Krytyka Polityczna - Tomasik: To mourn or not to mourn

Nowość w sklepie KP!

Katalog Książek KP

Najnowszy numer KP

Komentarze

CYTAT DNIA

Pytałem decydentów MFW, jakie mają dowody na to, że ich neoliberalna polityka jest właściwa. Odpowiadali, że nie potrzebują dowodów. Wyglądało to tak, jakby chodziło im nie o politykę, lecz o religię. Ale to tylko część odpowiedzi. Forsowali taką politykę także dlatego, że chciało jej Wall Street. Niestabilność, kryzysy, łączenie firm, dzielenie firm to raj dla sektora finansowego, który robi na tym ogromne pieniądze.
Joseph E. Stiglitz

Książki w sklepie KP

Warto przeczytać

Order software online

Tomasik: To mourn or not to mourn

Krzysztof Tomasik

15.11.2009

Media coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. Almost a month has passed since Michael Jackson’s death and still the articles picking over his phenomenal success keep piling up in the Polish press. No surprises there, because this sad event has provided our home-grown sages with the ideal opportunity of either maligning the ‘wanton and sensationalist’ mass media (Tomasz Lis), or self-righteously writing off the entire Western culture as unredeemably infantilised (Jacek Santorski).

Ludwik Stomma has also waded into the fray with the sixty-four thousand dollar question - ‘What Will His Legacy Be?’ - in the pages of Polityka: ‘…So who was that Michael Jackson? Certainly a twinkle-toed dancer. As for his singing ability – it’s a matter of taste, but you can’t ignore the fact that 700 million of his records have found willing buyers. And yet he remains the icon of the populist American culture at its worst and this simple fact should ensure that history will forget Michael Jackson. Only “Jacksonism” shall live on – hype and kitsch.’

I’ve no idea what led Stomma to his conclusion and I have no desire to persuade anybody that Jacko has earned an undisputed place in the history of music. I am much more intrigued by another of Stomma’s observations: ‘The world has been gripped by mass hysteria, aided and abetted by the media. After John Paul II had passed away, we had half a chance of switching channels to avoid being swept along by the general tide of madness. No such luck this time: It’s been blanket coverage end to end.’

Hold on; hold on: let’s remind ourselves about the coverage of the pope’s demise.

Nothing but nothing compares to the hagiographic hysteria unleashed in the Polish media after the pope’s death and the fallout after Jacko’s tragedy does not even come close. Jackson’s obituaries have not merited more than few minutes (at most!) in the schedules and have been merely typical of the genre. But we mustn’t forget that Stomma is writing from the perspective of his French domicile, so I’d like to put him straight on a few points - seeing that he lacked first-hand experience of the goings-on in 2005.

First of all, after the pope had departed this vale of tears, there was no question of chancing upon any unaffected television channels; not just after his death, but in the run up to it as well. And even if Stomma should write off my recollection of events as flawed, all he needs to do is look up any issue of the weekly ‘Polityka’ from April 2005 and wade through the acres of idolatrous articles with not a single word of objective appraisal. The dailies turned out to be even more craven than the weeklies and all the press coverage put together was being easily trumped by the streaming TV.

Lis compares the media’s tunnel vision after Jackson’s death to: ‘…yet another longest suicide note in history. It’s hard to credit how full ten days after that great artiste had popped his clogs there still was no other news in town except: ‘Jacko has sadly passed away.’ Well, I couldn’t suppress a wry smile after reading Lis’s article, because if he reckons that the regurgitation of the Jackson story ad nauseam was self-defeating, how would he describe Polish media’s behaviour on that previous occasion, when all the news had been cancelled altogether and the pope story was running 24/7 for days on end? Ironically, the papal feeding frenzy was aided and abetted by Lis himself, who was Polsat’s number one anchor at the time. I recall ‘our special Vatican correspondent’ facing the cameras with a face like a fiddle, while taking care to insert ‘everybody’ into every sentence. I was told that ‘everybody’ was crying; ‘everybody’ was despairing; ‘everybody’ was praying….and taking that commentary to its logical conclusion, I discovered that I must surely be a ‘nobody.’

I haven’t come across anything like this sort of over-the-top outpourings after Jacko’s untimely death. And I’m much more comfortable with that.

Transl. Malgosia Skawinski

Komentarze

Dodaj nowy