The most telling media criticism in years isn't in any journalism review, on any Web site, or in any book, but was patched together by Doug Pray and Steve Helvey, two friends from UCLA Film School who scraped up US$60,000 and created Hype!, a documentary about one of the most ferociously overhyped phenomena in cultural history - Seattle grunge.
Journalism can wail all it wants about illiterate and apathetic kids, new media that's addictive and displacing, and the decline of civilization in general, but one of the most corrosive and alienating problems gnawing away at journalism's moral center (along with our growing disinclination to believe what it tells us) is the media's steady absorption into America's ravenous hype machine.
This process has never been better documented, step by amazing step, than in this movie that tells the story of the tsunami-like hysteria over the Northwest rock explosion in the bewildered voices of the people who created, benefited from, watched, and survived it.
Grunge music is basically punk rock with a different number of chords - and a strong flannel fashion identity. It was created in and around Seattle by kids who liked to play and listen to music. Savvy producers managed to plant some stories in British rock magazines about how hip Seattle was, and within days the America media herd - Spin, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, MTV, People, Entertainment Weekly, the networks - came thundering in.
We all know how this story ends. A few bands - Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden - became huge, and the freewheeling, experimental, and innovative Seattle music scene was overwhelmed by clueless journalists, invasive TV producers, greedy music executives, and hordes of hip wannabes from all over the world.
Rolling Stone editors flew in to photograph grunge fashion, and made their subjects take off all their clothes and put on high-tone flannel shirts and long johns. The New York Times ran a story on grunge language, ponderously reprinting totally bogus words and terms - the "language" of grunge - made up on the spot by a mischievous producer.
Hype is one of journalism's most virulent infections. TV news magazines, morning talk shows, and most slick magazine-covers no longer even pretend to be about noncommercial editorial subjects. They brazenly hustle movies, books, cars, kitchen appliances, celebrities, the latest movie star, the hottest CD, the most sensational revelatory book.
Tuesday's New York Times "Home" section this week hustles coffee tables, including a $1,875 Kenya table on the front of the section where editorial matter once appeared. Newsweek is as likely to hype Independence Day as Variety is.
Publishers, studios, record companies, publicists, and corporations have manipulated journalism right out of its moral mind, transforming a supposedly independent and truth-dispensing culture of information into a kind of cultural flea market.
We have all become so inured to this corruption that it isn't even controversial any longer. Journalism doesn't seem to have considered the profound problem that if it becomes part of the hype, who would be left behind to give us unvarnished reality?
The very medium we are supposed to depend on to tell us the clear and levelheaded truth about things is busily - and often unknowingly - pitching us hype. Media is being swallowed up by the great hype machine. That raises all sorts of moral issues in its own right, but some pressing and practical ones, too - it undercuts journalism's most basic purpose. To protect us from hype and transcend it. Mainstream media is creating another form of cultural suicide by becoming just another uncritical and non-thinking hand reaching into our pockets. The need for new things to hype seems to far outstrip the need for new issues to clarify, new truths to tell.
The modern ideology of even our most serious media is the next hot thing, recycling the most famous face, the most outrageous nation. Since we can't count on journalism to be rational or levelheaded, we're on our own, mistrustful of more and more of the messages we're bombarded with. We might as well just look at the ads directly and skip all the pretense that surrounds them.
Hype! tells this story astonishingly well. Seattle's heads-up rock entrepreneurs knew if they placed a story about grunge in a spot mainstream journalists considered hip - in this case a British magazine - they might fire up the hype machine. It worked beyond their wildest dreams.
Seattle was transformed, hundreds of millions of dollars changed hands, fashions were launched, Kurt Cobain died, and the diverse, experimental, sometimes-innovative music movement in the Northwest was almost completely obliterated.
Since the hype machine is perpetually hungry for the next hot thing, by nature it must abandon each of its discoveries quickly. So we run from one hype to another, unable to absorb or comprehend any of it thoroughly.
"We just play music and do shows when we can, and every now and then we find out Seattle got really famous and we didn't," said a bemused member of one band, reflecting on the world turned upside-down around him.
Aside from the blistering indictment of the ways in which journalism works to distort truth and culture and reward greed, Hype! is a triumph of entrepreneurial student spirit. Pray and Helvey had no big bankers, and painstakingly nagged their way into the offices, living rooms, and backyards of most of the principal witnesses to one of the most astonishing pop-culture creations of recent years.
Their movie is entertaining in its own right, but more than that, it gives journalists a good place to start looking when the scions of media wring their hands and wonder why nobody believes the news anymore.
