skulduggery. I studied the ownership structures of the media and the ownership structures of firms. I learned to link what I read in the crime columns with the movements of stock-market indices, and I became skilled at recognizing the jargon of party spokespeople in the words of academicians. In my articles, stories about crimes in village schools rubbed shoulders with the theory of the Frankfurt School, the names of bankers stood next to Brecht’s, and the tragic fates of Bosnian refugees bore so many similarities to Walter Benjamin’s final days. My speculations were no less truthful than supposedly objective information, and were far more interesting.
From the first day on, I felt the deepest disgust for the job I was doing. Journalism is not for the respectable. Which is to say, it should have been the ideal job for me. But there was too much lying and falsity even for my taste.
Today journalists not only play the role of committed thinkers, who communicate important realizations about human existence and work hard to unmask society’s hypocrisy. Journalists today are also detectives, exposing what is hidden. It is they who visit criminals in their troubled dreams, where they dread what will be discovered and what dirty work the reporter’s X-ray vision will alert the public about, and with the sensitivity about injustice being so great the public prosecutor and police are bound to react. It is a story about bold journalists who uproot society’s weeds, a yarn intended for brains readily narcoticized with fairy tales. Journalists are like the animals in the story who band together, holding each other by the tail, and tug and tug until they finally pull a turnip out of the ground.
There is nothing noble in public activism, nothing enlightened or heroic. All that talk about incorruptible public intellectuals and their virtues is a naive fantasy. It’s a simple, even trivial matter – a question of the market and the stock exchange, but not of the spirit.
Everyone who participates in ‘public life’ possesses a certain symbolic capital. The media are just a market for symbolic capital that can be enlarged by the action of the media: Or diminished. Like information, symbolic capital can be transformed into money in one way or another. And just like the dollar, the global currency, symbolic capital has no firm foundation.
The idea of free media flows from the idea of a free market. Both one and the other are pure ideological constructs. Neither one nor the other exists.
The media are a tool for achieving the interests of their owners. Those interests meld with the interests of other ownership structures and political groups, and together they form networks of interest groups.
Publishing in the papers means to serve one of the networks of power. Every communicable truth, however well hidden and dangerous, is a truth to the detriment of one person and the advantage of another, who probably, or rather certainly, has skeletons of their own in the closet. Such a truth is only a partial truth and therefore not the truth at all. Your most brilliant stroke is just the move of a pawn: You are lifted up and put down again on the board so as to keep playing your paltry role as a fighter for the truth, for which you will of course be paid and perhaps even recognized by society.
You’ll be the hero of a game in which the media raise the symbolic capital of the interest groups behind them and undermine the symbolic capital of their rivals, who retaliate in kind.
The thought that anyone could consider me the conscience of society was frightening. I despised society, as deeply as can be, and it choosing me to be a guardian of its conscience was irrefutable proof that I was right to do so.
One of my really top-notch pieces, or so I considered it at the time, set off a chain of events that saw me leave the safety of home and reject the precious rituals that had given my existence a degree of predictability and structure. The water flowed out of the narrow, concreted channel it had crept along, never to return.
6
Do you like anniversaries and find them meaningful? Do they give you a sense of security and continuity? People need something to keep them grounded, you think, and just can’t allow themselves to be swept along by the floodwaters of time?
Then here’s a good anniversary for you.
On Sunday it was four decades since Theodore Robert Bundy, nicknamed Ted, killed Lynda Ann Healy and thus began his killing spree. All that remained of the girl were the blood-stained sheets in her basement flat in Seattle. Two and a half months later Ted killed Donna Gail Manson, who was not related to Charles or Marilyn Manson.
Bundy went on killing, absolutely unhindered, until September of the next year. He was one of the most infamous serial killers. When he was finally arrested, the American authorities were so inept that they allowed him to escape twice: Once only briefly, but the second time, in January 1978, for long enough to break into an isolated house, where he raped two women and beat them to death with a wooden club. One hour later, Ted had moved on and bludgeoned a woman in another house. It was not until July 1979 that he was arrested again and condemned to death.
Ted diligently penned appeal after appeal and, as a God-fearing American, was able to have his execution postponed for ten whole years. He even acted as a police consultant in the case of the Green River serial killer. That slayer was never caught, but Bundy’s public-private partnership with the police served as a model for the cooperation of the law-enforcement agencies and the maniac in the film we all love – The Silence of the Lambs. Before he was executed, he confessed to twenty murders, although it’s estimated that he left over one hundred victims in his path.
Apart from being a serial killer, Ted Bundy was a Republican Party activist.
John Wayne Gacy was... you know, different to Bundy. A Teddy-boy who raped and killed girls – Gacy preferred boys. Bundy was a handsome, charismatic killer, while the namesake of John ‘The Duke’ Wayne was a paunchy, nondescript boy from the block. Bundy behaved like a star, while Gacy did his best to be friendly to everyone and, if possible, to blend into the background.
Gacy hid the corpses of his victims under his house. When he ran out of space, he threw them in the nearby river. At his trial, he confessed thirty-three murders. He was sentenced to twenty-one life sentences and twelve death penalties.
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