Myths At Eleven O'Clock

Today's RET discussion was particularly interesting. A local left-wing radio show host, Mark Harmon, spoke about why he believes there is no left-wing bias in the mass media, and why the mass media does such a poor job of communicating facts to its audience.

I didn't agree with everything he had to say. Most specifically, I have to dispute that there is no left-wing bias at all. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CBS, ABC, NPR, and PBS all have used substantially less venom on left-wing targets than right-wing ones. I will concede, however, that other media outlets (most notably Fox News but to a lesser extent MSNBC and Gannett News Service) have right-wing biases. Some of his attacks on Fox News were right on, some were a little less so. He had some statistics that were interesting and which supported his points, but I'm aware that there are opposing statistics out there as well.

My main criticism was that he minimized the fact that news organizations, whether they are newspapers, magazines, broadcast journalism sites, websites, or any other medium you wish, all exist in the form of profit-generating businesses. I'm willing to believe that most journalists, and many (perhaps not most) journalism sources, try to deal fairly with the issues that they confront. The reason that I do so is because these journalists want to create a quality product, which is what will sell. The media, like everything else in the West, is driven by the desire for profit. It is not a public service. Fox News has found that people who are politically to the right believe that other media outlets are slanted to the left, so it sends out a message emphasizing the kinds of messages that conservatives like to hear. In so doing, Fox has gained an audience that likes what it is being told, and it is rewarded with the largesse of advertisers. It's a self-perpetuating cycle; the more audience Fox gets, the more conservative it will get. (Fox's market share is growing.)

Harmon affirmed a lot of what I had thought of broadcast news organizations -- that to a large degree, they simply lack the intellectual tools to see bias within themselves unless it slaps them in the face in the form of an order from on high with which they disagree. Thus do individual journalists (who by and large are liberal) bristle at orders from their corporate superiors (particularly but not exclusively at Fox News) to present a story in a particular way, to emphasize particular sides of a story, or to choose a story for presentation in the first place. Individual "gatekeepers" -- TV news producers, newspaper editors, and so on -- serve as filters and transmit to the public information that they deem to be important. They work under intense time pressures and have a set of criteria they use to make these judgments. It is at the level of the gatekeepers that Fox's bias is criticized, but again, I think this may be driven in part by greed rather than political preference.

But the concept that intrigued me most was his summarization of the concept of myths in news. Certainly I've read enough Joseph Campbell to understand the importance of myth. A myth is a story which is, while not literally true, illustrative of a concept that is deeply resonant with its audience and in that sense stands for an emotional or a larger truth. Creation myths, for instance, satisfy the desire of their audience for understanding and meaning in the universe and their own lives. For many people, the existential concept that life, the universe, and everything are random and meaningless, that things only exist for the purpose of existing, is simply intolerable. Even those who can tolerate such notions generally append the idea with the notation that there is meaning to life, even if it is self-supplied rather than objectively true.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the seven myths he described really are repated all the time in the news -- both on the national scale and locally. There is a reason the news reports "stories" and not "facts." "Stories" are easier to understand than raw facts. Facts are numbers, dates, places, geography. They lack context. They lack emotional resonance. They are hard to comprehend unless they are part of a "story" -- and another word for a "story" is "myth."

So, these are the categories of myths that we see on the eleven o'clock news every day:

In the Victim-Sacrifce myth, the victim becomes sacrified to serve a larger cause. This enables the victim's survivors to reconcile themselves to the loss of the victim and to their own mortality. So for example, Dana Reeves, the wife of Christopher Reeves, died of lung cancer recently. The randomness, senselessness, and pain of her death is transformed through this myth into a memorialization of the good work she did for the charity created by her husband and honoring her steadfast loyalty to her husband, especially after his tragic injury. Thus a meaningless death acquires meaning.

The Hero myth gives us a mythological figure of extraordinary power and importance. He goes forth from the community, sometimes as an ordinary figure, and often leaving the people of his community behind in great peril. He gets assistance from an older or wiser figure to gain power and knowledge, conquers some great obstacle, and returns in triumph to his community. Thus do we see Bill Clinton as a hero – an ordinary man from humble beginnings, who is touched deeply by his teenage meeting with John F. Kennedy, overcomes poverty and difficult circumstances to become President.

The Trickster myth is what I was taught is called the Classical Tragedy. This is a story about a person who causes trouble for trouble’s own sake; not maliciously but usually as a result of some character flaw. In a lot of mythologicl systems, the Trickster is part beast, emphasizing the animal or base nature of the Trickster. The trick usually causes damage along the way and a moral tale illustrating the problems of the character flaw in question is revealed. Bill Clinton, again, is such a mythic figure – he was portrayed as little better than a barbarian, lacking virtually any humanizing attributes and therefore was a beast. From the beginning, he was portrayed as a beast. And, true to the myth, stricken by his lack of ability to control his own libido, in a random and senseless act. Completing the myth is the tragic result of his lack of self-control -- he lost his nobility and much of his power as his enemies tried to bring him down in punishment for his misdeeds.

If the Trickster is a tragedy, then the Flood myth is the Classical Pathedy. Here, innocent people, through no fault of their own, are destroyed by overwhelming forces of nature. The point of the myth is to demonstrate man’s utter powerlessness and helplessness before God (or the Gods) and to chide the powerful for their hubris. Hurricane Katrina fits the pattern of such a myth perfectly.

All of the problems of society, or at least of a particular situation, are blamed on a single thing, or more often, a single person, in the Scapegoat myth. This scapegoat is then ritually banished or destroyed, and in so doing, the problems caused by the scapegoat are also banished or destroyed. Michael Brown, the former head of FEMA, was the scapegoat for the government’s embarrassingly poor response to Hurricane Katrina; while he may fairly be attributed some blame we now know that much more of it belongs elsewhere.

The Good Mother myth is about a woman (always a woman, never a man; men must be Heroes), who gives birth and life, and nurtures her children though difficult times and makes an extraordinary sacrifice to benefit her children. The children can be surrogates for her own natural children, such as animals, a village, or even a cause. The woman is seen through a one-dimensional lens of moral purity. The woman’s status as life-giver and nurturer rather than a man’s status as a protector or a provider is central to the myth’s emotional power. Thus do we ignore Princess Diana’s marital infidelities, social grasping, and mistreatment of her household staff in favor of remembering her as a good mother to her sons, devoted philanthropist, and political idealist crusading to rid the world of land mines.

Finally, there is the myth of the Other World. Here, we are introduced, usually through the adventures of a hero or other protagonist, to a new and strange environment, where things are not as they seem, bizarre creatures abound, and things can turn dangerous in an instant. Only the hero’s quick wits, strength, and moral compass enable him to survive. This myth is being played out now in Iraq. We lack a central protagonist to this story in Iraq, but nevertheless the description of Iraq as the Other World is spot-on.

I had thought of another myth, to be called the Clash of the Titans. (No, not the one with Harry Hamlin -- more about that below.) Classically, this would be the war between the Titans and the Olympians for dominion over the world of men -- a colossal struggle between seemingly evenly-matched opponents and won in the end by one side or the other. It might also be seen as the interplay between Yin and Yang in Eastern thought, as the conflict of good versus evil is not a necessary part of that struggle. But upon reflection, I realized that the absence of a moral dimension to the struggle makes it really kind of a poor myth. The Greek myth of the Clash of the Titans really does not resonate all that well with us today, precisely because we cannot tell whether Zeus and his Olympians were better than the Titans that they usurped. It is kind of a succession myth, as the Olympians were the children of the Titans and they seized power when they came of age, but they weren't any better or worse than the Titans themselves. What's more, when a moral dimension is added to a struggle, it becomes a Hero myth. A good story needs a good guy and a bad guy; the good guy wins in the end, although often the bad guy is a lot more interesting.

So I don't think we see stories like the Clash of the Titans very often. Yes, there is conflict, but conflict alone is not enough -- we need to identify with some of the characters of the story. The movie Troy did not do well in America because we did not know whether Hector or Achilles was the good guy; we didn't know which one of them to root for when they fought. The movie did a poor job of showing Achilles feeling remorse for his killing of Hector and his abuse of Hector's corpse and it didn't do a very good job of letting us see why Achilles was moved to commit that atrocity in the first place. It didn't even give us a good look into the destruction caused by the impetuous love between Helen and Paris; their love affair was shown to be a mere excuse to go to war, a war that everyone had wanted to fight in the first place. The movie did do a good job of showing the tragedies of hubris and arrogance (Troy falls because Priam cannot believe that anyone could penetrate its walls; Achilles is disgraced because his rage and desire for personal revenge overcame his respect for a worthy adversary and his duty to protect his countrymen). But at its root, the story didn't do well because the only readily identifiable bad guy (Agamemnon) wound up winning the war and sacking Troy. Agamemnon seemed to win at the end, the sympathetic figure of Priam got whacked by the maurauding Greeks, and the heroic figures of Achilles and Hector fought each other, and both of them died what seemed to be pointless deaths that accomplished no greater good.

Troy represented a huge investment of money and resources for the studios. They were able to make a profit from the movie as a result of its foreign release, but they took a bath in the United States. We lack the capacity to appreciate a true Clash of the Titans myth. (The unbelievably cheesy yet immensely popular movie with Harry Hamlin from the early 1980's of that name, you will recall, had good guys and bad guys in its storyline.)

We need good guys and bad guys. The Good Mother myth needs only a good guy; the Trickster myth needs only a bad guy. But most often, we need both a good guy and a bad guy. We need a story to make sense of the world -- a story that we have been told time and again, over and over. We need to be told what we already believe to be true. As I mentioned before, the existential alternative to mythology is simply intolerable.