Trapped in a library somewhere in the United States, our correspondent's only means of communication is...
My Word's Worth
THE DAILY MAWGID
I've been having an extended e-mail conversation with Jon Katz, the Media
Rant columnist from the Netizen.
He's affronted by the one-sided nature of journalism about the internet--all
pedophiles and porno, and nothing about online instruction,
online statistics and dictionaries, nothing about the grassroots
politicking.
I have the same feeling of immense frustration with journalists, not just
because of how poorly they understand and cover the internet, but because of
how poorly they understand and cover women's issues, affirmative action,
race relations, the downsized globalized economy, and anyone under 30.
I was attributing this to the fact that so much of our journalism is in the
hands of MAWGs (middle-aged-white-guys). These are guys who grew up with a
certain understanding of how the world works, and their proper place in it,
and then found that that world had gone and changed on them. And they
refused to change along with that world. It occurred to me as I was writing
Katz that he might, technically, be a MAWG himself, and I told him that, if
so, I wasn't talking about him.
Turns out, he is a middle-aged-white-guy.
Oops. So of course, I realized that the term MAWG was unnecessarily
dismissive of
a class that people can't help fitting into. After all, if you're born a white
male and you live long enough, you're going to be a MAWG, and you might be
one of a large number of extremely intelligent, broad-minded ones at that.
I mean, Douglas Adams and James Burke and Bill Bryson and Dave Barry and
John Cleese are MAWGs, for heaven's sake.
No, my problem is not with MAWGs but with MAWGIDs--middle-aged-white-
guys-in-denial--and at that, only with the ones we are dependent on for news
and information. And law-making.
Not that I can't feel some sympathy for them, you understand. It's hard,
when you've been taught how to compete against other white guys for jobs, to
find out that you now also have to compete against women and off-white guys
too. The rules changed in the middle of the game.
And they grew up in a world where women waited on men and tended to their
needs and raised their children and, if they worked at all, worked as
adoring girl Fridays who cheerfully waited on the boss and bought presents
for his wife. And now those women are demanding seats on the boards of
directors, refusing to serve coffee to the boss, sometimes earning more
money than their husbands, and even becoming bosses themselves, over MAWGs
who are all convinced they could do a better job because, after all, they
don't get PMS.
They don't understand their kids, or their kids' music at all. REAL rock n'
roll was what the MAWGIDs listened to in the '50's and '60's; the Seattle
sound is beyond them, punk is downright dangerous and we all know that rap
encourages violence don't we?
The global economy threatens their jobs, their security. Quarterly profits
are everything, and in the name of quarterly profits, people are getting
fired right and left. Hence the desperation with which the Mawgids fight
competition from women and blacks for the jobs that are still there.
Computers of course are threatening. Reporters have gone from typing their
stories and handing them off to copyboys to typesetting them themselves on
their word-processors. Most of us over 40 do not understand computers; we
have this powerful conviction that if we touch computers they will break;
worse, they will get revenge by losing our copy, sending preposterously
wrong credit card bills, spreading private information about us to the wrong
people.
And if the computer is threatening, the internet is even scarier. It
doesn't help that the people who should be teaching the MAWGIDs how to use the
internet are people who write English like they translated it from Japanese
to Finnish first. It doesn't help that the people who do know and love the
machines are the same guys the MAWGIDs ridiculed in high school (we all know
when someone has a right to get revenge on us), and that these
technowizards go around saying things like "What's your IP address?" and
asking you how many BPS your system can handle.
I have a lot of sympathy for MAWGs--and, indeed, for anyone who finds the
rules changed midway through their lives. The rules changed for women, too,
after all. The women who thought they had a social contract--take care of
your man,
raise your children, keep a clean and gracious house, and you will be taken
care of--found themselves traded in for sweet young things, and tossed out
on the job market they had no training for. Life is tough all over.
The problem I have with the MAWGIDs in journalism, though, is that they have
no right to retreat into denial because they are REPORTERS, dammit, and it
is their job to find out what is happening and report on it honestly. If
they don't, the rest of us don't get the information we need to make
intelligent decisions about social problems.
The MAWGIDs in journalism feel their own pain. So intensely that they
can't understand other points of view, other people's pain. They can't deal
with competition from blacks and women, so they write stories about how
brilliant a work The Bell Curve (a poorly researched piece of racist
nonsense) is. They write long articles about suffering white people cheated
out of jobs they deserve because affirmative action forced an employer to
give the job to an "unqualified" black or woman. (As a librarian, I have
had to hunt long and hard to find positive stories about affirmative action.
Most stories in the mainstream press are slanted against it. Moreover, many
of the "facts" presented in those stories are incorrect.)
MAWGIDs deal with Generation X by calling them "slackers." They dismiss
children, and fail to write about them at all unless the kids are killing
someone or being murdered themselves. The kids aren't learning what the
MAWGIDs learned in school (What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know is a
scary book), so the MAWGIDs fail to notice that, in fact, the kids know a
whole lot of stuff--it's just different stuff. (For starters, the kids
understand the computers.)
The MAWGIDs look with blank incomprehension at MTV if they look at it at all
(it's rarely part of the cable package at hotels serving business
travelers), so of course they totally missed the story of the Rock-the-Vote
campaign that led to an extraordinary turnout of young people voting for
Bill Clinton in 1992.
Their ideas about women keep them from reporting what's really going on in
women's lives. They need to believe that women are really unhappy with the
world of work, so they publish stories about how many of the first women who
got their MBAs at Harvard have dropped out of the corporate world; the
MAWGIDs didn't notice that approximately the same percentage of the male
MBAs from Harvard
also dropped out. MAWGIDs see men accused of rape through the perspective
of fellow feeling (my God, some woman could holler "rape" and my life would
be over) and then insist that the view from any women's group can't
possibly be objective.
(Acceptable spokespersons for women's viewpoints in mainstream media are
almost entirely non-feminists like Camille Paglia.)
These guys don't understand the internet. But they do understand that fewer
and fewer people are reading newspapers, and that fewer and fewer people are
watching the network news. They do understand that their profession and
their jobs, are in danger, and that part of the new competition is electronic
news. What's worse, a lot of that news is not selected by journalists, but by
ordinary people.
The only actual power journalists have, after all, is the power to decide
what's news. If the president wants to say something to the American
people, and the reporters choose not to report it, or simply misrepresent
it, who's more powerful, the president or the filter his words must squeeze
through?
So when the MAWGID journalists look at the internet, they don't see
treasures. They don't see
the entire text of the stolen Brown Williamson memos and realize that they
could use them to write a brilliant story about what the tobacco industry
knew about nicotine. They don't see the online oral history of Holocaust
survivors and use it for a story. They don't read the rants of all the
patriot groups online and warn their readers about the nutcakes in our midst
(the existence of the patriot groups was unknown to most newspaper readers
until the Oklahoma City bombing). They don't notice that every single
government department has put its information resources online so they can
click on the exact statistic or name or quote they need for their stories.
No, when they look at the internet, they see a place shrouded in mystery,
filled with deadheads, bombmakers, lust-filled adventurers, and
non-journalists who have the nerve to think they can decide what's news--a world
that isn't safe for children. Let alone middle-aged-white-guys-in-denial.
And that's why those of us who know what the net is, have to fight
politicians and a frightened public to keep our freedom of information. The
politicians are MAWGIDs, the journalists are MAWGIDs, and none of them know
what they're talking about.
So, yes, I feel sorry for them. But I also want to kick their butts. Because
all of them have an absolute responsibility to know what they're talking
about, to go and find out, and to tell us the truth.
Please feel free to send any comments on this column to Marylaine Block
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