Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women By Ward Just Dutton, 178 pp., $8.95 “Media” is one of those prodigal words: long ago it left home to set up a bachelor loft in SoHo. Yet the progenitorial meaning deserves regard. “Medium. 1. a middle state or condition; mean.” E.g.: steaks done media rare.
Media people inhabit a forlorn sheol: homeless, separate, strung between fact and fact—chosen—for—public—edification. Any medium—TV, journalism, art, representative government, diplomatic protocol (after all, what occurs in Congress, at the UN is media-tion between citizen and nation or nation and nation) —any medium must function within a compromising ambience, a mean: neither absolute truth (which would require drab itemization and which couldn’t be transmitted whole), nor absolute fiction (which would not entice serious interest). Those who supervise this coexistent, invisible universe—the entrepreneurs of information—become remote, anomic in due time. They aren’t, say, an infantry platoon under perimeter attack; yet they can’t accept the edited, clean newsclip of that attack. They know the pragmatic selective mechanism too well; the actual experience they know not well enough. It’s hard to put much faith in your own three-hundred-word news release.
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