"Pray tell, is this a Vice news article with my ugly mug plastered all over the cover photo!?” Yes, somehow my image was used for a Vice article about the band 'The Misfits.'"
Chappelle, The Misfits & Judo
Two thousand and four was a momentous time for sketch comedy. Anyone old enough at that time with even a slight pulse or sense of humor knew the Chappelle Show must be on their weekly viewing schedule. There was one sketch that still makes me chuckle; “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories.” In particular it was Charlie’s tale of Prince challenging him to a game of basketball that stands out in my mind. The reason for it coming to mind these days is not because of Charlie Murphy’s hilarious retelling of the story, or seeing Dave Chappelle run basketball plays in the iconic purple Prince outfit; instead it reminds me how far journalistic standards have sunk in a relatively short amount of time.
When Chappelle was interviewed on the Tonight Show about the Prince sketch in 2014 a real-life Prince single was presented to Dave entitled “Breakfast Can Wait,” which was a not so subtle reference to the Chappelle Show sketch. As for the cover image on the single...indeed, it was of Dave Chappelle dressed as Prince serving pancakes from the original sketch.
As Chappelle aptly states in the interview: “that’s a Prince judo move right there,” because Prince used the momentum of Chappelle’s humor against himself.
Using inspiration from Prince I would like to pull a Judo move of my own. I also want to stress these are my personal opinions, because nowadays what used to be referred to as an Op-Ed piece has turned into solid facts.
In the fall of 2018, a friend sent a text. It wasn’t the usual random, disturbing GIF (pronounced GIF not JIF), or plans for happy hour. No, this was something different. This time it was a link. Upon clicking the link an image was displayed that gave me a jolt of bewilderment, and I thought, “pray tell, is this a Vice news article with my ugly mug plastered all over the cover photo!?” Yes, somehow my image was used for a Vice article about the band “The Misfits.”
Author Dave Arnold is an unsuspecting model in a Vice article that used an image of him from the internet
I’m the blonde guy with the stupid grin on his face.
Up until the point of seeing that article I had spent a lifetime happily anonymous, minus my minimalistic presence on social media. I never imagined that an innocent picture with the member of a quasi-famous band would appear over a decade later in a major news outlet’s article. Nobody is safe from the watchful eye of the internet. Like Herpes, our electronic past lies in wait to haunt our present. Granted this was a benign photo of me and some friends posing with Jerry Only of the Misfits, and it by no means skyrocketed me into the spotlight, but it rubbed me the wrong way.
In my anger and annoyance, I looked up the referenced link of the photo only to find a Flickr account a friend had created over a decade ago. The photo had sat dormant for years, until the time was ripe for a desperate enough columnist to pluck it from the ether and insert it into their article. Nothing could be done to challenge the unauthorized use of my personage; the Flickr legal jargon stated the photo fell under the free use terms of their agreement. That’s legalese for “sorry but we reserve the right to treat you like a sock puppet because you glanced over the terms of use and agreed to its stipulations sheerly out of exhaustion from the length of the document.”
The Sinking of Journalistic Practices
The most egregious problem is not the unauthorized use of my image, rather the complete lack of effort used to blend together an article with a random internet image, and chum it off the side of main stream media’s click bait vessel. Besides, the picture doesn’t even go with the entire conceit of the article; that being a Misfits fan will cost loads of money because it requires buying a lot of the bands merchandise. Nobody in the picture is wearing any Misfits paraphernalia, except for the band member Jerry Only. If anything, the picture should be used in an article about the embarrassment of wearing a Redskins shirt in public.
"I never imagined that an innocent picture with the member of a quasi-famous band would appear over a decade later in a major news outlet’s article."
I hope to do a better job of mashing a column together from borrowed pieces of the internet than Vice did. I used to enjoy Vice, because it seemed to be the only news organization producing substantive news about the world. For example, they had the only journalist reporting behind ISIS territory when that situation was in full swing in 2014. They allowed journalists to practice real journalism by going out into the world to investigate salient issues, and then report those stories relatively unfiltered. Those stories are now lost in Vice’s pursuit to compete with the other major networks and fractured viewership of the internet. Today Vice seems more like CNN for stoners rather than an edgy, hard hitting upstart to the news world, but I’m digressing. The point of this article is not to pick apart a poorly written Vice column. I already knew journalism was in trouble before I read the Vice article, it merely reaffirmed my belief.
It is now the year 2020 and journalistic standards continue to sink, largely due to a massive lack of objectivity inherent to the modern business of news. Reporting standards for most major news organizations now consists of low quality, biased and sensationalistic content that is hastily cobbled together in the pursuit of clicks and views. Worse yet is the unabashed corporate propaganda being passed off as news. If there is any doubt this is true, please read William Arkin’s leaked resignation letter to NBC from 2019.
Arkin is a renowned journalist with decades of experience, particularly in the national security sector. In his resignation letter he aptly points out that news media cannot keep up with the world, largely because of a national security apparatus that ballooned out of control alongside the rise of social media. Arkin wrote, “I feel like I’ve failed to convey this larger truth about the hopelessness of our way of doing things, especially disheartened to watch NBC and much of the rest of the news media somehow become a defender of Washington and the system.” Journalists are supposed to guide us to the truth and sniff out corruption and bias, but what happens when we can no longer turn to the news for the truth or trust its intentions?
Even coma patients in the last three years know how incessant the term “fake news” was and continues to be used. We all know that president Trump has blamed the media for organizing witch hunts, or concocting information to fit their narrative against him, while he has equally perpetrated the same offenses. The clash between Trump and the media has played out in a childish tit for tat name-calling game that resulted in a flood of erroneous or meaningless news, while real stories go unreported, but this type of reporting has become standard across the board. Real information is now lost in a sea of twenty-four-hour television hucksters, pervasive online click bait, and erroneous stories emerging from the depths of the internet with no known provenance.
It's become a carnival side-show, where greasy yes men emerge from corporate shadows to deliver political agendas poorly disguised as objective reasoning, and fringe onlookers attempt to convince everyone the game is flat or that pizza is really a gate. All the while the average person is left exhausted to the point of either accepting the carney’s little ruse or giving up and walking away. The result is a fractured landscape where individuals find their corner of the internet or television and stay there.
What is Driving the Madness and Where is it Going?
There is no one simple cause, but a major factor for the exponential degradation of journalism is an economic one spurred on by the spread of “free” information through the internet. The democratization of information at the click of a button is one of the human race’s greatest achievements, but also had the unintended consequence of shuttering most businesses that could be made digital and couldn’t compete with the low-low cost of free, journalism included.
"The clash between Trump and the media has played out in a childish tit for tat name-calling game that resulted in a flood of erroneous or meaningless news, while real stories go unreported."
The moral hazard created by the internet’s open accessibility is that we are collectively filling cyberspace with so much nonsense, such as low-quality news articles, that we now require the assistance of artificial intelligence to sift through the endless stream of data. For instance, if someone is getting their news exclusively from Google news searches, they are allowing Google’s algorithms to decide what they read. The same is true for Facebook, or any other social media platform one chooses to preoccupy their time. In hindsight it seems inevitable that large corporations will continue to take control over the flow of information, because unbiased journalism was always in danger from large corporate entities.
In 1983 Ben Bagdikian wrote “The Media Monopoly,” which rang the alarm on the tightening grip conglomerates had over the flow of mass media. The book was periodically updated to report on the status of mass media until the early 2000s. I remember reading it in the late 90’s and was disheartened to find that when Bagdikian first wrote the book in 1983 around 50 corporations controlled mass media, but by the late 90’s it was down to around 5-7. Since the internet was not on the general public’s radar through the 80’s and most of the 90’s mass media back then was consumed the old-fashioned way; through print, television, and radio. Media could easily be controlled by large corporations because of how high the barrier to entry is in owning a piece of one, two, or all three of those mediums. I was preparing for a future where fear mongering would be delivered on television by Mickey Mouse, but the internet exploded in the early 2000s giving me hope for the future. The Internet opened the floodgates of information, but over time it became derailed onto the current path.
I haven’t completely lost faith in journalism because I know there are real journalist in the world with the intent of uncovering truth rather than profit, but as a society we must place value on their work and give it support. Unfortunately, the internet holds the promise of infinite knowledge at the click of a button, but it is also wielded by a vast array of profit seekers, nut-jobs, and propaganda mongers the average person must sift through to find truth. What I hope anyone reading this can do is find objective truth through an open mind and their own critical thinking skills. That is the only defense any individual has against the tyranny of ignorance or the misguidance of propaganda.
