EVEN if he did not write media criticism, James Bowman would be a media critic by example: His original thinking and lucid prose are an implicit rebuke to the cliché-ridden, English-torturing, deep-as-a-bumpersticker discourse that issues from so much of the American media. In Media Madness, Bowman goes Sigmund Freud on press pundits and television blatherers, diagnosing in them a psychosis whose symptoms include paranoia, delusions of objectivity, and gradual withdrawal from reality.
Bowman is complaining not about the media’s lack of objectivity, but about their pretense to it. The myth of objectivity, Bowman argues, allows the media to relieve themselves of the more homely burden of being honest about their own prejudices and scrupulously fair to those who do not share them. He writes: “If you are truly objective, what need do you have to be fair? You speak, as it were, from no point of view-or all points of view at once, which comes to the same thing. In other words, you speak with the voice of God. To believe this is the very essence of media madness, and it is to eliminate the need for fairness.”
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