Unsettling

I think the most that I can do with journalism is say, “Fuck you.”
—Nir Rosen

“Where television always has difficulty is with depth, perspective, context.” Dan Rather has his own perspective on television’s difficulties, at least some of it formed as the rest of us watched him on television. By the time he appears in the fourth segment of IFC Media Project Presents: War, Fear, Greed, and Disaster, he looks a lot like an elder statesman, seasoned, weary, and still passionate about his beloved business.

It’s good to see Rather, and it’s good to see him respected. But his point is not exactly news, and neither is most of what you hear in this four-part series. It’s structured as four reports on reporting, by “independent journalists,” each assigned a topic. On the first night, 24 May, Max Blumenthal considers how fear drives media and political campaigns, and how these never quite separate realms have become utterly intertwined (and not only over at Fox News, though this particular instance comes in for predictable, if righteous criticism). For the following reports, Nir Rosen looks at coverage of the war in Afghanistan, Charlie LeDuff at how TV missed major aspects of the financial meltdown, and Andrew Berends, usually a photographer and documentary filmmaker, examines how the story called “Haiti” serves the news industry.

Even if these stories are familiar, the reports are shaped in fresh, hard-charging ways, with lively soundtracks, quick wit, and zappy visuals (including the Media Project‘s signature animation-as-explanation). It’s news designed for a “younger generation,” simultaneously scolding business-as-usual and nostalgic for some nearly forgotten better old days. This kind of new news, slickly packaged, post-MTV-style, is of a piece with recent promos for Current’s Vanguard (though the reporting and imagery on that series tends to be more purposely gritty and aggressive in its pursuit of stories off the beaten path). Here IFC Media Project presents its own reporters’ outrage as a story unto itself. Goddamnit.

Blumenthal’s segment typifies the attitude, taking easy aim at Glenn Beck (who appears in clips proclaiming, “I just love my country and I fear for it… The last thing I wanna be is the fear-mongerer”), Sarah Palin (backing off the “death panels” when pressed by Barbara Walters—of all people!), and Blumenthal’s own person bugbear, Andrew Breitbart. “In politics,” Blumenthal assesses, “There’s no better way to get out the vote than to scare people to death.” He laments the rise of the Tea Party, patently false RNC talking points (“It’s like you’re in a George Romero movie”), and seemingly willful ignorance (have you heard? 24% of TP acolytes believe Obama “may be the anti-Christ”). He also makes an OMG face at the camera when he’s told by one of the TP faithful that lawyers, like Obama, are liars. Period.

Rosen’s story on Afghanistan offers some truly disturbing images, indicting private military contractors (Blackwater, now Xe, being only the tip of that iceberg) and their more egregiously corrupt brethren, services contractors (the Louis Berger Group being the Halliburton of Afghanistan, with the Kabul power plant as Exhibit A). Rosen’s interviews with Afghans are this segments would seem to illustrate his point, that the U.S. “is spending billions of dollars rebuilding a nation we destroyed without listening to what the people who live there want and need.” But their comments are mostly general and obvious complaints (which isn’t to say they’re invalid): America is not providing electricity or clean water, infrastructure or education. The kicker, of course: “The media isn’t listening.”

It’s a little ironic that this series takes up a decidedly flashy affect to make a case against glib, loud, superficial reporting, but it’s a calculated affect. As LeDuff puts it in “Greed”—after telling you he’s won a Pulitzer Prize—he is determined never to be boring. “If it’s boring, nobody’s paying attention: you might as well be on PBS.” At the same time, LeDuff has made a moral decision as to his own career, leaving a job with the New York Times to return home to work at the Detroit News.  Here, he insists, he can keep his focus. As Detroit’s industrial base collapses, the city seems a “canary in the coal mine” for the rest of the nation. Here, he looks “Through the lens of Detroit to the United States. That’s the way I see it. That’s why I came back.”

LeDuff’s interviews lay out a now familiar trajectory. From a cartoonish Wall Street CEO named Thomas Belesis to Matt Taibbi, their versions of events are what you expect. “Our media has not done the job of explaining to people who all this stuff works,” notes Taibbi, as he’s noted repeatedly. LeDuff’s piece doesn’t so much explain as bemoan the lack of explanation, with context provided by Charlie’s brother Billy, once a subprime mortgage seller, now out of work and his own home.

Berends’ segment, airing 27 May, is the series’ most effective, in part and ironically because its point is its end, underlined when Haitian photojournalist Daniel Morel observes, that for all the rush to cover the disaster in Haiti, “When the press left, that’s when the story started.” Still, Berends makes clear that the pain of covering pain is nothing compared to the actual pain. He looks at the self-insertion of Anderson Cooper into stories (saving a boy on the street, for instance) as well as Ivan Watson’s earnest conversation with Haitian journalist and fixer Yvetot Gouin, as a way to illustrate the irresolvable and simultaneous intimacy and distance of reporters to catastrophe. If it’s not exactly “Disaster Porn,” as Blumenthal suggests,” it is troubling. Perhaps being aware of that trouble is the best TV can do.