Most of the shows were formulaic (how many variations of wrongly accused, Good Samaritans-on-the-run can there possibly be?) and alternately melodramatic or campy, but none of us minded much, so long as we could be allowed to tune in each week and carry a plastic lunch box upon which our favorite heroes from "The A-Team," "CHiPs," or "The Dukes of Hazard" were proudly displayed. One such show was the CBS television show "The Incredible Hulk," starring Bill Bixby as the beleaguered, hitchhiking Good Samaritan-on-the-run, Dr. David Banner, and the indomitable Lou Ferrigno as his green-muscled, fright-wigged titular alter-ego, The Hulk. I didn't pay much attention to the plot of the show, as I recall, but I pretty much tolerated whatever late '70s-to-early '80s melodrama was unfolding so that I could get to that unwaveringly reliable point in the show where Bixby's character would opine (or, more accurately, warn) his antagonists, "Please... Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."
What, one may ask, does a 30-year-old, highly formulaic TV show have in common with the Fifth Estate and our beloved 21st century 24-hour news machine? Much like The Hulk himself, the answer -- or is it the monster? -- lies within.
For the pop culturalist in the know, The Incredible Hulk was created as the result of a freak accident whereby a quiet, emotionally and socially repressed, but good-natured, scientist named Bruce Banner (the name was inexplicably changed for the famous TV show) is bombarded by "gamma rays" that, outwardly, have no effect on him. But in a modern retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde tale, the gamma rays change Banner on the inside, at the cellular level, creating a monstrous physiological mutation triggered whenever the scientist gets angry, transforming him into a massive, green-skinned hulk. An Incredible Hulk.
Cue smashing.
Historically, in both the source material Marvel comic books as well as his film and television incarnations, The Hulk -- while incredibly destructive and incredibly anger-management impaired -- was always on the side of the angels. The Hulk was a good guy. He smashed a lot (it's sort of his signature modus operandi), but it was always for the good of good people, after all.
According to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." Since the time of its writing, the First Amendment has been consistently cited for both the protection and justification of the press' tireless pursuit to deliver the news to the American people on the basis of the public's "right to know." This year, in the Obsidian Finance Group v. Cox case brought before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, it was effectively ruled that bloggers -- i.e. any individual writing an Internet-based "web log," or "blog" -- may now be viewed and litigated, for or against, as journalists, their "medium of publication" being the Internet, according to a publication by the District Court of Oregon this past January. Meaning the line between the Fourth Estate (news media, broadcasting, print journalism, etc.) and the Fifth Estate (the blogosphere, social and other growing mainstream digital media) is not just blurring. It's disappearing.
Traditionalists and progressives within both camps -- or estates
-- have wildly varying opinions about this inevitable convergence of the two
points, with wildly varying defenses for why it is alternately a good thing or
a bad thing or simply a thing which cannot be reversed or undone, like a
Pandora's Box for the information age.
No matter which side of the line one falls on, it must be acknowledged that the media world is transforming; it’s mutating into a creature
unto itself.
And it’s getting bigger.
 |
| Chart from the Pew Research Center |
According to findings published by the Pew Research Center, the
number of Americans who are getting their news from the more traditional Fourth
Estate sources has been drastically declining over the past twenty years. The digital Fifth Estate, however, has been
growing, as more and more Americans are getting their news from online sources,
surpassing newspaper and radio in 2010. By 2012, according to Pew’s Journalism Project, between 9% and 19% of Americans preferred online and digital news to
print or radio. Which is an incredible
growth over less than a decade’s time span, but why view it as Hulk-like?
Take, for example, NBA pariah Donald Sterling, up until recently
the basketball league’s longest-tenured team owner. Sterling was recently brought low and banned
from the league after TMZ -- an online celebrity tabloid -- published racist comments by the octogenarian that were secretly recorded by his then-girlfriend. The news spread like gamma rays, the NBA and
its players were outraged, and “bad guy” Sterling (to borrow the term from
oversimplified comic book parlance, following the assumption that racists are
pretty bad guys) was stripped of his team and banned from the league. HULK SMASH!
And rightly so, for how could such an ejection be a bad
thing? Does it matter that the means of
attaining the damning recording was possibly unethical? The bad guy was punished, so does it matter
that The Hulk went on a downtown rampage to achieve this end? As evidenced in the Pew research, the
monstrous growth of technology and digital media news delivery has mutated the
Fifth Estate into a nigh-omnipresent force.
But is it a force for good? And I’m
no journalism purist; I have a passable enough knowledge of history to recognize
that the William Randolf Hearst-esque school of yellow journalism was using
questionable, possibly unethical, means of exercising the public’s “right to
know” (and causing Hulk-esque destruction) in the long-pre-digital age.
The Incredible Fifth Estate, now overpowering its predecessors,
certainly has the Constitutional superpower -- like a certain Good
Samaritan-on-the-run from a bygone television era* -- to be on the side of the angels and
make evil-doers beware. But it should be
noted that even the good Dr. Banner feared unleashing The Hulk for fear of the
damage that he’d do.
