Before, it may have been necessary to pull a reader in with a well-made, narrative-rich image, a beautiful shot with classic composition, well distributed light and color. Now, it may be that visual culture will be that much more effective in terms of forging a vital connection when it breaks the rules, when it jars and becomes jagged, or grainy, sufficiently illegible-- at least slightly abrasive, maybe even a bit heavy-handed (like Latuff's work).

Today, there's nothing more surprising to our eyes than that which purports to represent reality but has some loose ends, some crooked flaps, some dissonant element. The media is educating our eyes, and words and images seem to wash over us, unless there is something in them that might stick into our skin. We need the barbs so that something might poke us and linger, and not merely slip away with the rest of the media bath, down the drain of daily forgetting.





Political cartoons by Carlos Latuff

The age of info-fiction

Journalism isn't dead. It's just being eclipsed by storytelling that is doing a better job of reflecting us back to ourselves, and doing so more honestly, while journalism struggles to find its footing. It may make journalists nervous to admit it, but as storytellers they should understand that in certain contexts, such as those in which censorship exerts a strong influence (as it has systemically in much of the U.S. media since Sept. 11, 2001, in the form of self-censorship), the kind of truth we look for in journalism wriggles out from constraints imposed on it in the news media and migrates, often, to strike its roots elsewhere: in the heart of novels, song lyrics, poetry, film or other "fictions."

(In Latin America, we are well aware of this phenomenon. In country after country there are examples of novels, songs, or poems that circulated under the worst dictatorships like candles in the darkness. Whether these were samizdat editions or published under the nose of censors incapable of understanding the symbolism, or whether they were allowed into circulation only to be later blackballed, the fact is that fiction does better under censorship than journalism, because fiction or poetry has a subtle power and hides some of its cards, and censors, perhaps unadvisedly, tend to view it with a bit more permissiveness than the news media itself. Also, fictions circulate more easily, as songs and tales, or as poems printed on a single page-- they are viral and efficient in conveying information in a way that news is not. An allegory about a dictatorship applies to all dictatorships and all phases of a dictator's rule, while an editorial quickly loses potency over time since inevitably it addresses only the subtleties in effect at a particular point in time and a certain place.

In Argentina, in the blackest period of the 1970s Dirty War, virtually the only voices of real protest, the only intuitive and subtle analyses of the smeared national conscience were heard in the lyrics of Argentine rock songs. Either because the junta's censors couldn't bear to listen to rock, or because they simply couldn't follow the poetry well enough to understand the message, the clearly dissident messages of the songs were allowed to filter out and into the minds of millions of young people, who were hungry for these lyrics precisely because they were the most impacted by disappearances and torture.

What I'm trying to get at is the way that information is processed civically in the here and now, the different ways in which it is interpreted, the surest ways to insure its absorption and assimilation by the body politic. I'm mainly writing with the U.S. situation in mind, but the mainstream news media and even the alternative media seem to be suffering from discredit everywhere I look. That is certainly true in Latin America, the other region I am familiar with. So, the vacuum of media credibility seems to be a global phenomenon. Fact-based journalism is in crisis. Obviously it will persist somehow and perhaps flower again into the dominant form (I suspect it will reemerge as an information-rich multimedia amalgam of content, including text, that will allow folks to truly steep themselves in the texture of the news and information they're seeking).

But for now it seems that fact-based journalism has taken a back seat to what I will call info-fiction, in which truth and objectivity are not necessarily what is valued (although they are still important, depending on the audience, their prejudices and tastes). What is valued is narrative force, depth of analysis, emotive charge, as well as texture and persuasiveness.

Disclaimer: I'm not intending here to wave the flag for irresponsible spewing of lies and innuendo and misleading information. Nor am I a believer in a postmodernist shattering of all ideas of truth, objectivity or the relativizing of all claims to reliability. Having said that, the increasingly sensationalist CNN and the reliably shrill Fox News are the worst kind of evidence of the hybridizing of journalism into a form that is no longer purely facts-based. Whatever one might say about these media, to the extent they are successful, they are arguably so because they have embraced overarching narratives that they can color in with emotion: Fox and its jeremiads on terrorism and the culture wars, or CNN's Lou Dobbs and his anti-immigrant crusade.

Today, journalism is clearly a product competing alongside music, films, DVDs, as well as non-news Internet sites, radio and books. It's just another product in the market bins of the "infotainment telesector," as one analyst calls it. Many media critics point to the increasingly trivial nature of news coverage, and the seepage of celebrity gossip and rumor (which are forms of untruths) into its bandwidth. This trend is there, but so is its more productive complement: the work of Michael Moore, which integrates entertaining plot lines, video-editing and rhetorical styles (which conservatives like to call demagoguery or fact-bending) with documentary content and form. In fact political writer Theodore Hamm has written a book called The New Blue Media, which is about how people are increasingly getting their information and views not only from Michael Moore but from sources like The Onion, The Colbert Report, and Jon Stewart (the book is out next month). Definitely not "just the facts ma'am" media. Perhaps more central to my point, there's "The Wire," an encyclopedic War and Peace-style X-Ray of U.S. decline, created (not coincidentally) by a disgruntled former news reporter.

"The Wire" is info-fiction par excellence. I went to see David Simon speak at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (my alma-mater), where he was invited after an article on his TV series was published by the Columbia Journalism Review. The auditorium he spoke in is down the hall from the rooms where the Pulitzer Prizes are awarded. In this sanctum santorum of fact-based journalism, Simon let loose on an institution ( the print newspaper, the eminence grise of fact-based journalism) he no longer believes in, but still loves. Basically, he said newspapers had committed suicide by cutting reporting staff and shrinking their news hole when newspapers became corporatized and consolidated over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. Then, he said, when the Internet came, newspapers already were weakened, agonizing, and were "no more able to withstand the tidal wave of the Internet than anything else that is flimsy and insubstantial." In the end, newspapers were reduced to giving away their content for free online, and in any case it already was a watered-down dribble. The result is that only two or three newspapers still do great journalism because they have the resources to do so as national publications (The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.) and Simon said he sees no way out of the crisis for newspapers. He himself took a buyout in 1995 from the news chain that bought The Baltimore Sun.

And what did he do in lieu of writing investigative features for his old newspaper? Simon created a fictional universe of characters and stories, many of them drawn from his twenty years as a crime reporter. Except instead of trying to constrain these stories into column inches and editor-ordered word counts, and the inevitably somewhat antiseptic language of newspapers, he created hours and hours of gritty, curse-laden television, in which the city of Baltimore and all its intricacies are patiently unfolded, with scores of characters coming and going meanwhile, their lives intersecting, ending and beginning. These are not facts he is representing, but a deeper kind of truth. As many critics have pointed out-- the kinds of truths we look to novels for.

Yes, many of The Wire's characters-- including the most famous, Omar, the lone-wolf stickup artist specializing in robbing drug dealers-- are based on real-life characters or are composites of them. But "The Wire" is a fiction, and by Simon's own admission, in it he was able to tell stories journalists wouldn't be able to tell because since he was making a fiction he had access to facts and insider information he would not have been told if he had been a reporter. His sources would have been too nervous to give him some information for fear he would publish it. But since he was making a TV series, he heard the uncensored accounts of back-room deals, till-skimming, intra-bureaucratic sabotage, street feuds, etc. In some ways, then, "The Wire" is truer than fact-based journalism covering the same phenomena. "The Wire", as whole, is like a five part newspaper series on the decline of the U.S. city. Except incomparably richer in texture, emotion, narrative potency, in short-- a million times more interesting and illuminating-- than anything in newspapers. We can call it a reported fiction, or as I suggested, an info-fiction.

An analogous phenomenon to "The Wire" is the explosion in Brazil of locally produced, relatively high-budget films and TV series exploring the day-to-day reality of life in slums (Cidade de Deus, Tropa de Elite, Cidade dos Homens), prisons (Carandiru), and urban underworlds (Onibus 174, Madame Sata). These films and series are doing journalism's job. The fact that it has fallen to on-screen fiction to communicate this reality to audiences is likely a symptom of journalism's ineffectiveness, and definitely evidence of directors and writers learning to craft powerful stories from social analysis and topical themes. Audiences apparently cannot get enough of this gritty, topical vein in Brazilian film.

Today's truth is the truth of story and narrative. We're seeing the return of fiction. Arguably, up to the 19th Century, and even well into that century, people all over the world gained most of their information and truths in the most efficient form yet invented: story. And story liberated from the exigencies of hewing exactly to memory, fact, and the niceties of an institutionalized newspaper or magazine style can do amazing things. Before fiction became calcified as a section in a bookstore, it encompassed vast realms of human memory into which fed anecdote, storytelling, folk tales, legend, myth, jokes, poetry, rumor, oral history, testimony, song, etc.

We should get it straight: fiction is not the opposite of truth, rather it is poetic representation, in other words, art. To say we may be entering an era in which info-fiction displaces journalism is to say that art is again becoming ascendant in its longstanding role as a dispenser of information, even topical or "current" information. It is art's inherent ability to skirt censorship, even when the muzzle is rigorously applied, which makes it so powerful.

We are living under censorship. The media and publishing worlds, rather than enabling illumination, have become de-facto censors. The censorship is self-inflicted, and often takes the form of a lack of imagination, or fear to imagine moral alternatives, or new and daring ways of telling stories, graphically, grittily, as "The Wire" does, as Hollywood does, as Tolstoy's War and Peace, (an info-fiction on Napoleon's Russian campaign) does. How else can we explain the pre-Iraq War blindness and jingoism, other than by self-censorship? How else can we explain the slick and antiseptic way the worst atrocities committed in the name of freedom around the world are presented, the bloody and abominable reality of a global Dirty War air-brushed into a spectacle devoid of moral taint?

"The Wire" showed the pulsating reality behind the flat portrayals of cities in the media. When will we see what lies behind the Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo show, beyond pretty magazine-style writing, beyond bylines, beyond Pulitzer prizes and circulation figures? And when we all see what's there, will we call it truth or fiction?

Censorship art by Eric Drooker