Human interest
I just finished reading Bunk, Kevin Young's encyclopedic tour of the American history of hoaxes. His main theme throughout is the centrality of race to the perpetration of hoaxes. White Americans are willing to believe just about anything that reinforces the master hoax of white supremacy and the idea of "race" itself as a salient category. "The hoax is a sign of the poverty of our language surrounding race and helps perpetuate the same," Young writes. "You could go so far as to say the hoax is racism's native tongue. They both are things that don't really exist but that stay with us despite our disbelief, revealing more than is meant."
Maintaining the fraud of race requires an endless supply of racist thoughts and deeds that must also be disavowed, naturalized. Hoaxers are on the front lines of the struggle to maintain the plausibility of race, and the profitable racism that stems from it. More often than not, they concoct stories that reinforce racial stereotypes, operating in the same realm of the affective and unverifiable but allowing an air of truth to be attached to racist intuitions. "Why are all these banalities believed? Young asks. "Do we really think that little of each other? And why are all these white folks hoaxing about all these brown, yellow, and black ones? We have few other ways to say just how Americans remain divided, not only from each other but also schizophrenic about truth and race and detached from reality even though, or especially because, we refashion it daily."
Young stresses the point that hoaxes work not by being exaggerated and singular but by animating received ideas that order society's hierarchies. Hoaxes are thus "not a sign of more imagination but of less." They take familiar but unjustifiable injustices and couch them in emblematic "human interest" stories. In describing the career of New Republic reporter Ruth Shalit, Young writes, "the hoax, plagiarism too, almost always provides what we suspect but cannot prove: Poof! Here's magical proof, an abundance of evidence, actually masking stereotypes and cliches." And of Stephen Glass, her more notorious successor, he quotes Tom Scocca, who argued that "Glass's real trick was the way he appealed to his audience's prejudices ... The stereotypes flattered the reader, making him or her privy to the inner workings of the common folk — as laid bare by a bright young lad with a Penn degree and an inquiring mind."
This was enough to shame me for my having found entertainment value in Glass's work in the past, but Young's account of their racism really made me doubt myself and my memory. I remember reading Glass's stories as they came out, but mainly I recalled them making fun of young Republicans and GOP hypocrisy. When they were exposed as fake, it didn't seem important, because I had the sense that all stories about partisan politics and especially all stories about "human interest" are already basically fake, regardless of the facts. Human interest stories are usually just anecdotes designed to allow audiences to have their prejudices confirmed about what qualifies a person as human. They are told in a slanted way — the fact that they are told at all — to emphasize that purpose.
Glass's case confirmed my own lazy stereotypes about the vanity of journalists, that they care more about attention than the "truth." His fraud made me feel smart, even though I had no sense that his stories were fake at the time — I just felt them to be superfluous, written clearly for entertainment rather than news or truth value. They made journalism seem like what reality TV is more explicitly, a game of exhibiting people saying and doing ludicrous things to make viewers laugh or tsk. His stores unfolded like those YouTube compilations of "wacky" people interviewed on the street in local TV news segments. When he was exposed, it seemed less an indictment of his conduct but of the entire practice of anecdote-driven "stories" and the fatuous presumption of their truth. Everyone should be reading these stories as fiction anyway.
But Young makes an irrefutable case that Glass's fabulation was less about the self-regard of the press than perpetuating racism, and it embarrasses me now that I didn't see it that way.
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Hoaxes depend on the audience's desire to believe. But Young differentiates hoaxes from 19th century "humbug" like the hooey of P.T. Barnum, in which one took pleasure in being knowingly fooled, in electing to suspend disbelief and indulge the fantasy of possibility and have curiosity rebuked and then maybe quieted so you could get on with life as it was.
Advertising evolved out of that approach to engaging audiences. The history of advertising is intimately bound up with the history of hoaxes: early print ads were often for patent medicines, which were mainly a matter of attaching a placebo effect to a brand name. Often the appeal of ads, as with Barnum's put-ons, was the idea that you could be partly in on the joke as well as be the butt of it. One's awareness of the overarching scheme — it was all just a ploy to get your money — licensed the fantasy it was predicated on — this let you indulge your prejudices while retaining the sense of superiority that comes from "not really being tricked." You don't dare to really believe it, but the ad lets you pretend to believe it, indulge in the fantasy of an idea's truth, in the possibility of a world that really works that way.
But advertising didn't compartmentalize or rebuke curiosity and fantasy; it sought to instrumentalize them, generalize them, embed people within them, leaving us all feeling discontented but hopeful that acquiring things or experiences could change that. In Channels of Desire, Elizabeth and Stewart Ewen describe how the emergence of "mass imagery" allowed for the production of a consumer culture, disseminating the spirit of "beautiful things" and dissatisfaction to everyone. They quote Simon Patten, a late 19th century proselytizer for consumerism: "The standard of life is determined not so much by what a man has to enjoy as by the rapidity with which he tires of the pleasure. To have a high standard means to enjoy a pleasure intensely and to tire of it quickly." Hence the idea of consumerism as an evaporative "experience."
Advertising points away from the pleasure of being fooled to the anxiety of feeling envious. Hoaxes,
in Young's description, also turn away from the half-insider stance, allowing instead for full disavowal, full projection of responsibility for our wanting to believe onto the hoaxer. When inevitably the hoax is debunked, people can use their sense of betrayal to further distance themselves from the implications of their willingness to believe.
Taken en masse, advertising is less about promoting particular products than generating an emotional climate; hoaxes work similarly. The "human interest" hoaxes end up dehumanizing everyone involved, fomenting cynicism about the project of empathy, making the conditions for recognizing another's person's humanity ever more stringent, disqualifying more and more difference.
But what is to blame for the taste for "human interest"? Did the desire for "human interest" have its roots in colonial expansion, the invention of race, the systemization of difference? Commercial media makes human interest content because it is profitable, but does it also sustain the demand for it? If media can stimulate demand for whatever sort of thing it decides to make, why not make better stuff? Is "human interest" optimal as media product because it is cheaper to produce, like reality TV?
Sometimes emotional gullibility is depicted as an implicit badge of honor, as it proves one's feeling, if errant, heart. But it may be that media have weaponized our feelings, making them narcotic, teaching us how to experience them on demand and use them to insulate ourselves. If there is less pleasure in having private individualized feelings on demand, they are at least pleasures we believe we can control. But hoaxes should remind us that those instigated feelings are controlling us.