For me, Washington is the media Heart of Darkness. Journalists here take money to speak to banks and lobbying groups. Many of our best-known journalists take money to go on talk shows and scream at one another. They live nose-to-nose with the most powerful people in the country and have become, in many ways, indistinguishable from them. They have turned political journalism into a kind of cultural cesspool of accusation, scandal, nasty reporting, and confrontation. Our coverage of politics and government could hardly be more dispiriting or less informative.
I am generalizing, for sure. All Washington reporters don't do or contribute to those things. But collectively, the Washington press corps is a nightmare, the enemy of both rational discourse and civic enlightenment. The town is the capital, not just of the country but of People Who Don't Get It and Are Proud of It.
So I flew there to promote my book Virtuous Reality with more than the usual dread. Was there any place where people would be less likely to want to talk calmly about media and culture?
Which is why I was all the more surprised when it turned out to be an interesting day, discussion-wise. I learned a lot about how capital journalism views new media and culture. I was also discovering the special nature of the interactive book tour.
Reviews are emailed to me long before my publisher sees them. So are the first comments of readers, responding to my email address on the book jacket. Within minutes of any TV or radio appearance anywhere, I have email waiting with critiques, guidance, and advice. "You got a B," said one former political aide of my appearance on NPR's Talk of the Nation, where I was pounced on Monday by a Washington TV talk-show attack panelist named Mona Charen. "You need to point out more clearly that these people are upset because they're being displaced, not because media is immoral," emailed one former campaign aide.
This was good advice, and I used it to good effect all day. I was assaulted again, live on Fox News, by another "conservative" voice, columnist John Leo of U.S. News & World Report. It's clear that producers see Virtuous Reality as liberal and libertarian dogma that needs to be countered, not explained. Fair enough. Leo is on the thoughtful end of the spectrum, but he repeated some of the usual libels about culture - shows that make kids burn buildings down, movies that make people set fire to people. I was about to say that Sylvia Plath has caused some teenagers to take their own lives, but nobody wants to ban her poetry - but we were out of time. I was babbling over some jazzy music.
In the wake of months of stories about declining crime, the locus of the assault on new media and technologies has shifted, I notice, and without apology or shame. It no longer literally causes violence, as we've been told for years, but, as both Charen and Leo put it, damages the "moral fabric" of the country. That's a big change.
Cultural conservatives and nervous boomers have been yelling for years that the Internet is dangerous and TV will turn Johnny into a sociopath, but since that argument no longer holds up - crime rates among the young are sinking fast even as new media proliferates - the focus has shifted to Internet pornography and the degenerate moral climate.
The most fun I had all day was on a black-oriented jazz station where my book and my ideas were not the least bit controversial. "I really dig Thomas Paine," said the host. "He would tell the truth instead of what we get from most of the media." One caller, Art, sympathized with attacks on the Internet. "This isn't new, man. They did this with jazz and blues for years, until they just stole it and made it into rock and roll." Another caller said he was concerned that his daughter listened to rap, but he "monitored it," understanding where it came from. This was so shockingly sensible a response I hardly believed it. Chris, another caller, said that African American businessmen had blown the chance to invest in their own music years ago, and were making the same mistake with the Internet.
I had an hour with Brian Lamb on C-Span's Booknotes. He too gets off on Paine, and on the moral bankruptcy and corporatization of modern media. He surprised me by popping up my Netizen column right in the middle of the interview and pulling up archives of past columns he wanted to talk about. You rarely encounter that kind of homework on a book tour.
And a news-magazine reporter emailed me with the words my agent has been waiting to hear: "Might you spare me a few minutes to talk about the brewing controversy over your book?" Sure I could.
Emailers have suggested questions, offered crash pads, even makeup tips.
"Saw you on Fox News," said Galaxy P. "Stop slouching. You're not at a keyboard. Sit up straight. Look at the camera."
After six hours talking to people in Washington about culture, politics, and media, I left with the sense that it was a harsh place, conservative in its politics and its culture, so addicted to debate and confrontation that discussion becomes nearly impossible. It's not so much hostile to new media as clueless about what they are and how they work. As my emailer reminded me, this culture is profoundly threatened by the liberation of information, and with good reason. They are being asked to share what they have long monopolized.
I found myself telling seasoned reporters that the elderly were online, and that child porn wasn't an automatic, commonplace part of most people's online experience. Journalists were shocked to learn that crime statistics show that children are more like to have airplanes fall on their heads than be harmed being online.
I explained the principles of interactivity as if they were quantum physics. Except among the very few younger journalists I met, the gap between that place and this culture is real, vast, and significant. I understood in just a few hours how the Communications Decency Act was so easily passed by people who live and work there.
I didn't bridge or dent this chasm. I was a ripple in a vast lake. I had the feeling of having entered a closed and profoundly self-absorbed culture, and was questioned like some British explorer back for the first time from the deep and dangerous recesses of an unexplored continent. I wasn't back on the plane home before the waters had closed.
The men particularly, especially the male boomer journalists, academics and think-tank types, seemed threatened in some visceral way by the Net. They appeared to find it destructive, displacing, and evil, and I haven't the slightest doubt they will try to regulate it the second they figure out a way.
It wasn't an unpleasant day. It was largely civilized, respectful, sometimes even hospitable. But DC was a strange, alienating place for me. I'm already fantasizing about getting to San Francisco, my new-media home, where not only did I not feel like some creature on the X-Files, but where nearly everybody would have watched the last episode - the one with the talking tattoo - along with me.
