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Recently, I encountered the term "WPN" (for "what passes for news").
I'd like to propose a related term, "Nuzak." It's a functional description
of how WPN fits into the life of the average Joe, who never reads a newspaper
except for the sports section.
Nuzak is like Muzak. It runs in the background. It's a New York Times headline
on the way out of the house. It's CNN at the airport. It's Fox News at home
whileJoe is really doing something else. The purpose of Nuzak is to be mildly
interesting and possibly entertaining without telling Joe anything that would
disturb him personally. Real news has immediacy. It is "actionable intelligence,"
the last thing Joe is interested in. The average person basically wants to be
left alone and to be told, town-crier fashion, that "All is well."
Elevator news.
This does not mean that Nuzak can't be unpleasant, or that certain stories are
off-limits because they are horrific, or gruesome, or disgusting. Nuzak can
report all such things, but the important thing to Joe is that the events are
someplace else, happening to someone else, thathe personally is okay, and that
there's nothing for him to be disturbed about.
Lest you think I am talking exclusively about the "conservative" media
or the "liberal" media, I'm not. The discomfiting thing about Nuzak
is that it comes in both varieties and in between. Nuzak really has to do with
the way the stories are told and heard.
WPN is most commonly the product of zero-sum journalism. A partisan is interviewed
and quoted. A partisan of the opposite persuasion is likewise interviewed and
quoted. The reporter, having thus presented both sides, considers himself dispensed
from fact-checking and analysis. The reader is left to decide the truth for
herself as though it were merely a matter of opinion. But as the late Senator
Patrick Moynihan said, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not
to their own facts."
We saw an example of this kind of journalism during the last presidential campaign.
Swift Boat-loads of lies were told about John Kerry and dutifully reported,
"balanced" with denials from the Kerry campaign but often with very
little fact-checking or analysis by the reporters. WPN became Nuzak when the
accusations turned into headlines and 30-second commercials and the facts and
denials were delayed or muffled. After a few days of steady drumbeat on cable
news, polls revealed most people viewed the lies as accepted truth.
Nuzak in itself is nothing if not innocuous. Not so, the use to which it is
being put by the White House, with the willing cooperation of its friends in
the mainstream press. Together they convinced staggering numbers of Americans
that Saddam had WMD, that he was in league with al-Qaeda, and that preemptive
invasion of Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam from delivering a mushroom
cloud or bubonic plague to our shores. None of these things were true.
The White House has also exploited Nuzak since the invasion to convince the
public that the situation in Iraq is steadily improving, when it is clear that
the opposite is happening. The White House spin grabs the headlines and soundbites;
the corrections and the full facts must wait until the next news cycle, where
they are buried by more new spin. The steady drumbeat goes on. Mark Twain had
it right: "A lie can travel half-way around the world while the truth is
still putting his boots on."
If we don't want the White House and the mainstream media to use Nuzak to
sell us another war, we are going to have to demand real news and be willing
to be bothered by it.
John W. Baker is a teacher who lives in Houston.
