Issue #10/65, May 20 - June 3, 1999  

by Matt Taibbi

I had a friend once who had an awful dog, a big, mangy black French poodle. In a world where all puppies are at least a little bit cute, this was a dog that was born looking like a shiveled turd, and grew up to be a horrible animal, an accursed, doomed, miserable pet--stupid and with a surly, unlovable disposition. And it was all my friend's fault. His first mistake was naming it "Bogart"; his second was that he'd had the impressively evil idea of shouting new and incomprehensible commands at it every day of its puppyhood-"Heel!" one day, "Don't Heel!" the next-- so that the damn dog never knew whether he was being asked to sit, shit, or jump in the Winnebago.

By the time the dog was four years old, he spent most of his days growling at strangers and hiding under the family station wagon in the garage. He eventually swallowed his tongue there and choked to death, while twenty yards away, in the back yard, my friend and I unwittingly played out a dull game of wiffleball.

Two years later, my own family bought a puppy. We raised her right, taught her a solid set of commands, and she grew up a pleasant, loyal, respects-your-couch, won't-shit-on-your-pillow kind of pet. But then, when she was already an adult, I stumbled on an ingeniously cruel idea that changed her little doggy life... I made a recording of my own voice calling out her name, turned the recording on on one side of the room, and then called out to her myself from the other side of the room. I used to keep her frozen there in the middle of the room for hours that way. After enough of this, she started to give me that peculiarly canine "Fuck You" look from time to time, and eventually even stopped coming right away when I fed her.

Now that I'm no longer a sadistic adolescent male, I see the light. Dogs have done right by me and I'd never pull something like that on one of them again.

Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of my colleagues in the press haven't gone through the same maturation process. I have no idea what reporters do to their dogs, but they're definitely laying some seriously twisted pet-torture tactics on their readers. Try out the following pair of headlines out for size. Both are culled from April 19 morning editions of British national dailies:

Russia Shows Signs of Remarkable Recovery
* The Guardian

Study Puts 30 million Russians in Harsh Poverty
* The Financial Times

Story A, citing economists gathered at an investment conference sponsored by the European Bank of Recostruction and Development (EBRD), asserted that the "hunger, power supply problems, hyperinflation" roundly predicted after the August crash had not come to pass. Story B, citing World Bank officials, asserted that "the full effects of last August's financial crisis on economic growth and household incomes will continue to worsen this year and will increase poverty to a peak in early 2000 affecting up to 30m people."

The EBRD is a World Bank organization. These stories came from virtually the same place. The sources for both stories had access to exactly the same information and could be expected to have the same point of view on things. And yet, they are sending us diametrically opposite messages on the same subject on the same day. Fetch! Stay! Fetch! Stay!

Fortunately, I'm old enough now to instinctively loathe the World Bank, and interpret every article that mentions it or any of its minions as just one more excuse to loathe it further, and desire the mass suicide of its staffers. Other readers may not be so lucky. They might look, for instance, at the Moscow Times's April 30 cartoon, depicting an IMF loan as a gleaming treasure chest, and interpret the picture to mean that IMF loans are actually gifts of money. And why shouldn't they? A good 70% of all news stories mentioning loans by the World Bank or its evil hag sister, the IMF, refer to loans not as loans, but as "credits" or "aid".

I'm a relatively educated person, and yet my pop-culture experience with those two words are as follows. "Credit" is what flashes on the screen beside the number "1" when I put a quarter in a video game. "Aid" is the word Simon Le Bon used when he talked about getting together with his mates to donate money to feed those starving black blokes in Africa. The former refers to a thing already paid for, the latter refers to something free.

Neither is a term a loan shark would use. And yet, this latest round of IMF "aid" (a new multibillion dollar aid package to Russia was announced a few weeks ago) is a story in the true loan-sharking tradition-- this IMF money, for instance, will probably clear the way for more World Bank loans, which in turn will be used to pay back the IMF...you get the picture. Or maybe you don't, if you read the aforementioned Financial Times article, whose concluding paragraph read:

"[World Bank official] Rutkowski said the analysis showed the need for far more detailed targeting of government social programmes on those most severely affected by poverty. The World Bank has already launched pilot projects in three Russian cities and is discussing expansion to a further 25."

The launching of projects, the need to concentrate more closely on those most severely affected by poverty...it sounds encouragingly benevolent, doesn't it? You'd almost never guess that what that paragraph actually says is that the World Bank needs to take a closer look at which social programs it hopes to kill in its next set of structural adjustment demands. The image is Santa Claus, the reality is Scrooge with a few reluctant second thoughts.

The dialogue between the Western mass media and its consumers isn't much different than the dialogue between master and dog. In both cases the former trains the latter to bypass difficult concepts and fulfill his social needs by responding to simple, tonally-shaded commands. With a dog the dialogue is limited by the animal's cognitive power; with the news, by the limitations of the media format. You can teach a dog to sit, but you can't teach him to stand up on his hind legs if a three-star general enters the room after sundown in a leap year. Similarly, you can train a person from birth to have pity for the poor, but you can't possibly explain the ambiguities of international lending in 470 words.

The truth is that our media are structured in such a way that it is virtually impossible for the average person to acquire the information he needs to intelligently assert whatever meager political power he has. The average newspaper article is ostensibly a self-standing, rhetorically coherent description of a newsworthy event, but space limitations force reporters to carry out their responsibilities by relying on broad generalities and canine-friendly catchwords-- words like "aid", for instance, or "nationalist", or "reformer", or, more to the current point, "ethnic cleansing" or "military position".

There's no substantive difference between using the phrase "ethnic cleansing" and shouting "Bad!" at a dog. You're not explaining to the dog why it's wrong to barf on the carpet-- you're just telling him it is. "Ethnic cleansing" doesn't tell you how it's different from "internment", which is the nice word we used in World War II for virtually the same thing-- but it does give you a strong hint that whatever it is, it's bad and you should condemn it.

Most of the hundreds of catchwords you digest every day are likewise designed to evoke an emotional response rather than a sober intellectual judgement. When you open a newspaper, rather than informing yourself, you're actually just submitting to a series of these commands.

Unfortunately, even assuming an absolutely responsible use of these command-catchwords by reporters, it's a hugely imperfect system of civic education. The mere act of simplifying monstrous subjects like the activities of the World Bank or war in the Balkans or the reforming of the Russian economy is destructive in itself. It trains the dog/reader to expect and even demand simplifications, which ultimately results in the simple-minded making decisions about complicated problems. As in: if you reduce a six-hundred year conflict to eight sentences spread out over two minutes of airtime, you naturally get two-minute opinions, however well-meaning, about six-hundred year issues.As George Orwell once wrote about the decline of the English language: "[English] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that on top of it all, most reporters are evil morons who make asinine fuckups and lie on a daily basis. They're not only telling you to fetch, they're doing it when they haven't thrown the stick yet. For instance, take a Reuters story which ran a few eeks back under the head "TV Host Got Kosovo Letter Before Slaying". Here's the lead:

"BBC television host Jill Dando received an anonymous letter about the Kosovo war shortly before she was shot dead, British police said Friday as they published a picture of the murder inquiry's prime suspect."

The article insinuates, of course, that there is a possible connection between the letter and the murder (otherwise they wouldn't have both been reported in the same article in the lead), and that it might be reasonable to think that a Serb might be responsible for the killing. That the letter was not threatening, that there was no evidence whatsoever linking the two incidents, that the entire frigging world is talking about the Kosovo war, that half the private correspondence passing through the English post probably contains mention of the bombings, that people who are still clinically alive like yours truly have received not one letter about Kosovo but dozens--none of this is in the piece. What's in it is an insinuation and nothing more. Dando in her lifetime probably got a letter from a Rowan Atkinson fan, but you don't see British police responding to "theories" that she was whacked by Mr. Bean.

The U.S. kills 24 people, including 15 kids, in a missile attack on a bus last month--but every major newspaper in America leads with Jesse Jackson's negotiated release of three American POWs, complete with interviews with the soldiers' parents. Interviews with the Serb parents of the missile victims were nowhere to be found...Reuters reported around that same time on the crash of a U.S. Marine Harrier jet into the Adriatic, and identified the craft as American four times in the piece, but somehow neglected to mention that the plane which just crashed in clear weather without being fired upon into a calm open ocean is a British-designed machine... When a NATO missile "strayed" into Bulgaria on April 29, the AP made a piece of metal the protagonist and wrote in the crucial sentence that "an alliance jet fired the missile but it [quoting now NATO spokesman Jamie Shea] 'strayed [note this curiously impersonal verb] from its course and unintentionally landed in Bulgaria.'" Serb violence, of course, is generally attributed to one or more guilty and evil person(s), and its excesses are seldom chalked up as accidents.

You get the point. The system sucks to begin with, but it starts to look positively Mephistophilean when you factor in the myriad of little lies, omissions, and outright mistakes that reporters wrap around their hypersimplified plotlines. It's amazing that anyone would make any decision of any import based on these confused and ill-meaning campaigns of literary harassment, but they do. They'll even decide to support killing people in foreign countries based on this crap. It's unbelievable.

Dogs are smarter. They know when they're being fucked with, and make a beeline for the nearest station wagon to hide under. If only people had that sense. Don't hold your breath.