"The Braindead Megaphone" by George Saunders: An Evergreen Essay on News Media
(Unfortunately So)
Several words come to mind when I look to describe this first experience with George Saunders: rewarding, gratifying, even fertile. Saunders is a fine satirist and a better essayist, a man who, like David Foster Wallace, has his finger on the pulse of the American society. This is a fruitful comparison, though the two writers are very different. Foster Wallace's work is personally more rewarding, exhibits a level of engagement with the world of ideas that is often breath-taking in its scope. Saunders is more a comic; perhaps also more journalistic in a way that speaks to the influence of Hemingway.
The thematic overlap between the two invites yet further reflection: like Foster Wallace, Saunders engages with questions of an American population drowned out by thoughtless entertainment, more and more unwilling to critically engage with the world. Like Foster Wallace, Saunders pens travel essays that show the effects of fairy-tale luxury on the "thinking" person, the intellectual. To read Saunders' writing is to be invited to enter into dialogue with him; I found myself doing so with pleasure, caring little for the hours that went by. Before I share the first of these 'dialogues' with you, it's time for everyone's favourite thing on substack, the Call-to-Action. Do subscribe if you haven't already - it's much appreciated.
I. The Braindead Megaphone.
George Saunders' titular essay opens with a look backwards, at the human beings of eight-hundred years ago, and the posing of a question: what differentiates us from them? Saunders formulates a chief difference thus: "a change in what human beings are asking their minds to do on a daily basis." Starting from this foundation, he proceeds to examine what ails our sensationalist media-saturated world and, finally, to offer an imprecise way of resisting the luridness of our time's journalism.
Saunders introduces the figure of Megaphone Guy after inviting the reader to imagine a dinner party. You’ll know the type - it’s full of people like you and I, speaking in respectful notes, sharing their experiences, expounding on their interests. Among them all, however, is a louder voice: The Megaphone Guy. This Megaphone Guy is characterised by his dominance and tendency to drown out his fellow party-goers and their conversations. They are forced instead to transform into passive reactionaries: "They may not even notice they’ve started speaking in his diction, that their thoughts are being limned by his. What’s important to him will come to seem important to them". His language will become their language - because the loudest voice is not only the most difficult to ignore. It is the one that lodges itself deepest in our minds, and since "thought also results from speech," at least some of the Megaphone Guy's words will inevitably leave a mark on those forced to listen to him.
Saunders discusses this figure in the context of contemporary news media, but it would take no great leap of imagination to repurpose his points to the discussion of social media. With the way Twitter was used during Trump’s rise to power and his time in the presidency; with the way Elon Musk has transformed the platform as of late, the Renaissance we’ve seen of alt-right and bot accounts over these last several months.
A short trek down memory lane leads Saunders to reflect on when the news media shifted its discourse towards the scaremongering and sensationalist tactics we know today, as best exemplified and practiced by such right-wing organizations as FOX. Saunders pegs the O. J. Simpson trial and the Monika Lewinsky scandal as key junctures to have made "something latent in our news media" into something far more "overt and catastrophic". Namely, this need for around-the-clock reportage demands the “making of an elephant out of a fly” - an idiom native to Bulgarian, which we might equivocate to “making a mountain of a molehill”. Make no mistake, however - the handbook has been in use by most large-scale news organizations for well over two decades now.
The United States may have been ahead of the curve, but this type of sensationalism and the resulting decline of media literacy has spread throughout the world - today, you don't even need to glance at privately owned news media organizations. Look instead to Russian and Chinese state media, Polish and Hungarian state media, Bulgarian and countless other state medias—including the BBC, most worryingly (as [**Matt Seaton**](https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/matt-seaton/) argues on the [pages](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/04/20/the-british-broadcasting-conundrum-the-bbc-a-century-on-air/) of the New York Review of Books). You'll find most of them helplessly warped in the same fashion described in "The Braindead Megaphone". Whether pressured by economical, political, or ideological considerations, their coverage is slanted, aimed not at reporting facts but at presenting points of view, and dissecting others.
To illustrate the worst (at the date of writing) failure of the logic of this media machine, Saunders examines the USA (and others') war in Iraq:
Our venture in Iraq was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination. A culture better at imagining richly , three- dimensionally , would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’ s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect. A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possible, and as cautiously, because it knows its own girth and the tight confines of the china shop it’s blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well-prepared it is—no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny—the place it is headed for is going to be very different from the place it imagined.
There's truth to that: polarizing discourse demands that you see the other side as "Other," as "less than". And once you've made that leap, the way back is arduous indeed.
What inspires this polarizing discourse is, as Saunders notes, a fixation on profit to the detriment of all else: "Now, profit is fine; economic viability is wonderful. But if these trump every other consideration, we will be rendered perma-children, having denied ourselves use of our higher faculties". I don't know about you, but anytime I find myself glued to a TV screen (despite my best efforts) and watching some chance news programme, I become all too aware of that motive. It doesn't sit well with me and I can't imagine it should sit well with you, either. Saunders drives the point home:
In surrendering our mass storytelling function to entities whose first priority is profit, we make a dangerous concession: “Tell us,” we say in effect, “as much truth as you can, while still making money .” This is not the same as asking: “Tell us the truth.”
This is one of the lingering questions I invite you to ask yourself: What trust can anyone place in a news media that must account for profit before truth?
Saunders also captures the self-reflexive capacity of media to repurpose critique into itself, and in its increased collaboration with authority, to be particularly underhanded:
The era of the jackboot is over: the forces that come for our decency, humor, and freedom will be extolling, in beautiful smooth voices, the virtue of decency, humor, and freedom.
Doesn't that sound all too familiar to you? Think of the ever more repulsive world of politics we see, in Russia, but also across the Global South and the West (or shall we use that term, “Global North”?) alike. You're certain to come up with examples all your own.
Before I let off, I'll share one last quote. Saunders captures those elements that make an excellent story, juxtaposing them against the kind of rushed, limited storytelling venture that Megaphone Guy makes use of. I found this quote strikes at the heart of storytelling:
The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, inconvertible.
Next time on The Mind Shattered and Renewed, I’ll pick up with an examination of Saunders’ essays on reading and writing. You can find those essays in The Braindead Megaphone.