Collage by the author
They say “the map is not the territory” and I might add that “the media coverage is not the event.”
Maps are limited by their scale, age, level of detail, intended purpose, and who made them. You wouldn’t take a road atlas on a hike. We can learn useful things from maps but to truly know the territory, we have to go there. I think we all know that.
Media coverage can be judged by similar factors: degree of context, date, level of detail, intended audience, and who paid to produce it. We won’t learn about socialism from the capitalist business press. We can learn useful things from media coverage but to truly know what’s going on, we’d have to be there. I think we forget this.
If you’ve ever been to a protest and then checked the local corporate news stories afterwards, you’ll be forgiven for wondering if the reporters were at the same event. Frequently, they misrepresent the message, slander the participants, undercount the crowd, dramatize conflict, and side with the cops. Sometimes they’ll just make shit up. Then, there’s the editing, which can completely change the meaning of a visual.
That’s on the factual side of things, but there’s more: If you’ve ever seen a place or a person who you know very well on TV, you might have noticed how “different” they look on screen; somewhat alien. The camera only shows you what it sees, but it doesn’t see everything, or even most of it. It only records visuals and sound, and both at a lower fidelity than real life. When you’re there, you experience a far wider sensory range, including the emotions generated by the events. The camera leaves most of the scene out and flattens the rest.
There can even be physiological effects from media. Blood pressure can rise, adrenaline can surge. We can lose appetite or sleep.
Media is by nature manipulative. It is literally “in the middle,” between us and the event. It cannot help but to shape what it presents to us; that’s how it functions: as a molder, a limiter, an extruder. It is incapable of doing anything else, just at the map can never be the territory.
Our own thoughts and emotions are shaped by media–especially by its visual and audio forms–and we end up believing we know more than we actually do. Like having a memory of visiting a place when all you really did was look at the map. If someone said it was the same, we’d rightly call them delusional, but that’s kind of what we all do when we repeat what we saw on media as if we “know” it.
Then we have the audacity to argue about it and insult each other, as if our impressions are knowledge. Our impressions aren’t nothing–we can learn from maps–but they’re not worth as much as we think.
This has been going on for over a century at this point. Historians of media can talk about how perception of reality changed with the introduction of movies, then radio, then television. All those things chipped away at our handle on real life in some sense. The internet and now portable devices have taken it to an all new level. Social media provides a delivery mechanism that’s bona fide addictive and very easy to manipulate, in terms of what people see and what they don’t. I find it dystopian, frankly.
In turbulent times like the current moment, when cool heads are needed, our media is stirring us up, inflaming emotions, and making a bad situation worse. This is certainly due to choices made by the people who control the media, but it’s also because of the nature of media itself.
Most of us would do well for ourselves right now to limit the amount of media we are consuming.
How you do that is up to you. Some people use apps on their phones to set how much time they can be on social media. As the current crisis has been intensifying, I’ve been staying away from scrolling, and I only check in with a small number of trusted news sites and podcasts. Nothing corporate. I just can’t take the jingoism. I’ve been less stressed, I’m happy to report.
The media will always be waiting there for you, if you want to go back. (Unless the bombs fall.) So give yourself a break from the drama and the propaganda, and also from the flattened, superficial version of life that media inevitably gives you because it is functionally incapable of doing more. Take a walk, pet a cat. Anything really, that will cut down on screen time.
