The Meaning of Media -- and Life?

What is the essential role of media – news media – in our lives?

Media, all media, is meant to enlighten, to entertain, and to inform societies.

Does Fort Wayne media do any of these things? Not exactly.

Fort Wayne media is limp; it has become flaccid because the practitioners are soggy and mediocre.

Media here is formulaic, which wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t a formula contrived at a time when Fort Wayne rode the wave of American complacency.

That time was the 1950s and Fort Wayne has never escaped the era, in news reportage or any other kind of living parameters.

WOWO Radio is the exemplar of the 50s, and Fort Wayne. It hasn’t changed, in essence, since that time.

The Journal Gazette today is a clone of The Journal Gazette from the 50s also.

The morning paper moved away from the 50s ambiance for a while but today [2008] the a.m. paper reeks of 1950s complacency and ennui.

Look at some of the replicas that The News-Sentinel is providing from its 175 year existence.

You’ll see a vibrancy or reportage that broke the 1950s mold [sic], but that vibrancy has dissipated and N-S is, nowadays, a poor representative of newspapering.

Television news in Fort Wayne, especially at NBC33, is just about what it was way back in the 1950s.

The gloss of WANE, 21Alive, 33, and PBS39 – Fox 55 doesn’t count – is not very different than it was 58 years ago.

The formulae – the template(s) – for TV news are just about what they were back in the heyday of the old Dumont network: stick a face on the screen, read some copy, and show a picture that doesn’t quite tell the story or supplement it but pretends to, since that was what TV was (and is) supposed to do.

Is Melissa Long very much different than Faye Emerson?

Take the local TV weatherists and sports guys, for example. They could just as well come from the 50s era as anyone doing weather or sportscasts at the time.

Newspaper reporters – take Steve Penhollow for example – are as corny as those who wrote in the 50s, and who were eventually usurped by the Hunter Thompson types of later years, although Fort Wayne journalists never made or accepted the change in style from the 50s writing to the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s styles.

And heaven forbid that Fort Wayne newspaper reporters take on the snarky reportage of the early 21st century.

Even the music and talk of Fort Wayne radio, aside from WOWO, is outdated, ossified in the formats and patter of the 1950s.

Listen to Star 88 or 92.3/The Fort for instance. The talk is raunchier, for example, at The Fort but the on-air format is still the same: make small talk and slip in a song now and then.

Fort Wayne magazines are, apart from font styles and ad copy, virtually the same as those from earlier eras.

But more importantly, content – the “substance” of media hereabouts – is little changed, if changed at all, and is mildewed generally.

(This can be seen in Leo Morris’ N-S editorials or Frank Gray’s and Ben Smith’s JG columns.)

Fort Wayne is a backwater, we all know that, even though many refuse to accept the reality, living in a state of nostalgic denial that is enhanced by the 50s patina that media suffuses the city with.

It’s not a bad thing, this attempt to hold on to the values of the 1950s, as shallow as they were and are.

But it does eliminate a sense of adventure, which is what life is seemingly all about.

And you wonder why those of us with a need to explore and know things are so cranky.

It’s Fort Wayne media.