Profanity, Obscenity and the Media

Melvin J. Lasky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351480277
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

This is the second volume of Melvin J. Lasky's The Language of Journalism series, praised as a "brilliant" and "original" study in communications and contemporary language, and as "a joy to read." When it was first published, it broke ground in focusing on the comparative styles and prejudices of mainstream American and British newspapers, and in its trenchant analysis of their systematic debasement of language in the face of obligatory platitudes and compulsory euphemisms.

Lasky documents the growing crisis affecting honest, thoughtful, and independent journalism in the Western world. He extends the scope of his first volume in the trilogy and deepens the interpretation. He also adds a personal touch of wit and anecdote, as one might expect from an experienced international journalist and historian. Lasky's examination of the use of formerly forbidden language is a triumph of sinuous semantics. In his incisive analysis, we see the tortuous struggle of a once Puritanized literary culture writhing to break free of censorship and self-censorship.

This volume on the phenomenon of profanity adds another dimension to Lasky's thesis on mass culture's trivialization of real social and political phenomena. It also underscores our society's embrace of banality, in standardizing politically correct jargon and slang. Readers of the first volume will find here a new range of references to illuminate the detail of what our newspapers have been publishing.

Part 1
Towards a Theory of Journalistic Malpractice

“I recognize quite plainly that my insatiable craving for news [mon insatiabilité de nouvelles] is one of those inveterate diseases that defy all treatment. It’s dropsy, that’s what it is. The more you give it, the more it wants. [C’est une hydropsie toute pure; plus on lui fournit, plus elle demande.”]

—Pierre Bayle, letter (Paris, 27 February 1673)

“Professionally you try to get as close to things as possible, but never to the point of involvement. If journalism were a philosophy rather than a trade, it would say there is no order in the universe, no discernible meaning, without…the daily paper. So it’s a monumental duty we wretches have who slug the chaos into sentences arranged in columns on a page of newsprint. If we’re to see things as they are and make our deadlines, we had better not get (personally) involved.”

—E.L. Doctorow, The Waterworks (1994)

“I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”

—Tom Stoppard,“Night and Day” (1978)

1
From A. N. Whitehead to Irving Kristol

Illusions and Self-Deception

If our subject is what it is programmatically set out to be, “our newspaper culture,” or “Culture and the Media,” then I confess that I am myself not so sure I know what it really amounts to. “Media” is probably unproblematical. It used to be known as the Press, until television came along; and although no channel or station or newspaper is ever referred to as “a medium”—the spiritualists at all the séances in the world would rise up and protest!—“media,” in the plural, is clear and understandable enough. We know the messages of the media: information, knowledge, interpretation, analysis, criticism, and last but not least: entertainment. But what has “culture” to do with it?

We could, I suppose, deal with the culture of the media professionals. It’s an approach not very different from Margaret Mead’s among the Samoans when she was investigating the culture of the native tribes. For among the tribes of media men and women there are also customs and mores, rituals and taboos, which call out for anthropological classification. But if field an-thropology could take us too far afield, perhaps homespun aesthetics is closer.

We could just as easily discourse on the subject of how well in the media such cultural subjects as Sunday painting, music, local poetry, community architecture, and the like are treated (if at all), and the extent to which man’s artistic aspirations are being reported, recorded, criticized, evaluated, and perhaps (ultimately) encouraged. Some corners of the media might come away with fairly good marks—some of the best American newspapers for their meticulous reporting at length and in depth (especially the Wall Street Journal); the BBC-TV channels for their excellent theater; the London Times for its “TLS” (Times Literary Supplement); the best Italian newspapers for their terza pagina, their “third page,” replete with elegant features; in Frankfurt the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for its formidable feuilleton; the Swedish television for its devotion at great and admirable length to its indigenous cinematic genius Ingmar Bergman.

One could go on, and then break to disburse the bad marks: to the popular low-quality press in each of our countries in whose sensational columns there is rarely any place for anything but sex and crime, violence, and murder, weeping mothers and/or sadistic fathers; or to the more popular, that is, most highly “rated,” television programmes which aspire to nothing higher than the lowest common denominator of thrills and gags which catch and hold the short attention span of tens of millions of viewers, all teetering on the edge of uneasy boredom, with dangerous remote control switches at their fingertips. Is this our theme? Perhaps; perhaps not. I hope the reader of my first volume, published in 2000, will benevolently give me the benefit of any doubts.

All these matters are surely part of a great problem which has been generally set for us. Who the makers of the media messages are, what their properties and characteristics are, their ideas and their idées fixes, their conspicuous virtues and natural vices—all this is an aspect of valuable current anthropology, of the “sociology of knowledge” or the sociology of the knowledge industry. And, further, the attention (or lack of attention) which is being paid in our increasingly literate, increasingly educated societies to what in more old-fashioned times used to be called “the higher things”—this, doubtless, goes to the heart of such matters as liberal values, democratic ethos, human ideals, social ethics, and what Walter Lippmann referred to as “the public philosophy.”

Is the subject really so wide as to embrace anthropology, economics, psychology, sociology, and philosophy (not to mention journalism)?

One philosopher, the great Alfred North Whitehead, wrote the following (in his Aims of Education, 1929) about the meaning of culture which has been giving us so much trouble in these pages (and will give us even more, in the third and concluding volume to come):

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and human feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art.

This is a noble statement, but more than a little naive in its utopian innocence of the early years of the twentieth century. We have indeed produced several generations of men, especially in the media, who have “special knowledge in some special direction,” superb technicians of film and of typography, experts in communication—but have they, or we, been led to realms “as deep as philosophy” and “as high as art”? More often to depths as low as slanderous gossip and to levels as shallow as soap opera.

It is this aspect of liberal and humane innocence which engages me: all our illusions about information and expertise; our self-deception about literacy and mass communication; our careless mistakes and grievous errors about the useful and constructive function of press and television–or “media”–in a democratic culture which is increasingly offering more treacherous traps than the golden opportunities for utopian progress which Whitehead surmised. It is to this darker aspect of the theme of “Our Newspaper Culture” that I want to turn.

Still, before moving from A. N. Whitehead to, say, Irving Kristol–a City College classmate of mine in the New York of the 1930s (and my predecessor as American editor of Encounter in London) whose writing career managed to encapsulate the zeitgeist of the century–I venture a few remarks about the connections between the first and second volumes.

Hard Facts and Soft Future

In the development of Western culture from its modern beginnings—some put it in the English seventeenth century, in the time of Cromwell’s Revolution, accompanied as it was by brilliant pamphleteers and newssheets (a few written and edited by no less than John Milton); others put it in the French eighteenth century in the time of the philosophes of the Enlightenment and the radical politics of Condorcet, Danton, and Robespierre—we can locate the special qualities which characterize the spirit of our modern media.

Here was urgency, and public-spiritedness; here was new information about the way we live and how society is thought to function; here was a new note of criticism and candid communication, disseminated often at great personal risks for writers and editors; here were innovative forms of the written word and the “broadcasting” of various opinions, often dissenting and dangerous.

Each developing nation came to have its own “culture heroes”: men who went to prison for writing as they pleased, for defending the emerging “rights of a free press.” The name of the eighteenth-century German émigré to America, John Peter Zenger, only stands for many who over the centuries fought for the right to tell truths; his trial and acquittal of the charge of “libel” is considered the classic landmark.^*

But if we move forward in time to our own day we note that this critical spirit has become an increasingly relentless one. In the past it helped to open up windows in a fairly closed society. Is it, in its systematic devotion to airing every issue, blowing a cold wind into every nook and corner, still opening windows–or smashing them? We must be candid enough to ask of ourselves self-critical questions like these.

The cultural context in which our media have developed has, as I have already suggested, shaped them into a necessarily critical force, subversive of conventional attitudes and, more than that, of existing institutions. For if there is to be progress, le progrès, Fortschritt—a basic ideal in our Western pantheon of values—then we have to move forward to the better from the bad. Distressing evils are in the present; fine hopes are in the future…but only if we proceed to right wrongs, expose malefactors, improve faulty institutions, ameliorate our changing society. C. S. Lewis, no man to be in tune with modern fashions of thought, curtly dismissed the contemporary class of intellectuals precisely because “we have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain…” What he loosely called “the general movement of our time” had the effect of fixing

men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead….We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap on the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the present.¹

Here, then, is the general proposition from which our media have deduced its essential maxim: good news is no news. Only bad news makes headlines, interests curious and impatient readers, recaptures colorfully the kaleidoscope of fast-moving reality. The syndrome is familiar: “Man Bites Dog,” not “Dog Bites Man,” is the call which must catch the attention of us all.

As a result we have had throughout the twentieth century, in the democratic communities of the world which have enjoyed a more-or-less free press, an unending cascade of devastating criticism.

We know about the horror of mounting crime; the dirt in the hospitals; the child abuse in the homes; the corruption of the police; the wastage of millions in the military establishments; bribery in high and low government places; the monstrous hypocrisy of Northern affluence in a world of Southern poverty; the swindles of financiers and the greed of doctors and lawyers; the miseries of prison life in our jails; the blackboard jungles and functional illiteracy in our schools; the muggings in our parks and the gang warfare in our streets; the pollution of our environment; the insidious drug addictions in our slums. One could go on to the point of exhaustion. And my point is that it is a wonder of our lives, almost a psycho-social miracle, that we can get up each day and survive yet another round of doom and despair.

I am not trying to deride this, only to explain it. Whether it is desirable or not in the abstract (and we do not live in the abstract), it is inevitable in the here-and-now and it is sturdily reinforced, for better or worse, by the ethos of our Western culture—the truth will make us free. The dark side of this faith is what I want to touch upon in passing.

In the first place I am not at all certain that it is “the truth,” that is, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which is being told about the virtues and vices of our mixed democratic societies; I will return to this in a moment. In the second place, I am not sure that these so-called truths are invariably making us more “free,” or more strong and resilient, as liberal and humane societies. I have been in bookshops in at least a dozen world-capitals where there are innumerable shelves of books on all four walls—fiction as well as non-fiction—which in this spirit criticize, and expose, and indeed almost annihilate the very social-political foundations of Western societies. Are we willing to argue that all this is, invariably, an unqualified source of strength?

We, at least most of my readers, are writers, critical journalists, sceptical editors, independent intellectuals–and each of us has often dwelt on the “negative side” of our own cultures and governments. We are justifiably proud of efforts to tell us what has gone wrong–I myself am groping towards that kind of critical position in this chapter. But I have also come to the unhappy feeling that we in the West all too easily say, “Of course we are relentlessly critical—therefore ours is a healthy society!” I too once believed that, and am now beginning to disbelieve it. More and more it is, I feel, like saying that because there are a good dozen brilliant surgeons on hand to analyze a case of cancer, therefore the case of cancer isn’t really as bad as it originally was! I know that this is the faith that we in the democracies live by; I am just wondering whether the faith isn’t misplaced. Writers have made a fetish of “swimming against the tide”; but there is also a danger of drowning. André Gide used to preach that “the truth wounds only to cure”; but is the wounded patient always so lucky? I doubt it.

As in certain doctor-patient relations, the result of careless and blunt truth telling does not reinforce the will to live but induces despair. In the case of the United States, the twentieth-century decades from “the Muckrakers” to the Ideologists of a “sinful, evil America” brought a chronically cheerful population to a state of such melancholy that public-opinion polls revealed that for the first time–it deeply depressed President Jimmy Carter in 1978–the old Yankee optimism was giving way to despairing feelings that the future would bring nothing good at all for the children. Despite a brief burst of passing self-confidence during the Ronald Reagan years, an unprecedented note of pessimism still obtains in the national temper.

This, then, is my first question about the relations between our cultural tradition and the spirit of the media. Is the balance right between the ethical and philosophical commitment to maintaining (and, if you will, “improving”) a free, changing, democratic society—and I take it that this is what our media-makers as citizens are publicly committed to—and the actual practice of cameramen, thrusting mike-in-hand interviewers, and stop-press headline writ-ers? Put another way, is the balance right between the primary responsible civic engagement and the traditional century-old role of the intelligentsia as a radical avant-garde, the journalist as the gadfly of the state, and our media corps en masse as a permanent, relentless oppo-sition to established institutions, to everything that is and has ever been?

I ask the question; I am not alone in the Western world in asking for an historic reconsideration. Dogs do bite men; and if thereafter no cases of rabies are ever registered, as in the British Isles, then it is good reportable news. Neo-Nazis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Towards a Theory of Journalistic Malpractice
• Part 2: Sex and Other Ongoing Titillations
• Part 3: Literary Origins and Popular Consequences
• Notes
• Index