Chautauqua, Day 4: Juan Williams

National Pub­lic Radio’s Juan Williams is funny.

No, you can’t tell from the pic­ture. Here he looks angry. Brood­ing. Somber. Morose. He came out on stage and sat in the chair await­ing his intro­duc­tion for nearly a full minute look­ing just… like… this.

Scarey.

But then, the humor came, deliv­ered secretly in that NPR monot­one tak­ing us all by sweet sur­prise. Jokes about drugs and penises. Jokes about Chau­tauquans and good man­ners. But mostly, he joked at the expense of the media.



His mes­sage, of course, was not to be funny. He came to Chau­tauqua to talk about the many mes­sages of the media, the many mas­ters served in the busi­ness. Inter­est­ingly, while the pre­vi­ous speak­ers lead­ing up to Williams focused on what they were doing to change the way they do busi­ness, to make media bet­ter, his mes­sage was far more empow­er­ing: if you don’t like what you’re watch­ing on TV, what you’re read­ing in the papers, what you hear on the radio, turn it off. Write let­ters. Make calls. When demand shifts, the mar­ket will change to fol­low it.

Williams’ take on the pri­mary pain the media causes our cul­ture is rooted in frag­men­ta­tion. Many of these con­cepts that drive imme­di­ate access to focused and fil­tered infor­ma­tion on the web — RSS, por­tals, sub­scrip­tions, etc — nat­u­rally dri­ves con­sumers of media to be gen­er­ally less informed than their pre­de­ces­sors. It’s narrow-casting, not broad­cast­ing, he says, and this frag­men­ta­tion of sig­nal is mir­ror­ing the frag­men­ta­tion of our pop­u­lace as well.

Once, we were a melt­ing pot, cul­tur­ally diverse Euro­peans just want­ing a place to fit in. Now, we’re a stew, made up of Mex­i­cans, Asians, Latin-Americans, Africans, all com­ing to the US with one agenda or another, look­ing to reclaim cul­tural her­itage or iden­tity, to cel­e­brate, rather than fit in. And the media, in search of rat­ings and cir­cu­la­tion, is cater­ing to all those angles at once.

Frag­men­ta­tion is hap­pen­ing along age lines as well, Williams says. Media latch on to sto­ries about medicare, social secu­rity, and the high cost of pre­scrip­tion drugs, cater­ing to the fifth of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion now over age 65. In the mean time, a fourth of the pop­u­la­tion are under 18. These are the drive-by media con­sumers, tar­geted with flash and drama by the media, any­thing that will grab the atten­tion of their cell phones, their instant mes­sag­ing appli­ca­tions.

The conservative-liberal divide is the third media rift: Rush Lim­baugh plays host to Vice Pres­i­dent Cheny on his show exclu­sively, narrow-casting directly to the administration’s right.

“Hon­esty doesn’t play in this media pic­ture, because it doesn’t com­fort the audi­ence,” Williams said. “It doesn’t allow them to feel secure in thier opin­ions when you stand up and tell them some­thing they may not want to hear.“

Yes, Williams got seri­ous. He is, after all, a seri­ous news­man. Lis­ten­ing to his com­ments, I couldn’t help but get the feel­ing that he was on track to much broader expo­sure. If there’s a chance to rebuild an aging media infra­struc­ture into a new, rel­e­vant broad­cast medium, Williams will be at the front of it.

Then, he called in the “Net­work” ref­er­ence, the leg­endary Howard Beale call to action, dri­ving a nation to cry out, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any­more.“

Of course, that movie’s over 30 years old. What are we doing car­ry­ing on about the same mes­sage, the same frus­tra­tion, three decades later?

To me, it’s because the bet­ter speech of that movie won out in real-life Amer­ica. It’s Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen scold­ing Howard Beale and extolling the mean­ing of the uni­verse. It’s one of the great­est, most com­pelling mono­logues in cin­ema thanks to the bril­liant expos­i­tory of writer Paddy Chayef­sky and as much as I want to repost it here entirely, I’ll just point you in the right direc­tion to watch after a snip­pit:

You get up on your lit­tle twenty-one inch screen, and howl about Amer­ica and democ­racy. There is no Amer­ica. There is no democ­racy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T & T and DuPont, Dow, Union Car­bide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Rus­sians talk about in their coun­cils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their lin­ear pro­gram­ming charts, sta­tis­ti­cal deci­sion the­o­ries, min­i­max solu­tions and com­pute the price-cost prob­a­bil­i­ties of their trans­ac­tions and invest­ments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ide­olo­gies, Mr. Beale. The world is a col­lege of cor­po­ra­tions, inex­orably deter­mined by the immutable by-laws of busi­ness. The world is a busi­ness, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

Arthur Jensen on YouTube
Arthur Jensen MP3

And this may be Juan Williams’ legacy, the same as Howard Beale’s, the same as Don Quixote. But, like Huff­in­g­ton yes­ter­day, the world needs its rad­i­cal flag­wa­vers, the smart rebels, chal­leng­ing the norm. He is an oasis in the desert, if the masses can take a minute to stop and listen.