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Media 
The Church of Best-Sellers
Media people are the high priests of secular culture, encouraging people to worship what sells. by William Powers ..... The only thing more entertaining than the Clinton book launch was watching the news trade try to fathom the Clinton book launch. More and more, the coverage of these massive cultural events is like absurd comic theater. Act 1: Long before publication, the media announce that the book in question will be simply huge, The Biggest Thing In Years, and the drumbeat continues right up to the day of release. Act 2: The public, eager to participate in this foreordained historic moment, dutifully lines up to buy the important tome. Act 3: The media marvel at the popular frenzy, as if it had happened quite spontaneously and they had nothing to do with it. Wolf, there is so much buzz about this book. Everyone wanting to see exactly what former President Clinton will say in this book, titled My Life.... Between now and Tuesday, when this book goes on sale, it will be all Clinton, all the time. He's doing interviews with Oprah, the Today show, Good Morning America, and, of course, Wolf, with CNN's very own Larry King Live. —CNN's Kelly Wallace to CNN's Wolf Blitzer, June 18 Today is the big day for folks who are waiting to read President Clinton's 957-page autobiography. That's a line right here in midtown Manhattan because these folks are trying to pick up a copy of My Life, the former president's new book, which is finally going on sale. Why such an uproar? Why such lengthy lines? —CNN's Soledad O'Brien, June 22 And why do we play this game? Because in a market-obsessed culture, there's no news bigger than a best-seller. Sure, President Clinton himself was the star of this story, and his amazing ability to satisfy the emotional needs of all true believers, left and right, was crucial. But it was the book itself and its instant rise up the lists that gave the story life. These moments are not really about history or politics or ideology, or even about reading. They're about movement of product. "What's selling most?" is the essential question of our collective lives. It dominates not just book coverage, but the media's take on movies, television, even politics (where those who raise the most money are taken most seriously by those who cover them). Media people are the high priests of secular culture, and we effectively encourage people to worship what sells. And the dears are wonderfully devout about it. There's a kind of best-seller chant you can hear all across the land, wherever two or more were gathered. "Have you read The Da Vinci Code? Oh, I have. It's wonderful." Is it really wonderful? Who cares? It's selling! And there's nothing more inspiring than that. The best-sellerness of a book or movie is often its core asset, the thing that gives us joy. Buy it and feel as if a shaft of the golden best-seller light falls on you. You're not just a reader, you're a best-selling kind of reader. And Bill Clinton isn't just an ex-president writing a memoir—that would be so dull. An editor at Amazon.com told The Boston Globe that Clinton's pre-publication sales alone put him "in the same league as John Grisham, Stephen King, Dr. Phil, and Tom Clancy." Now that's something. The vast machinery of the news business is now wired to detect best-sellers as early as possible—and pump them until they drop off the lists. And the media are not choosy about their best-sellers. If you've got the numbers, you've got our attention. For example, the trade's traditional chariness about religion goes out the window if a best-seller is involved. The authors of the Left Behind books recently made the cover of Newsweek in a story that touched repeatedly on their best-seller status, as if to remind us of the key point. Rick Warren, religious leader and author of The Purpose-Driven Life, has been everywhere lately, including in a spin-off story on the front page of The New York Times about his influence over prisoners. Reading the story, you could feel the ticket-punching moment coming, and then, there it was: "The Purpose-Driven Life, a Bible-based self-help book, has been on best-seller lists since October 2002, selling about a million copies a month." When the media fail to see a best-seller coming, and it sells anyway, that itself becomes a reason to marvel and do our dance. Witness the giddy coverage of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, the surprise best-seller about punctuation. That book is now on prominent display at my local supermarket, which recently added a spacious book aisle with a giant overhead arch that reads, "BEST-SELLERS!" Walking under it, I get a special buzz that never happens on the soup aisle. None of this is really new. Best-sellers have been around forever. When Truman Capote's In Cold Blood came out in 1966, Time magazine noted: "The book may not break new literary ground, but it seems assured a loftier future and a longer public reign than most crime stories enjoy. It is already a popular success.... In the hardcover edition, a first printing of 100,000 is selling at a best-seller clip." To dismiss a book or any other product just because it sells is mindless snobbery. But if high sales don't necessarily tell us a book is bad, they also don't tell us it's good, or worthy of its own hype. As the early reception of the Clinton book shows—massive hype, dismal reviews—it's a distinction sometimes lost on the media.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2004 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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