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My Word's
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My Word's
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vol. 2, #4, July, 1997
THE DAILY MAWGID
I've been having an extended e-mail conversation with Jon Katz, the Media Rant columnist from the Netizen. He's affronted by the one-sided nature of journalism about the internet--all pedophiles and porno, and nothing about online instruction, online statistics and dictionaries, nothing about the grassroots politicking.
I have the same feeling of immense frustration with journalists, not just because of how poorly they understand and cover the internet, but because of how poorly they understand and cover women's issues, affirmative action, race relations, the downsized globalized economy, and anyone under 30.
I was attributing this to the fact that so much of our journalism is in the hands of middle aged white guys (MAWGs). These are guys who grew up with a certain understanding of how the world works, and their proper place in it, and then found that that world had gone and changed on them. And they refused to change along with that world. It occurred to me as I was writing Katz that he might, technically, be a MAWG himself, and I told him that, if so, I wasn't talking about him.
Turns out, he is a middle-aged-white-guy.
Oops. So of course, I realized that the term MAWG was unnecessarily dismissive of a class that people can't help fitting into. After all, if you're born a white male and you live long enough, you're going to be a MAWG, and you might be one of a large number of extremely intelligent, broad-minded ones at that. I mean, Douglas Adams and James Burke and Bill Bryson and Dave Barry and John Cleese are MAWGs, for heaven's sake.
No, my problem is not with MAWGs but with MAWGIDs--middle-aged-white- guys-in-denial--and at that, only with the ones we are dependent on for news and information. And law-making.
Being middle aged, white, and male is not a choice one makes. Being willfully dense IS.
Not that I can't feel some sympathy for them, you understand. It's hard, when you've been taught how to compete against other white guys for jobs, to find out that you now also have to compete against women and off-white guys too. The rules changed in the middle of the game.
They grew up in a world where women waited on men and tended to their needs and raised their children and, if they worked at all, worked as adoring girl Fridays who cheerfully waited on the boss and bought presents for his wife. And now those women are demanding seats on the boards of directors, refusing to serve coffee to the boss, sometimes earning more money than their husbands, and even becoming bosses themselves, over MAWGs who are all convinced they could do a better job because, after all, they don't get PMS.
They don't understand their kids, or their kids' music at all. REAL rock n' roll was what the MAWGIDs listened to in the '50's and '60's; the Seattle sound is beyond them, punk is downright dangerous and we all know that rap encourages violence don't we?
The global economy threatens their jobs, their security. Quarterly profits are everything, and in the name of quarterly profits, people are getting fired right and left. Hence the desperation with which the Mawgids fight competition from women and blacks for the jobs that are still there.
Computers of course are threatening. Reporters have gone from typing their stories and handing them off to copyboys to typesetting them themselves on their word-processors. Most of us over 40 do not understand computers; we have this powerful conviction that if we touch computers they will break; worse, they will get revenge by losing our copy, sending preposterously wrong credit card bills, spreading private information about us to the wrong people.
And if the computer is threatening, the internet is even scarier. It doesn't help that the people who should be teaching the MAWGIDs how to use the internet are people who write English like they translated it from Japanese to Finnish first. It doesn't help that the people who do know and love the machines are the same guys the MAWGIDs ridiculed in high school (we all know when someone has a right to get revenge on us), and that these technowizards go around saying things like "What's your IP address?" and asking you how many BPS your system can handle.
I have a lot of sympathy for MAWGs--and, indeed, for anyone who finds the rules changed midway through their lives. The rules changed for women, too, after all. The women who thought they had a social contract--take care of your man, raise your children, keep a clean and gracious house, and you will be taken care of--found themselves traded in for sweet young things, and tossed out on the job market they had no training for.
Life is tough all over.
The problem I have with the MAWGIDs in journalism, though, is that they have no right to retreat into denial because they are REPORTERS, dammit, and it is their job to find out what is happening and report on it honestly. If they don't, the rest of us don't get the information we need to make intelligent decisions about social problems.
The MAWGIDs in journalism feel their own pain. So intensely that they can't understand other points of view, other people's pain. They can't deal with competition from blacks and women, so they write stories about how brilliant a work The Bell Curve (a poorly researched piece of racist nonsense) is. They write long articles about suffering white people cheated out of jobs they deserve because affirmative action forced an employer to give the job to an "unqualified" black or woman. (As a librarian, I have had to hunt long and hard to find positive stories about affirmative action. Most stories in the mainstream press are slanted against it. Moreover, many of the "facts" presented in those stories are incorrect.)
MAWGIDs deal with Generation X by calling them "slackers." They dismiss children, and fail to write about them at all unless the kids are killing someone or being murdered themselves. The kids aren't learning what the MAWGIDs learned in school, so the MAWGIDs fail to notice that, in fact, the kids know a whole lot of stuff--it's just different stuff. (For starters, the kids understand the computers.)
The MAWGIDs look with blank incomprehension at MTV if they look at it at all (it's rarely part of the cable package at hotels serving business travelers), so of course they totally missed the story of the Rock-the-Vote campaign that led to an extraordinary turnout of young people voting for Bill Clinton in 1992.
Their ideas about women keep them from reporting what's really going on in women's lives. They seem to need to believe that women are really unhappy with the world of work, so they publish stories about how many of the first women who got their MBAs at Harvard have dropped out of the corporate world; the MAWGIDs didn't notice that approximately the same percentage of the male MBAs from Harvard also dropped out. MAWGIDs see men accused of rape through the perspective of fellow feeling (my God, some woman could holler "rape" and my life would be over) and then insist that the view from any women's group can't possibly be objective. (Acceptable spokespersons for women's viewpoints in mainstream media are almost entirely non-feminists like Camille Paglia.)
These guys don't understand the internet. But they do understand that fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers, and that fewer and fewer people are watching the network news. They do understand that their profession and their jobs, are in danger, and that part of the new competition is electronic news. What's worse, a lot of that news is not selected by journalists, but by ordinary people.
The only actual power journalists have, after all, is the power to decide what's news. If the president wants to say something to the American people, and the reporters choose not to report it, or simply misrepresent it, who's more powerful, the president or the filter his words must squeeze through?
So when the MAWGID journalists look at the internet, they don't see treasures. They don't see the entire text of the stolen Brown Williamson memos and realize that they could use them to write a brilliant story about what the tobacco industry knew about nicotine. They don't see the online oral history of Holocaust survivors and use it for a story. They don't read the rants of all the patriot groups online and warn their readers about the nutcakes in our midst (the existence of the patriot groups was unknown to most newspaper readers until the Oklahoma City bombing).
They don't notice that every single government department has put its information resources online so they can click on the exact statistic or name or quote they need for their stories. No, when they look at the internet, they see a place shrouded in mystery, filled with deadheads, bombmakers, lust-filled adventurers, and non-journalists who have the nerve to think they can decide what's news--a world that isn't safe for children. Let alone middle-aged-white-guys-in-denial.
And that's why those of us who know what the net is, have to fight politicians and a frightened public to keep our freedom of information. The politicians are MAWGIDs, the journalists are MAWGIDs, and none of them know what they're talking about.
So, yes, I feel sorry for them.
But I also want to kick their butts. Because they're NOT DOING THEIR JOBS. They have an absolute responsibility to know what they're talking about, to go and find out when they don't know, and to tell us the truth.
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