Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

‘Too Fresh to Be True’ 141
may well be imposed by systemic factors such as the economies of
scale imposed by a mass form rather than any corporate or state
agent, which partly explains why they are able to fail so readily when
the system is renewed by an emergent technology.
Bias itself is seen, at least for consumers in the West, to be part
and parcel of ‘the news’. Readers understand that news is inflected
by its source, that it is mediated. It is that inflection which explains
why it has been elevated from its actualité and gives it meaning. A
news spectacle like Zippergate carried a range of different meanings
for Republicans and Democrats, and for Americans and the citizens
of other countries. The Starr report, deprived of its political spin – its
bias – remains merely raw and confusing information. When the
values subsequently applied to it are those of entertainment rather
than news, its political meaning becomes subject to significant
category distortion.
Baudrillard suggests that such a distortion is systemic, that
scandals such as Watergate and Zippergate function in the same way
as Disneyland, that is as ‘imaginary effects’ concealing the lack of
‘reality’ or moral principle both within the park and without. 24
‘Whoever regenerates … public morality (by indignation, denunciation,
etc.) spontaneously furthers the order of capital …’ The claim is
that by repudiating the immoral and the licentious, capital, itself
completely without principle, provides itself with a moral facade or
‘superstructure’. Its agents, whether they be Matt Drudge or
Woodward and Bernstein, place that superstructure in the hands of
capital in the form of scandal or rather news of scandal. That news,
in its unmediated form, seems, however, to neutralise the moral
order (an ideological form) leaving an indifferent readership and the
scandal of a rapine capitalism unconcealed. The media’s consumers
then accuse it of dumbing down, of selling out to advertising.
Capital’s claim to a social contract, founded on a moral probity
which exposes scandal and conducted through the global media
corporations, is itself exposed. One of the scandal’s of Zippergate was
cruelly exposed in the failure of the American public to become
interested in the abortive impeachment attempt upon President
Clinton.
There was interest, however, expressed elsewhere. One effect of
the web is the globalisation of news, however local, which is not
necessarily to imply, as we shall see in Chapter 8, a ‘global’ news but