This NPR segment is appalling journalism and comes damn close to outright propaganda. Not once does the journalist ponder whether faith-based initiative programs are the right way to combat poverty. Not once does the journalist consider the creepy hold that one of the described programs has on the local economy. Not once does the journalist call into question the notion that a man “believing in Jesus” can be trusted.
Category / Journalism
Maybe It’s a Two-Way Street After All
My point is to call out the assumption among too many reporters that original reporting on the web amounts to free pickings, a separate class of journalism they can snag and call their own. That’s gotta stop.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I find it interesting that outlets have been utterly hypocritical in scolding bloggers for being somewhat parasitical in their approach, while simultaneously leeching off of the leads that can be easily find through a Technorati or Ice Rocket search. It seems to me that most, though certainly not all, bloggers are perfectly respectable in attributing where they found an initial link. (I certainly try to be.) Why not newspapers?
I feel that any journalist or blogger piecing together a story, whether it be a series of links or any outside work going in to confirm a rumor, has the duty to offer as much of their work product as the situation will allow. That way, another person looking to cover the story, perhaps stumbling upon it for the first time, knows what news is old and what news is known and she is in the position of unfurling additional story angles.
It is entirely irresponsible to let competitive animus get in the way of revealing this trail of crumbs. It is also counterintuitive to the investigative process.
David Lazarus: A Journalist Who Can’t Rise from the Dead
Ethical Question: Aren’t you really setting yourself up for disaster when you email naked photos of yourself to “a variety of online correspondents?”
The whole idea that this “Gene” character is complaining after he was foolish enough to send off photos to random strangers strikes me as naive and a bit self-serving. Further, if a person attending a sex party doesn’t already know that the San Francisco sex community is a small and tight-knit group (and, by damn, they should know) and that they should be highly circumspect, do they really have the right to complain? Here’s the question: what happened at the disrupted party and why didn’t the reporter push “Gene” for an answer?
The interesting thing about David Lazarus’s “The Internet is Evil” article is that we don’t hear the other side of the story. Why didn’t Lazarus try and get in touch with “Reality Check” or other members of the Yahoo group? Surely, “Gene,” if he had any brains at all, would have had records or emails from the disabled site. Oh yeah. His story angle was the “victimized” Gene and the evils of the Internet, as pronounced from Ray Everett-Church’s high horse. Never mind that Lazarus’s article still presents us with the possibility that “Gene” could have tipped off campus police about the party and that Lazarus doesn’t even bother to get a firm “No, I didn’t call the police” from “Gene” to make his case more airtight. Nor do we have any idea about how “Gene”‘s reactions to his accusations could have provoked the fury of his cybersmearers. Did he egg them on? I’ve seen a lot of flame wars over the years, and, in most cases, it takes two to tango.
The other thing that makes this story suspect: If Gene was told implicitly by Yahoo! that he needed a subpoena, why didn’t Gene figure out that maybe he just might need an attorney to file a civil suit and hammer Yahoo! with discovery? Perhaps because Gene either lacks the funds, can’t find an attorney to take his case, or implictly knows that there’s a bit of bullshit to his story.
Sure, cybersmears are certainly a threat and I don’t mean to suggest that “Gene” is without innocence. But “Gene”‘s case is a poor example, and Lazarus’s findings here are so full of holes, lack of specifics and unanswered questions that I simply cannot buy his premise.
Say Goodbye to Bay Area Papers
Frances Dinkelspiel examines McClatchy’s Knight-Ridder buyout and learns that both the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times are being sold off because they’re not in “growing markets.” This disheartens me too, for both papers are perfectly respectable. (In fact, the Contra Costa Times has a pretty good literary section.)
But while seeing newspapers slowly slide into the abyss is certainly sad, I’m not as much of a naysayer about this shift to commerce as Frances. We’re still very much in the early stages of a dramatic revolution in the way that news is gathered and disseminated. And if I had to make a prediction, I really see the action happening online. I also see someone coming up with a sustainable business model that is so amazing in its simplicity and efficacy that everyone will be wondering why they didn’t think of it first.
[UPDATE: And in a somewhat related note, it appears that Rupert Murdoch delivered a speech in which he suggested that newspapers must adapt to the Web and deliver its news on the current platforms or face extinction.]
To Buy a Vowell
Keelin McDonnell’s New Republic essay, “The Case Against Sarah Vowell”, would be completely worthless, had he not raised the perfectly valid point that Vowell is unable to convey political events with any sophistication.
Vowell’s recent New York Times columns represent yet another move in the ongoing political commentary shift from serious thinkers to humorists like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and, of course, Vowell. Taken as humor pieces, this trio’s collective contributions certainly represent entertaining diversions. There would be nothing wrong with this, provided that those who watch The Daily Show or who listen to This American Life actually understood that what they were watching was entertainment, rather than deep political thought. But it seems clear to me that more people are willing to take The Daily Show‘s “news” as gospel because it entertains them or perhaps because the current television news outlets simply cannot offer a perspective outside of the martial, tickertape headine and multiple windows model.
As intellectual material, however, the collective oeuvre of Stewart, Colbert and Vowell can be categorized somewhere between some high schooler gushing over a dogeared copy of Atlas Shrugged and a starry-eyed undergraduate who believes that Chomsky is God.
Take, for example, Vowell’s February 5 column, “Gimme Torture,” in which the subject of torture is conveyed through the prism of Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer on 24. Rather than examining how the troubling notion of Bauer, a Dirty Harry-like character who throws the Constitution and due process out the window on a weekly (i.e., hourly) basis, might just be a tad pernicious in getting 24‘s many viewers to remember basic civics (without even mentioning a pro-Patriot Act commercial which aired during the episode Vowell describes), Vowell offers the banal conclusion that she’s “a little less gulty” ordering a DVD set of 24. The essay is certainly amusing, but Vowell eschews using her comic gifts to point out how the show’s tone, much less the commercial, might influence some viewers to feel a little less bad about sacrificing civil liberties.
Perhaps the problem here is that political essays in America are, for the most part, fairly predictable affairs, whether they come from left or right. We all get on the same soapboxes. And inevitably, we all pluck the same unsubtle chords.
To address Bernard Henri-Levy’s recent concerns, I really don’t think that the Left is asleep, nor do I believe that the political essay is necessarily dead. But I do think that the shift to humorists or novelists offering “political writing” for their newspapers — even the half-baked “political fiction” to be found in Stephen Elliott’s Politically Inspired, which is more of an exercise in deferring serious thinking by exploring such predictable associations as a story of Bush in the guise of a Minnesota schoolboy — is counterproductive, if not destructive, to real discourse.
The problem is that when one writes a political essay these days, one is expected to adhere to a predisposed thinking pattern. The American Left, in particular, being so fragile and regularly maimed by its lack of mobilization, risks offending its peers, much less specific groups. One is expected these days to assume that a reading audience will agree with everything you state, rather than questioning another person’s points, much less one’s own, in a civil manner. And for all the tyrannies of the Bush administration, how tyrannical is this kind of groupthink?
I had hoped to talk to Vowell about these issues when she rolled through town, but her very friendly publicist explained to me that these Times pieces were keeping her quite busy. Perhaps the explanation here is that Vowell is working with harder deadlines than she was accustomed to. But I don’t think so. I think the New York Times has set the bar considerably lower than the Baltimore Herald Tribune or the Baltimore Sun ever did for H.L. Mencken. Because today’s m.o. is to entertain. And coming to grips with the sober realities of torture, political corruption and the venal actions of politicians, left or right, seems incompatible with this apparent necessity.
(via Chekhov’s Mistress)
Side By Side On My QWERTY Keyboard
Tim Redmond’s public flailing against Craig Newmark has garnered a few notable responses. Locally, there was a thread over at the SFist, in which mystified San Franciscans responded. More prominent, however, is Anil Dash’s rant against predictable liberalism and defensive newspapers.
But what I see here in all these reactions is hostility and divisiveness from both sides. (I still remain as baffled as Dave Barry was by a Chronicle reporter’s recorded comment, “I have podcasted. I’m not a complete idiot.” And I have, in a few private incidents, been privy to outright hostility from print reporters when trying to piece together a story.) The journalist boosters note the online paucity of what Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell has identified as a a “comprehensive, neutral and authoritative argument” (emphasis in original). The online boosters decry how out-of-touch the journalists are, pointing out the new playing field requires people to keep current and unfettered. But both parties share an fascinating and one-note view: the reactionary need to keep both forms separate and discrete, as if bloggers and journalists should be neatly arranged into some red state-blue state dichotomy.
Yes, newspapers will dip their toes into the podcast arena, as admirably as the Chronicle has. But they will do so without understanding the podcast’s personal, subjective and, one might argue, authentic and perhaps unpolished form. Because there are innumerable blogs trying to get to a story first, the blogger will leap to get her hands on a story quick. But because the work is rushed, there will be mistakes and corrections — the possibility that misinformation might sneak through the cracks and be further disseminated.
But at the risk of allowing my idealistic side to come through, isn’t this all pretty silly? One would think that journalists, many of whom are intimately familiar with the innovations of gonzos like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton, would embrace an alternative after decades banging out the same who what when where why template. Likewise, one would think that the bloggers and the podcasters would see the creative and informational value of limitations, much less holding onto a story until more confirmed information has come in.
As someone who has worked both sides of the spectrum, I’m wondering why, in all the ink that’s been spilled on the subject, so few people are willing to put their bile aside and contemplate some hybrid of the two forms. You want to talk Web 2.0? Let’s try fusion. What if the newspapers hired more bloggers and podcasters? What if bloggers set self-imposed limits on their content or made more phone calls instead of relying exclusively on Google search results?
Anger, arrogance and dismissiveness might make a writer feel good and drum up some initial attention. But take it from a piss-and-vinegar guy like me: it’s the ideas, multilateralism and flexibility that will stand the test of time. I fail to understand why the blogging/journalism war has become as inflammatory as the situation in Beirut. Surely, both sides have much to learn and benefit from each other.
To Journalists
I can understand a newsppaer’s authoritarian impulse. But it seems that preventing a substantial bloc of people from accessing content is a sure path to extinction. In other words, if they can’t find the story at your newspaper, they’ll go somewhere else. Or worse: they’ll do your work for you, perhaps beating you to the punch. It was proven the other day by Jason Kottke that the New York Times‘ forced registration is having a serious effect upon its Google search engine results.
Note to newspaper editors: You want to win this war? Stop declaring this a war. It is no longer 1996. It is 2006. The playing field is level. The Internet is an undeniable fact. People click on links, comment upon posts, print things off, and send things to other people.
Pop quiz, hotshot: Who broke the James Frey story? The Internet or a newspaper?
Learn to accept the fact that bloggers are linking to your content. Learn to accept the fact that bloggers may not always be as accurate as you, but that they are faster than you and, in the best of cases, they are quick to correct their mistakes and offer multiple perspectives to a story. Learn to work with them. Credit them when they have the facts before you and they’ll do likewise. Make your content available to as many people as possible. Invite commenting and, if you are truly concerned with “family values,” hire someone to monitor the comments.
Of course, you can also live in your lofty castles and pretend we don’t exist. That’s fine. But you know what John Donne said about solipsism. And when the axe falls and you lose your jobs, we’ll be there communicating with the audience that you talked down to. All because you thought that you were the authoritarian voice and that they’d still listen to you no matter what you said. Well, if you want to play that way, you’d better be on your game. Because there will be a thousand bloggers there before you. And if even a soupcon of these are good, you’re going to be in serious trouble.
Bloggers vs. Journalists
Crooked Timber has an excellent post up about the differences between bloggers and journalists.
The Last Word on Bob Hoover
Over at Scott’s, Kevin has observed that newspapermen often ignore the rebuttals. In an effort to test Bob Hoover by his own standards and demonstrate just how slovenly we litbloggers can be, I note the following:
1. Bob Hoover’s Career
First off, this biography reveals that Hoover isn’t all that different from litbloggers. For one thing, it appears that he started off as a volunteer book critic for the now defunct Pittsburgh Press. Well, aren’t litbloggers the volunteer book critics of the Internet?
I am not certain that boasting about covering “Sesame Street on Ice” constitutes real journalism. Unless of course Hoover wrote a 4,000 word investigative piece revealing that the skater playing Big Bird was a methadone addict. But then I’m not a man to pass judgment, given that I have a great fondness for Grover.
The most mysterious personal detail is that Hoover “has a degree in English from Ohio University.” What does this mean exactly? Is it a vocational degree? An A.A.? A certificate of attendance printed in English? A thermometer purchased in the Ohio University bookstore? Bob Hoover is apparently a man of mystery. Why also does Bob Hoover mention that he “worked at newspapers” but fails to mention any names? For all we know, the man could have been some guy off the street who put in a few hours a week calling local merchants up for advertising space.
2. Bob Hoover as Journalistic Torchbearer
Bud’s already provided several examples, but because Bob Hoover’s silliness must be exposed in full, here are some of Mr. Hoover’s inaccuracies. It seems that, contrary to Hoover’s claims, the Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette‘s “hawk-eye standards” don’t seem to be practiced nearly as much as Hoover attests.
1. In an online chat, Bob Hoover fails to properly capitalize “MP3.” He also offers this sentence: “The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh can download books on its own mp3 player [sic] which you can borrow.” Mr. Hoover also seems unaware of such basic grammatical rules as the direct object and the indirect object.
2. France is already part of “the Western canon.” There’s no reason to “expand” the Western canon to include a nation already well-established in Europe.
3. Claim: “Mr. Thompson’s contribution to American letters is substantially less than Mr. Bellow’s.” Apparently, Hoover hasn’t heard of gonzo journalism or tracked its development, much less paid attention to the remarkable league of HST imitators, which would suggest that Thompson’s contributions were far more than “substantially less.”
4. Claim: “The current rivals of the newspaper book sections are Oprah, the Internet and the brief puffy reviews found in celebrity-entertainment weeklies.” What planet does this guy live on? Does anyone really read People Magazine for the book reviews?
5. Bob Hoover’s headline: “Mr., Mrs. Chabon tell all.” Aside from the fact that an ampersand is as good as a comma (and more grammatically sound), Michael Chabon’s wife is named Ayelet Waldman, not Mrs. Chabon.
And that’s just after spending about 15 minutes sifting through the Bob Hoover archives.
Of course, to coin a Hooverism, fair is fair. Some people wrote in and lambasted me for calling Pittsburgh a “small town.” Certainly, any city with a population of 334,000 isn’t a “small town.” And you’ll find me on Market Square this weekend, getting dutifully horse-whipped with Bob Hoover. I apologize for my confusion, but Bob Hoover’s prose style reminded me very much of the PennySaver articles I used to read to stave off boredom as a Sacramento teenager.
But if it’s any consolation, folks, I’m rooting for Pittsburgh this Sunday. Go Steelers!
Merging Chains, Growing Pains, Shaking Up is Hard to Do
I have know idea if the Village Voice Media/New Times merger has anything to do with it, but the SFist’s Jackson West reports on the bad juju going down at the SF Weekly. Factual errors, rolling heads, and names disappearing from the masthead without so much as a note. Can a dead body be far behind?
Another Crime, Another Cultural Scapegoat
So now we have a case where Stanley Kubrick is going to be blamed for a violent crime. Three teenagers, obsessed by A Clockwork Orange, set fire to a homeless woman. The woman died in a hospital. Here are the questions that I would like to know and that should be asked of the 16 year old referred to as Juan Jose and the two 18 year old kids, Ricard Pinilla and Onol Pinilla.
- How were they raised by their parents? And why is there nothing here in the article on this?
- Do these three kids have any history of violent behavior? Given the fact that they publicly boasted about the crime, was this a savage cry for attention?
- How does recording violent attacks on a mobile phone and exchanging pictures by email have anything to do with A Clockwork Orange or Counterstrike? It suggests to me instead a pathological impulse that originates from within. (Further, the homeless man in A Clockwork Orange is stabbed and beaten up and there is no gasoline poured on anyone throughout the movie. Could it be that they developed the burn-someone-with-solvent idea from their own minds?)
- Why even have a sidebar devoted to Kubrick’s wishes to withdraw the film when the crime is still being investigated and the corollaries are so flimsy?
Have today’s journalists removed themselves from doing the proper legwork? Here, not even the London Times can support the thesis, much less shine the arc into some of those pivotal gray areas. Or maybe the Times would rather sell papers than perform an investigation into the factors that cause juveniles to commit crimes.
Lies, Damned Lies and Freakanomics
Freakanomics. Like every sophisticated American looking for a conversational entry point at a cocktail party, you’ve read it and been astounded by the conclusions. Yes indeed, Virginia, economics can be applied to everything! As per the free associative argumentative style that seems to run rampant and unchecked in today’s popular nonfiction titles. (Thank you, Malcolm Gladwell, for opening that Pandora’s box.)
Well, as it turns out, the two Steves got the economics wrong. Two economists (both of them, strangely enough, named Chris, proving an economic equation I’ve always found true: Two Steves + Two Chrises = Mayhem) from the Federal Reserve Bank have come forward, finding the research and statistics to be of questionable value.
Economist Christopher Foote notes that he spotted a missing formula in Steven Levitt’s initial research and that this programming oversight makes Levitt’s conclusion that the legalization of abortion reduced crime rates invalid. Apparently, Levitt failed to account for the crack wave of the 1980s and 1990s and, Foote says, Levitt’s failure to count arrests on a per-capita basis renders the abortion effect null and void.
This isn’t the first time that Levitt’s conclusions have come under attack, but this is the first time a high-profile economist has taken on Levitt at length. Levitt says that he hasn’t changed his stance and that the abortion effect holds true in Canada and Australia. Levitt himself has responded to these charges on his blog, noting that he will post a lengthy response once he has fully parsed Foote and Goetz’s paper. For the moment, Levitt confesses that he’s embarassed that he forgot the pivotal data, but insists that the data still matches up “when you run the specifications we meant to run.”
I’m quite curious about the viability of the abortion effect myself, but I’m quite surprised to see one of the world’s top economists insist that his hypothesis is right without actually running any results. I’m no scientist, but I know that my high school chemistry teacher would never give me a pass until I had proven a hypothesis. (The exploding test tubes that resulted from these experiments are another story.)
So, Dr. Levitt, when will you run these specifications? This correspondent, for one, will be watching.
Edward Guthmann, Plagiarist?
Looks like San Francisco Chronicle reporter Edward Guthmann has been caught plagiarizing the New Yorker. I’m truly sorry to hear this, as I had several great conversations with Guthmann back in the days when I practiced film criticism and though him a decent person and a decent writer. Knowing what little I know about Guthmann, I’m truly shocked that he did this.
[1/25/06 UPDATE: I’ve been in touch with Edward Guthmann. There are a few things that should be noted:
1. According to this SF Weekly piece, Guthmann confesses that the so-called plagiarism was unintentional, “During the months I worked on the piece, I gathered a huge amount of research and interview transcripts that I stored in computer files. At one point, I read about the 1,000th suicide in the New Yorker article and pasted two sentences in my text as a ‘flag’ — a reminder to myself to mention the fact. But when I went back to the piece, which may have been days later since I had other work during that time, I forgot those weren’t my words. I should have set them in boldface or larger type, or not moved them at all. Huge mistake — and especially heartbreaking, since I worked so hard on the piece and, apart from those two sentences, I think it’s my best work.”
2. During the course of the online investigation, nobody (including myself) thought to contact Guthmann himself. While the Vidiot’s coverage was quite fair, hopefully this will serve as a reminder to bloggers that it’s important to hear multiple sides of the story, particularly the persons who are accused of the charges.
I leave all the results here for readers to make up their minds.]
[1/25/06 UPDATE 2: Vidiot informs me that Guthmann was cc’d in his email to the Chronicle ombudsman. So there were some efforts to contact Guthmann.]
Move Over Michiko. Ebert Was There First.
Even Roger Ebert has his WTF moments.
Mike Wallace & Bill O’Reilly Buddies?
Stamford Advocate: “‘I should probably confess that he’s a friend of mine,’ he said, smiling. ‘But he acknowledges that he’s playing a role. He has a style that he’s developed that has attracted an enormous amount of attention.’ O’Reilly also has been lending advice on how to sell books while on the promotional circuit, Wallace joked.”
I can only imagine them ordering dinner together: “Shut up! You’re wrong about the creme brulée, Mike, and you know it!”
One Paper’s Peer Group is Another’s Circlejerk
Editor & Publisher: “The Times-Post rivalry is unique in that it is believed to be the only one that involves two newspapers located some 200 miles apart, but with a competition that rivals any two-newspaper city. ‘This is really a peer group of two,’ explains Kaiser.”
When You’re a Fink, You’re a Fink All the Way
If you have a Yahoo email account and you eventually find yourself writing about something that might be considered inexplicably dangerous (if not now, then perhaps in the not-too-distant future), you may want to ensure that your personal information is fabricated. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang has confirmed that Yahoo provided journalist Shi To’s private information to Chinese authorities. The journalist was then sentenced to ten years in prison. What was Shi’s crime? He dared to spell out media restrictions in place within China. Former President Bill Clinton also weighed in at an Internet forum, saying, “The internet, no matter what political system a country has, and our political system is different from yours, the internet is having significant political and social consequences and they cannot be erased.” He then went into a panegyric about how none of this had any negative effects on e-commerce.
It’s good to know that in the Clinton and Yang vision of the Internet, business comes first and that political extradition and freedom of speech is as expungable as a spam message.
Actually, “Batshit Crazy” Comes to Mind
Arizona Daily Star: “Finally, we’ve decided that syndicated columnist Ann Coulter has worn out her welcome. Many readers find her shrill, bombastic and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives.”
Because Being a Team Player Involves Occasional Cunnilingus
MacKenzie Bezos has a new book out. Clearly, the fact that MacKenzie is married to Jeff Bezos has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with this fawning interview at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Clearly, the fact that Amazon is based in Seattle has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the apparent urgency to get Mrs. Bezos precious column inches that could have gone to Kelly Link, Christopher Sorrentino, Lee Martin, or Kirby Gann. This interview was clearly intended to reflect the most seminal concerns for furthering humanities of our age!
David Ulin to Head LATBR
Mark has the scoop on the next LATBR editor. His name is David L. Ulin and Mark says he’s okay. His credentials certainly look spiffy. And based off of this, he looks more down-to-earth and far less humorless than Wasserman ever was. But can Mr. Ulin stand the scrutiny of Mark’s LATBR Thumbnails?
Agism Going Down at the Dailies
There’s two extraordinary stories from Romenensko. The first deals with political commentator Jim Witcover, who at 78, had his column at the Baltimore Sun reduced his frequency, with the sun cutting his salary down to a third of its previous rate. When the year on the contract renewed, the Baltimore Sun then sent a termination notice by overnight mail. Could it have been Witcover’s anti-Iraq stance or the fact that he was older?
The second item concerns this memo from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which offers a retirement package to those “who are 50 ages and above as of November 1, 2005.”
With both of these stories, there seems to be a clear and resounding message here. If you’re a journalist, even a syndicated columnist, getting up in years, don’t expect to be respected. Don’t even expect to be treated with any polite exit procedure. With newspapers already facing possible threats from major advertisers looking for a “younger, lowbrow” demographic, rather than an “older and elitist one,” could it be that newspapers are panicking and taking this attitude too much to heart?
[UPDATE: The Baltimore-based Live by the Foma offers his perspective on Witcover’s career and how it ties into the Baltimore Sun‘s legacy.]
They Don’t Want News; They Want Nonsense
Another article deflating Bill Keller’s “more elevated” argument from USA Today: “For the first six months of the year, celebrity and gossip magazines such as Us Weekly posted double-digit newsstand gains while newsweeklies such as Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report saw single-copy sales dip 3.4% to 16.6%.”
Bill Keller: Chickenhead of the Month
It’s been a while since we awarded anyone the Chickenhead of the Month. We like to reserve this special prize for a person making truly astounding leaps in logic.
Lo and behold! While we may be on hiatus from the Brownie Watch, we opened the NYTBR‘s pages yesterday and found a fantastic dollop of silliness from none other than Bill Keller himself!
In a letter, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responds to the Posner media essay that appeared a few weeks ago in the NYTBR. Keller has made a fantastic claim: namely, that the New York Times is in the business of providing something “more elevated and consequential.” If this is the case, how does this explain the continued ridiculousness of the Style Section? Or last week’s amazing devotion of Times resources to Bridget Jones? Or yesterday’s slipshod cover story in the Magazine, where an alternative source was served up by a bogus claim of “technological advances” and, as Mr. Birnbaum noted in the comments section, a wholesale refusal to reference Hubbert’s Peak?
If this is what Keller calls “more elevated and consequential,” then I shudder to think about what he considers conventional. What business does Keller have talking about a professional code when he has hordes of Times staffers devoting precious time and resources to distinguishing between a salwar kameez and a sari? How dare Keller pull this stunt within his own pages when, by his own admission a few months ago, his paper failed to cut the mustard in covering Iraq? When I think about professional code, I think of a a newspaper that dares to question anybody and anything — whether the Bush Administration or Hilary Clinton. It is not, as Keller suggests in his interpretation of Posner’s article, a matter of being either “liberal” or “supine,” but of being regularly active and constantly probing any and all subjects, where others would fall asleep at the wheel. That is, in a nutshell, journalism. And believe it or not, it is not nearly as partisan in the blogosphere as Keller would suggest.
Additionally, one wonders if Keller’s letter is a desperate ploy to give the NYTBR the illusion of intellectual debate. Despite a few brownie shipments sent to Mr. Tanenhaus and some successes, it has been clear to us that the Keller-Tanenhaus experiment has, for the most part, failed. Today’s NYTBR is more concerned with providing column inches to John Irving and Nora Roberts, giving odious reviewers like Leon Wieseltier and Joe Queenan more paychecks than they deserve, rather than reflecting culture and literature, much less providing an “elevated ” place to talk about it.
We suspect that the onus falls more on Keller than on Tanenhaus. We therefore grant Mr. Keller our “Chickenhead of the Month” award.
It’s the Statement, Stupid
This morning’s New York Times features some disingenuous reporting about the oil crisis from Peter Maass:
One of the industry’s most prominent consultants, Daniel Yergin, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about petroleum, dismisses the doomsday visions. ”This is not the first time that the world has ‘run out of oil,”’ he wrote in a recent Washington Post opinion essay. ”It’s more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry.” Yergin says that a number of oil projects that are under construction will increase the supply by 20 percent in five years and that technological advances will increase the amount of oil that can be recovered from existing reservoirs. (Typically, with today’s technology, only about 40 percent of a reservoir’s oil can be pumped to the surface.)
As Paul Roberts argued in The End of Oil and James Howard Kunstler railed against with jaded fury in The Long Emergency, what technological advances? Where will these come from? What are they? Do we pull these out of the hat and get a crummy raffle prize?
I particularly like the way that Maass not only allows Yergin to get away with this criminally general statement (thus underplaying the oil crisis), but prefaces the statement with “one of the industry’s most prominent consultants” and “author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book,” failing to point out that Yergin never singled out any tech specifics in his article.
So what was the point of this ridiculousness? To provide “fair and balanced” journalism? To throw in a credentialed naysayer without actually calling up Yergin and ask him to elaborate on his views? That’s lazy journalism — the kind of misleading context that I expect from some priapic warblogger.
NYT = People-Style Profiles Can’t Be Too Far Away
LA Weekly reports on a development that may kill two mediums with one stone. Apparently, movie studios plan to kill their full-page advertising for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. (At $100,000 per full-page ad, that adds up to a lot of dough.) The justification? The studios want to attract younger, lowbrow moviegoers and they view these two newspapers as “older and elitist.”
This is a fascinating development for several reasons: (1) This only confirms the notion that Hollywood is uninterested in making adult films (or at least appealing to adult audiences). (2) Studios have previously thrown so much money at publicity that their lavish spreads have seemed almost inconsequential. Is this a sign that they’re starting to tighten their belts? (3) That entities as slow-moving as movie studios recognize the declining readership of newspapers suggests that, at least on the entertainment front, we’re about to see a real transformation in entertainment journalism and related media. I sincerely hope that online outlets aren’t co-opted, along the lines of the corrupt Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Of course, since this isn’t yet a fait accompli, expect to see Bill Keller promote more entertainment-oriented junk on the front page in a last-minute effort to woo back Hollywood.
Esquire — Blowing the Same Old War Trumpet
The July 2005 issue of Esquire celebrated “10 Men” — presumably, ideal men that other men (read: that pivotal 18-34 male demographic) can look up to. What was perhaps most shocking about this dubious fete was Thomas P.M. Barnett’s masturbatory article, “Old Man in a Hurry,” a profile that set aside any and all criticisms of the Secretary of Defense for such passages as:
RUMSFELD POPS OUT of his chair with the speed of the weekly squash player he still is at age seventy-three and strides over to shake my hand with a big, welcoming smile on his face, employing the enthusiastic, familiar tone one associates with longtime acquaintances. “Hey, how are ya? Nice to see ya!” I’m surprised by how short he is, as I can look right over his head.
and
This is a room you smoke cigars in and decide the fate of the free world.
and, in describing a conversation with a general
Then the general clinches the deal. “So I’ve finally figured out why we get along so well,” he says. “We’ve both run with the bulls at Pamplona!” Rumsfeld shrieks in delight and then launches into a fifteen-minute reverie about the time he ran with the bulls. And for fifteen glorious minutes, he put away the goddamn wire brush.
This cuddly avuncular approach, which makes no reference to Abu Grhaib or Guantanmo Bay, is rather astonishing for a magazine that cut its teeth in the 1960s on hard-hitting journalism that dared to expose and penetrate. And I, for one, will soon be writing a letter canceling my subscription for such a disgraceful piece of journalism.
What’s particularly interesting is that the writer of this article, Thomas P.M. Barnett, has a blog. What’s interesting is that rather than atoning for his inability to throw a baseball faster than a amicable lob, Barnett (who, no surprise, has kids to feed, making dealing with the devil more justifiable) has written a post expressing surprise that his efforts would be greeted with such outrage. He concludes, “I wanted to write up Rumsfeld in the way I saw him in history for the transformation process he has unleashed, not simply replicate the hundreds of articles that blame him for Iraq. My choice? Yes. Don’t like it? Fine. But criticize the choice without implying that the only way the man can get a profile that doesn’t crucify him is for the journalist to be fooled.”
Fair enough. But as Norman Solomon has argued, the overall questions to Rumsfeld haven’t exactly been hardball. In fact, as FAIR reports, during a September 18, 2002 interview with Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Lehrer failed to call Rumsfeld on factually inaccurate statements. And as Salon reported last December, it took ordinary soldiers to ask the tough questions that journalists typically shied away from.
It would seem to me that Barnett, far from taking the hard alternative route, settled for the same old song. And if Barnett, with his continued fatherly references to “the old man,” genuinely believes that he wasn’t fooled, why the deliberate efforts to portray this seventy-three year old man as some virile squash player? Why the continued masculine assertions? Why nothing in the way of tough questions?
There’s an old Chinese proverb: “He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”
Sarah Boxer Must Be Replaced
Sarah Boxer: “But when it comes to the content of Web comics, Mr. Groth was right. The comics that use digital technology to break out of their frozen boxes are really more like animated cartoons. And those that don’t are just like the old, pre-digital ones, without the allure of the printed page and with a few added headaches for reader and creator alike.”
One can make the same case for Sarah Boxer’s columns. A healthy dose of skepticism is one thing. But Ms. Boxer’s columns are, for the most part, large dollops of bitter reactionary bullshit. She’s about as flexible to culture as hardened doss sticks. I’ve yet to see Ms. Boxer crack so much as a smile or let down her guard in any way. I suppose this is because, in the Boxer universe, all forms of DIY or independent culture are essentially bullshit. The people who try something different are no less than crazed dilletantes. Ideally, these upstarts should be mowed down by machine guns, lest they tango with the status quo or, even worse, disrupt Ms. Boxer from the west wing in her seculded estate. Damn these artists! They’ve deigned to force Ms. Boxer to actually think and write a column!
On the whole, Ms. Boxer’s snotty and inert columns are almost completely devoid of joy. One wonders why such a jaded glacier is on the Gray Lady’s payroll. After all, without going all Julavits here or condoning some phony 100% happy approach, if one is writing about culture, shouldn’t one actually enjoy the subject one is writing about?
Let’s take a look at a few choice examples from Ms. Boxer’s oeuvre.
July 11, 2005: “She is so bored by her job that she will even let you take control of one of the security cameras where she works. If this sounds intriguing, you might want to stop reading here and just go visit the site.”
Instead of trying to understand the approach, perhaps contextualizing the art with the heightened number of surveillance security cameras around us, what we have here is instant dismissal without thought.
June 28, 2005: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have that kind of time. Which raises the question: what kind of art do you have time for?”
Never mind understanding the concept behind John Simon’s “Every Icon.” It’s either instant or it sucks!
May 12, 2005: “Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of these. It just means that you’re not cool. And now that you’ve learned about them in the mainstream media (known as MSM on the Web), they’re not all that cool, either.”
Why is this paragraph even necessary? And why should hipness even matter in describing messages that disseminate across the Web?
What is the purpose of all this negativity? For the Times reader to pick up the Wednesday newspaper and feel superior to the disheveled upstarts? For a stockbroker to read the Times on the way to his miserable and artless job and say to himself, “Boy, I’m glad I chose the right path. Unlike these foolish urchins, I’m rolling in the dough. The never of these nincompoops!”
It seems to me that if a critic is writing about culture for a major newspaper, the effort expended should not be made mocking it, but analyzing it, using primary and secondary quotes, to put the cultural effort into perspective. While Ms. Boxer is certainly offering a “Critic’s Notebook,” one would hope that lead articles from the Arts & Cultural Desk would be composed of something more substantial and less half-baked.
Another Alt Weekly Goes Cold, Banal and Spineless
New York Sun: “The New York Press, a troubled alternative weekly with a bare-bones staff and budget and a streak of nasty humor, will soon be refashioning itself as a more sober-minded newspaper with longer essays, fiction, travelogues, and a centrist political voice, according to its new editor.”
[RELATED: Americans are fucking pussies. Canadians are not.]
This Being Said, Almost Anyone Is Better Than Rex Reed
Over at the Book Standard, Adam Langer presents a taxonomy of interviewed authors. The categories Langer presents are The Freewheeling Improviser, He/She Who Does Not Suffer Fools Gladly, The Unself-conscious Subject, The Consummate Storyteller and The Genuinely Decent Human Being. It’s not a bad list, but, without naming names (and this certainly doesn’t apply to any of my Segundo subjects thus far, who have all been fantastic) and drawing upon my experiences in journalism from the late ’90s, I’d also include The Chronic Plugger, He/She Who Will Only Speak in Soundbytes, The Most Important Voice of Our Time, and the TMI Exhibitionist.
I have to disagree somewhat with Langer’s claim that it is the subject’s duty to respond in erudite fashion to the questions. While it does indeed take two to tango, it is the interviewer’s job to find a common ground, to figure out early on how revelatory a subject is likely to be and adjust accordingly, to know the right time to stray from the prepared questions, to provide as comfortable a setting as one can have under the circumstances, and to ask a critical or provocative question at the right moment. Speaking for myself, one thing I’ve noted is that I tend to ramble too much. I’ve begun taking steps to rectify this. And the silly preamble “I’d like to touch upon…” seems to enter my vernacular when I’m talking with someone. Practice, I suppose, makes perfect.
[RELATED: There’s an interesting discussion over at Scott’s about what constitutes a stupid interview question and whether or not this is even a factor.]
(via Moorish Girl)
Leading Alt-Weekly Exploits Workers
All is not well in the New York alt-weekly world. Gawker reports that the Village Voice has proposed a contract for its writers that not only almost completely cuts out benefits, but offers a wage increase of $15/week. $15 may not get you health care, but it might just get you a movie and a few slices of pizza! Or perhaps a mousetrap to buy for the rat-infested warrens that the Voice overlords hope their staff can inhabit.
Now perhaps this has something to do with strategic alliances between the two behemoths have worked in the past. And labor and antitrust laws haven’t been a concern for these two bastions of progressive and “independent” media.
Fortunately, Voice workers aren’t taking this lying down and are planning a strike. One would hope that Norman Mailer, one of the original founders of the Voice, might channel his rage and energies towards these developments, rather than some book critic whose words he could easily ignore. But then that would involve Mailer living up to his self-projected image as an elder statesman, when we all know that he’s really a hollow shell.
(via Booksquare)