THERE was a time, before Postmodernism became a formal textual strategy for ignoring what is going on in the world, when one of the early postmodern bywords, “reflexivity,” connoted a kind of fun and carefree field of play, with a satirical overtone that made all kinds of intertextual relations possible. 

In today’s media field, however, reflexivity is a trick used to seal the discussion and make sure that the limited media parameters of discourse are never breached.

Nowhere is this hardening of the once playful strategy of reflexivity more apparent than in corporate media news. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS news have given up reporting and analysing the news in any serious way and simply transcribe US State Department dispatches while chattering among themselves. The same goes for their ugly cousin Fox News which, rather than countering this blather, in simply providing a louder and brasher echo illustrates the emptiness of media for profit. 

All of which suggests that there is no life or truth outside of the seamless truth of TV News.

Two cases of reporting around the Genocide in Gaza will illustrate this point.

The first is the coverage of the increasingly violent attacks against students protesting the genocide on college campuses in the US and across the world. Let’s focus on two elements of that coverage. 

First, what was often violent repression either by the police or by armed thugs against unarmed peaceful protests was instead uniformly described not as beatings but as “clashes” that resulted in “chaos.” Reuters in describing the violent removal of demonstrators depicted a “jarring scene that underscored the heightened chaos that has erupted at universities.” The New York Times recounted police “arresting dozens of people and clearing out tents” as producing “chaotic scenes,” that is, as disrupting public order. 

The “chaos” featured students linking arms and contesting the intrusion of the police onto their campuses, that is, peaceful resistance mis-translated by privileged media stars as chaos.

The beating and mass arrests by police on these campuses were described as “clashes” between police and demonstrators. The New York Times described the police arresting scores of demonstrators at UCLA as taking place in the wake of “violent clashes a day earlier,” and NBC News echoed this description: “Police clear Pro-Palestinian encampments at UCLA after two nights of clashes.” 

The description of brave police willing to make their way into a hostile territory in fact echoes that of the Israelis in Gaza who despite blowing up universities and hospitals are often depicted as well-meaning representatives bringing order to chaos and “clashing” with unarmed Palestinians who they then murder at a rate of over 40,000 so far with the majority being women and children.

And second, in the perpetually reflexive taxonomy of coverage of the Gaza Genocide, occurred in the again unquestioned and constantly repeated analysis-free reporting of the so-called Biden peace plan, a ruse aimed not at actual peace in the Middle East but at quelling the uprising at home while at the same time allowing the slaughter in Rafah to continue.  

The Associated Press reported that Biden’s “peace plan” was proposed by Israel and submitted to “Hamas Militants.” National defence spokesman John Kirby on ABC News claimed the Israeli proposal would “negotiate a permanent ceasefire”, the rallying phrase for protest groups in the US and abroad. While NPR, US Public Radio, in a “think piece” called the Israeli proposal a “decisive moment” for Hamas to prove it “really” wants a peace deal, asking its listeners, in the words of Joe Biden, to “Raise your voices and demand that Hamas come to the table.”

There are three problems with this coverage. 

First, many top Israeli officials are opposed to the proposal, which did not originate with Israel, and have publicly said so. Second, the proposal is not Biden’s at all; it is in fact mostly crimped from a Hamas peace proposal laid out weeks before. Third, and most falsely, it presents Hamas as “unreasonable militants” and Israel as desiring peace and negotiation when exactly the opposite is true. Hamas has continually proposed peace settlements and Israel proposes nothing but extermination. 

The media also, having set Hamas up as bloodthirsty terrorists who do not represent the Palestinian people, must, when they are mentioned, discredit them as a legitimate entity in a peace settlement so they are illegitimate “militants” while the Israelis are a rational state entity.

For this kind of stilted coverage with little backgrounding or analysis, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize, which again validates the ghost whispering in the infernal machine as it rewards itself for what amounts to a lack of effort.  

The result of this hardened reflexivity has been a vast decline in circulation for newspapers and ratings for television with Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post just barely treading water and CNN now averaging 481,000 viewers, its lowest number in 33 years. The median age for its audience in 2023 increased from 60 to 67, while the median age for Fox News is 68 and MSNBC is 71. Almost 70 per cent of Americans by late in 2023 had little or no trust in mass media, the highest on record.
 
In producing the news, reflexivity, or simple ping-ponging of one news outlet to another all with fairly uniform content, aids the industrial output and the daily grind of news in the 24-hour cycle, in a time of budget cuts.

As Marx notes, in capitalist production, the imperative to “transform all possible production into commodity production... the notion that trumps all others is the necessity of continuity and speed,” all aided by reflexive practices that require less reporting and effort.

Since there is little to distinguish one news station or publication’s news report from another the salient feature becomes the “flavour,” the individual flair that reporters and broadcasters bring to the newscast. In an era of hardening reflexivity these “personality quirks,” rather than analysis, sell this worldview, and hasten commodity production by taking the emphasis off the import and frightening implications of the news and lessen the ability to distinguish one outlet from another.