The Impotence of the Word

    At the end of his bestselling book A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media, Bernard Goldberg asserts: “The so-called mainstream media are dying a slow death. Circulation is down for many big newspapers. And TV network news ratings have been declining since cable and the Internet came along…People read papers online these days; fewer and fewer buy the actual newspaper. More and more people get their news from cable televsion, rendering the old network news divisions less and less relevant…Pray, that [the mainstream media's] demise doesn’t also lead to ours.”   

Here’s the point. While Goldberg, in his tome, paints a quite convincing picture of a media that was nakedly slanted toward Obama–and was nakedly opposed, to the point of hostility, to John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin–during the last Presidential campaign, he’s considerably off in his insinuation that our health is tied to the health of the mainstream media. The cold, hard truth is that, as such distinguished writers as Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin have pointed out, the written word by and of itself does not have and has never had any real power. Reading is not, and never has been, a major endeavor in this country. There are those of us, both inside the creative community and who follow it, who rage and rail against the incessant venom of the critic John Simon. The fact is, though, that nothing Simon writes–repeat, nothing–can impact anybody’s career in any sense; the worst it can do is damage their egos. And Rex Reed, widely seen as a thoroughly lightweight–if not outright laughingstock–critic, likely realized early on that, even if he turned out “serious” criticism, most folks still wouldn’t pay him any real attention, so he figured: “”Screw criticism. I’ll give them pure entertainment instead.”   

    Cutting it another way: Such black-oriented magazines as Ebony and Jet and the nation’s shrill, whiny, handkerchief-head, pity-the-poor-black-man African-American critics and columnists (I am of course leaving out such refreshing truth-tellers as Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele and Larry Adler) are read mostly by upper-middle-class and upper-class African-Americans. Most “cats on the corner,” to employ the legendary African-American entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.’s phrase, don’t partake of them. They get their entertainment and their information from television and, more often than not, from radio (Indeed, it has long been a truism that if you have a person or a product that you want to sell to the African-American community, you don’t go to the print media and you don’t even go to television–you turn to black radio). In point of fact, most average, “corner” blacks just don’t see reading as an endeavor that is worthy of their time.   

    It was Breslin who once contended: “Journalism…is a passive trade. Words command only when used by someone in command.” The reality is, the attitude we writers should have, considering the nation’s cultural and political lives, is a clear-eyed acknowledgement of our own basic impotence.