The Books of the Damned
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

"I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical
transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with
the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have
come back with the quasi-souls of lost data."
Charles Hoy Fort in "The Book of the Damned"

"Let me have the three major American networks and three leading
newspapers for a year and I'll bring back public lynchings and
racial war in the US."
Charles Simic quoting a Belgrade journalist

"We do not have censorship. What we have is a limitation on what
newspapers can report."
Louis Nel, Deputy Minister of Information, South Africa


The media outlets in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe are easily
interchangeable. The media in the countries in transition is
taxonomically not dissimilar to its brethren in the West. It, too,
can be divided to five categories of ownership and agenda. What sets
it apart, though, is its lack of (even feigned) professionalism, its
venality and its tainted ulterior motives. I wrote about it
elsewhere, in "The Rip van Winkle Institutions":

"And then there is the media - the waste basket of post communist
societies, the cesspool of influence peddling and calumny.
Journalists are easily bought and sold and their price is ever
decreasing. They work in mouthpieces of business interests
masquerading as newspapers or electronic media. They receive their
instructions - to lie, to falsify, to ignore, to emphasize, to
suppress, to extort, to inform, to collaborate with the authorities - from their Editor in Chief. They trade news for advertising. Some
of them are involved in all manner of criminal activities, others
are simply unethical in the extreme. They all have pacts with
Mammon. People do not believe a word these contortionists of
language and torturers of meaning write or say. It is by comparing
these tampered and biased sources that people reach their own
conclusions within their private medium."

The commercial media - the likes on "Nova" TV in the Czech Republic - are poor people's imitations of the more visible aspects of
American mass culture. Overflowing with lowbrow talk shows, freaks
on display, malicious gossip which passes for "news" and glitzy
promos and quizzes - these TV stations and print magazines derive
the bulk of their income from advertising. While ostensibly
politically innocuous, they exert a subtle and cumulative influence
on the numbed and dwindling minds of their spectators and readers.
By conditioning their consumers to ever lower fare of pulp common
denominators, they set a standard of no holds barred and no
standards observed. They are the opium for the masses that religion
once was, diverting potentially dangerous attention from real events
and personalities to the staged alarms of public enemies and the
artificial crises of bingo lotteries. No less persecutory than any
totalitarian regime, these mass media are ominous symptoms of the
social malaise of disillusionment with the realities of life and
with more institutionalized modes of expression. They are escapism
embodied, a dreamland, a scape of fantasy, the vale of telenovellas.
Whole nations are in thrall. In Macedonia, the protagonist of a
servant's saga, "Kassandra", was given a hero's welcome upon her
visit to this impoverished and bitter land. Whole families consume
hours of this visual Ritalin, hypnotized by cheap scenery built to
resemble unattainable riches.

Then there is the mercenary media. These are groups of hired pens
and keyboards - so called journalists who offer their services to
the highest bidder. Their price is often pathetic: a lunch a month,
one hundred deutschmarks, a trip abroad and a dingy hotel room. They
collaborate with their editors and share the spoils with them. They
are the whores of the profession, ever the hungry look, ever the hat
in hand, ever the submissive and furtive glances of the serfs of
capital. They often publish other people's self-serving communiqués
without altering a word. I, myself, provided them with "interviews"
which I, solely, have authored, questions and all. Too lazy to or
embittered to invest in their profession, consumed by self-loathing
and by general disdain - they let themselves be passively abused in
the dirty intercourse of money and of influence.

The mercenaries often work in brothels known as "business-backed
media". These are TV stations, daily papers and periodicals owned by
the oligarchs of malignant capitalism and used by them to rubbish
their opponents and flagrantly and unabashedly further their
business interests. This phenomenon is most pronounced in this land
of depredation and depravity, in Russia, where virtually all the
media is now identified with and digested by business, mafia-like
interests. Despite their infamous one-sidedness, they still claim
neutrality and objectivity but these spurious claims are met with
revolt by a hostile population, long trained to distrust the printed
word and even the broadcast image. Thus the art of "reading between
the lines" is flourishing again and the very language is distorted
by its media rapists (see: "The Magla Vocables"). This - the abyss
opening between the people and their language, the demise of true
communication and the ensuing rupture in the social fabric - are the
veritable damages of enlisted journalism.

Political vehicles are less pernicious in that their masters are
well known and their itinerary clear. Always one sided, always half
truthed, forever the righteous - these rags produce no riches and
they preach to the converted, serving as bulletins and message
boards rather than as media in any known sense. A rallying point, a
flag, an emblem, a collective memory, the group's unconscious and
conscience - these papers and TV channels are often widely read,
even by rivals and adversaries. They are so self-absorbed, so
narcissistic, so sickeningly partial that they make for fine
amusement in dreary times. There are the coalition papers and the
opposition papers, the left wing and the right wing and the centre
ones. It is a colourful admixture of indignation and triumphalism,
veiled threats and promises, trial balloons and drama, the daily
equivalent of the romance.

Thus, Central, Eastern and Southern Europe do have daily papers and
magazines and periodicals and television. What they do not have is
media even remotely resembling the Western ideal. In some countries,
this ideal is disparaged as a Western manipulative ploy or, worse,
naive idealism. In others, it is a kind of holy grail to be pursued
only in myths and narratives. Yet others view it with envy and
aspire to it, but without much hope. To them, it is an ever-receding
mirage. Perhaps that other phantasmagoria, the Internet, is the
solution. In it, budding, fresh beginnings of irreverence and
courage seem to coalesce into recognizable - though virtual - media.
The small number of web surfers currently limits both their outreach
and their survivability. But if Western trends are anything to go
by, this is a temporary state of affairs. The Internet, this
immaterial and ethereal medium might yet spawn the first real media
and a return to reality. It might yet liberate the prisoners of all
the telenovellas, foreign and domestic. It might yet win.


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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)

Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com