The Metropolis

The Agony of Danny Dyer: who cares about the torrent of trivial content?

Cila Warnck | Saturday 15 May, 2010 15:34

After a decade in journalism I still can’t look a deadline in the eye. Performance anxiety floods my veins like bad dope. My blood pressure rises and my confidence plummets. I have learned many things over the years; just not equanimity. Driving the churn in my stomach is an uneasy awareness of the power of media.

It should be self-evident that the endless column and screen inches unspooling into the eather of Western capitalist culture are nothing more than the fleeting fancies of a bunch of ill-paid, dubiously motivated hacks. We, the people, should realise the media is nothing more than a megaphone, amplifying the ideas (or idiocies) of whatever fool, knave or prince happens to wield it. Yet somehow the act of publication invests words with disproportionate importance. The babbling blog torrents and freshets of DIY media serve to dilute, a little, the impact of print.
Nevertheless, newspapers and magazines are still the voice with which British society carries on its conversations.

Consider the Danny Dyer ‘cut your ex’s face’ furore that lit up the broadsheets and got him sacked from his “agony uncle” gig at Zoo magazine. Would anyone in their right mind go to Danny Dyer for relationship advice in real life? Not anyone old enough to drive, surely. Yet put his gurning mug on the page of a second-rate jazz mag and suddenly his idiot ramblings are a matter of national concern.

Another example: take the remark: “There’s no point in denying it. Women have breasts.” A dinner guest who said something that breathtakingly dumb would find himself on the receiving end of blank stares. Fashion designer Peter Copping made the comment to a Harper’s Bazaar journalist and it ended up as the main pull quote in a two page feature.

Nothing, it seems, is so banal or crude it cannot be elevated to meaningfulness by an editorial decision. Take the Dyer debacle. Publisher Bauer Media says his misogyny saw the light of day because of a “production error”. Truth is though, magazine editors breathe rarified air. I worked at Q magazine for several years, around the time then-publisher Emap launched Zoo. Both magazines were run out of airless offices in central London, cobbled together on unreliable computers, awash in reams of unclaimed back issues, fuelled by instant coffee and M&S Sandwiches. There was no mystery, no guiding ethos, just relentless deadlines and aggressive cynicism. Office chatter revolved around lurid tales of sex, violence, drug overdoses, and fatal accidents because they were good stories. In media terms “unprintable” is a legal judgment, not a moral one.

Yet, surrounded by TV, digital billboards, Evening Standard headlines, streaming radio, magazines, tabloids and free papers, like Snipe, we mindlessly absorb ideologies generated by bored cynics at the behest of mercenary moguls. Patently trivial content is lent credibility by the form in which we receive it; we accept partisan interpretations as objective truth and mistake misinformation for facts. This is why my nerves still jump when I sit down to write. Words matter. The money and motivation behind them matter. My mission with this column is to look at the media and ask not ‘what is it saying?’ but ‘why is it saying what it says?’ Because, to borrow a phrase from David Simon ‘The why is everything.’

[email protected]
cilwarncke.wordpress.com

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