Lara Logan and the Media Ouroboros

I like to imagine Nir Rosen as he typed those fateful tweets last week, smugly pleased at his cynical prediction of the media response to Lara Logan’s assault, yet completely oblivious to the response his own comments would draw – a response that was all too predictable to the chorus of Twitter followers who immediately snapped screenshots. Sophocles himself could not have written a better scene. Not only was Rosen brought down by his own hubris, but his remarks in fact served to catalyze the very attention he was railing against. For as we’ve learned repeatedly in recent years, if there’s one thing that gets more media focus than an awful event, it’s the controversial and insensitive statements that various media figures will inevitably make about it.

Consider the Arizona shooting. Certainly it made sense, in the wake of a bitter and divisive campaign season, to question whether violent rhetoric by politicians and commentators could inspire violent acts. Then, before we knew it, we were somehow talking about whether Sarah Palin had said something anti-Semitic and whether the ADL’s response to the inappropriate choice of words in her response to the liberal media’s response to the shooting should have been more strongly worded. It’s like if David Foster Wallace had been a writer for National Enquirer.

This cycle becomes particularly predictable in cases dealing with race, religion, gender, or sexual assault. Thus, when the Lara Logan story broke, all the stock characters came out of the woodwork. There were the political hacks who can never pass up an opportunity to complain about the attention received by white victims of assault, as if doing so somehow helps minority victims. There were, as always, the delightful internet commenters who were quick to blame Islam (a strange thing to say, considering nearly 20% of the Egyptian population is Christian) or to ‘compliment’ the victim’s appearance in less than ideal ways.

And there were the almost-as-delightful internet crusaders who jumped on comments like “CBS should have provided better security” with cries of “Victim-blamer!” In the near future, someone will create a script that will generate these entire conversations for us, leaving us all with more time to tend to our virtual crops. Until then, despite what some may say, we will continue to air our invaluable opinions. That empty comment box isn’t going to fill itself.

This brings us back to Mr. Rosen. What makes his meltdown somewhat novel is that he was neither remarking directly on what happened nor on what others had said about it but merely on what he thought they would say.  The process is now so familiar that reporting on it before it happens is only the next logical step. But this phenomenon is not limited to talking heads. Take the mini-uproar over the choice of photo in a recent Gawker article, where commenters complained that the picture of Logan in a somewhat flattering dress inappropriately sexualized her and would invite comments to the effect that she deserved it. Whether or not such concern was warranted, expressing it did in fact steer the conversation towards a discussion of her sexuality. And just as some media outlets report every single thing Sarah Palin says and some people follow Jersey Shore under the reasoning that ‘this is what everyone else is going to be talking about’, justifying one’s own reaction or opinion by attributing it to hypothetical future others creates the very situation it claims to anticipate.

In The Precession of Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard described the four successive stages of the image as representation: reflecting a basic reality, perverting a basic reality, masking the absence of a basic reality, and finally bearing no relation to any reality, existing as its own simulacrum and representing nothing but itself. Our media culture has long passed the fourth stage (though it still engages in the second from time to time). But somewhere behind the map, one can still occasionally make out the territory – a real territory where people die, dictators fall, and female journalists face dangers that most of us are only now beginning to imagine.