Media's New Resident Expert

by Alexander Cockburn

Three or four years ago, it was William Schneider. No news story on the national political scene was complete without a sapient remark from Schneider. I remember once sitting at a national political convention with a bunch of people, including Schneider. We were all watching CNN. Suddenly, Schneider left the room, and a minute later, there he was on the screen, commenting, as a well-informed insider, on exactly the same stuff he'd been watching with us a moment before! Welcome to the real world of news commentary.

After Schneider went into eclipse, we heard a great deal from a man called Norman Ornstein, similarly endowed with an unquenchable facility for dispensing rapid opinions to harried reporters on deadline. There was a man from the School of Journalism at Berkeley and now ... Professor Gitlin.

The man has become a veritable Chernobyl of opinion mongering. I've rigged up a primitive Gitlin detector, and the thing starts crackling when I'm still 50 feet from the newsstand.

I'm not sure when exactly the Gitlin Opinion Reactor came on line as a continuously operating facility. Some Gitlin watchers reckon it was when he moved from the Bay Area to New York. Others reckon it was when he published his assessments of '60s radical culture, all very comforting to conventional opinion. Gitlin concluded that though a fine spirit of idealism permeated youth in the early stages of that stormy decade, by the end, an unpleasing and destructive strain had marred those bright hopes and dreams. You can see why Gitlin had made it to the top as a Walt Lippmann of the sound bite.

Dr. Spock dies, and Gitlin's phone rings. "'Parents turned to Spock because they were inclined to raise their children in a less authoritarian way,' said Todd Gitlin, a New York University professor ... " (Portland Press Herald, March 17, 1997).

Verso reissues "The Communist Manifesto," and Gitlin's phone rings once more: "'One thing Marx was right about was how capitalism converts everything into a commodity,' said Todd Gitlin, professor of sociology at New York University." The amateur platitude-monger would probably call it a day at this point and go off for a latte, pleased as Punch with his handiwork. Not Gitlin. He massages the obvious with an expert hand, creating a mini-vortex of platitudes in the Boston Globe for March 27: "The commodification of Marx himself shows 'that if even the baddest of the bad boys can be converted to commercial use, then anything can.'"

Here's another example of Gitlin's technique, which achieves the near miracle of being even more trite than the foregoing. I quote from the Christian Science Monitor for Sept. 22, 1997. "Celebrities use the media, and the media uses them," says Todd Gitlin, a media sociologist at New York University. 'Celebrities don't like all the moves of the media. They'd rather have privacy on their terms; but they are definitely not ready to do entirely without enquiring reporters or cameras.'"

Notice here how Gitlin maintains the same tonality throughout. Try reading the three sentences aloud. It's the same sort of stuff people say to would-be suicides standing on window ledges. The captive words shamble dully along the beaten path of the obvious, confirming the first law of journalism: never deviate into the unpredictable. People read newspapers to have their prejudices confirmed, not challenged. Getting an opinion from Gitlin is the intellectual equivalent of safe sex. There's absolutely no danger of getting infected with any interesting idea. As in:

Gitlin on the Unabomber: "'There is an immunity that comes from being unknown,' said Todd Gitlin, a professor of culture, journalism and sociology from New York University. 'Then all these myths can be projected onto him.'"

The Nation offered this to its readers on Jan. 16 of this year, less than a week after Gitlin had set the Buffalo News on fire with the thought that TV is "'now the storyteller for the American tribe,' says Todd Gitlin, a New York University professor of culture, journalism and sociology. 'TV affects different people differently at different times. It amplifies what's already in the works. So in the early '60s, television amplified the civil rights movement and thereby amplified the sense that great changes were afoot. In recent times, television more likely amplified the sense that business goes on as usual and the world of politics or social change is more or less frozen.'"

One problem with the Gitlin Reactor is the "disposal problem." In the old days, the waste would simply be carted off to the town dump or even thrown into the river. Environmental laws now prohibit such methods. There have been moves to declare Gitlin a Superfund site. Pending a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency, deadly cargoes of spent Gitlins are being trucked west, to Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which has become the nation's prime waste depository for such materials.

There have been protests from communities through which the convoys have been passing. On one of the western interstates, one particularly toxic Gitlin ("This is a culture of dispersion, and it's dispersed in television, as in other forms") shook loose and blocked the two westbound lanes for eight hours until emergency crews in protective clothing managed to reload it.