Читать книгу Till Kingdom Come - Andrej Nikolaidis - Страница 10

5

I wrote for the newspapers and that’s how I made ends meet. For a while, I used the money my grandmother had left to me, but I soon learned to save, and what I earned from six articles would last until the end of the month.

I wrote quickly and with ease, and what I wrote had an audience. They were commentary pieces at first, fiery and provocative. People liked to read them, especially those who didn’t agree with me – and there were quite a lot of them. If you tell people what they don’t want to hear in the way they least want to hear it, you’ll have their undivided attention and they will become your most loyal readers. I owed every single ‘success’ of my journalistic career, if we can call it that, to people who would curse and swear when reading my pieces, who would screw up the newspaper and trample on it, only then to wait impatiently for my next article that would drive them around them bend all over again.

Over time, I developed a special style of my own – a kind of hybrid – mixing investigative journalism, cultural criticism and conspiracy theories. The ‘investigative’ bit shouldn’t be taken literally. Naturally I didn’t have any ‘insider’ sources, access to classified information or anything like that. I examined information that had already been published and drafted my articles in the margins. But I dissected these texts like a forensic scientist, and a whole host of things came to light. I discovered logical lapses, discrepancies and incongruities in the statements of the players. If you knew where to look and what to search for, an author’s style provided ample information about masked intentions, hush-ups, and the toxic influence of editors and media barons. The lies of politicians melded with the lies of tycoons, who used their media to expose the former’s skulduggery. I studied the ownership structures of the media and the ownership structures of firms. I learned to link what I read in the crime columns with the movements of stock-market indices, and I became skilled at recognizing the jargon of party spokespeople in the words of academicians. In my articles, stories about crimes in village schools rubbed shoulders with the theory of the Frankfurt School, the names of bankers stood next to Brecht’s, and the tragic fates of Bosnian refugees bore so many similarities to Walter Benjamin’s final days. My speculations were no less truthful than supposedly objective information, and were far more interesting.

From the first day on, I felt the deepest disgust for the job I was doing. Journalism is not for the respectable. Which is to say, it should have been the ideal job for me. But there was too much lying and falsity even for my taste.

Today journalists not only play the role of committed thinkers, who communicate important realizations about human existence and work hard to unmask society’s hypocrisy. Journalists today are also detectives, exposing what is hidden. It is they who visit criminals in their troubled dreams, where they dread what will be discovered and what dirty work the reporter’s X-ray vision will alert the public about, and with the sensitivity about injustice being so great the public prosecutor and police are bound to react. It is a story about bold journalists who uproot society’s weeds, a yarn intended for brains readily narcoticized with fairy tales. Journalists are like the animals in the story who band together, holding each other by the tail, and tug and tug until they finally pull a turnip out of the ground.

There is nothing noble in public activism, nothing enlightened or heroic. All that talk about incorruptible public intellectuals and their virtues is a naive fantasy. It’s a simple, even trivial matter – a question of the market and the stock exchange, but not of the spirit.

Everyone who participates in ‘public life’ possesses a certain symbolic capital. The media are just a market for symbolic capital that can be enlarged by the action of the media: Or diminished. Like information, symbolic capital can be transformed into money in one way or another. And just like the dollar, the global currency, symbolic capital has no firm foundation.

The idea of free media flows from the idea of a free market. Both one and the other are pure ideological constructs. Neither one nor the other exists.

The media are a tool for achieving the interests of their owners. Those interests meld with the interests of other ownership structures and political groups, and together they form networks of interest groups.

Publishing in the papers means to serve one of the networks of power. Every communicable truth, however well hidden and dangerous, is a truth to the detriment of one person and the advantage of another, who probably, or rather certainly, has skeletons of their own in the closet. Such a truth is only a partial truth and therefore not the truth at all. Your most brilliant stroke is just the move of a pawn: You are lifted up and put down again on the board so as to keep playing your paltry role as a fighter for the truth, for which you will of course be paid and perhaps even recognized by society.

You’ll be the hero of a game in which the media raise the symbolic capital of the interest groups behind them and undermine the symbolic capital of their rivals, who retaliate in kind.

The thought that anyone could consider me the conscience of society was frightening. I despised society, as deeply as can be, and it choosing me to be a guardian of its conscience was irrefutable proof that I was right to do so.

One of my really top-notch pieces, or so I considered it at the time, set off a chain of events that saw me leave the safety of home and reject the precious rituals that had given my existence a degree of predictability and structure. The water flowed out of the narrow, concreted channel it had crept along, never to return.