Superb piece by Rick Perstein, a tiny bit of which is this:
It’s almost like they keep score in editorial offices. Only a certain number of horrifying—which is to say, truthful—things can be allowed in a major publication about our president-elect every day, which then must be balanced by something reassuring. Which is to say, something not true.
You really must read the whole thing. It’s excellent.
A tweetstorm’s tweetstorm from David Frum:
Slicing away one’s memory lobes an excellent basis for decision-making, so sure (he said with heavy sarcasm). [A Fresh Start for Trump!]
Let’s have a fresh start and forget that the president-elect owes his victory in large part to aid by a hostile foreign intelligence agency
Let’s have a fresh start and pretend that the president-elect didn’t alert allies and enemies that America may ignore its NATO pledges
Let’s have a fresh start and forget that the president-elect remains committed to a religious test for the rights of citizenship
Let’s have a fresh start and never mind that the president elect is a confessed serial sexual assailant
Let’s have a fresh start and who cares that the new administration is already developing fraternal ties to fascist parties in Europe
Let’s have a fresh start and believe that it doesn’t matter that the president-elect owes hundreds of millions to the Bank of China
Let’s have a fresh start, because who is bothered that black, brown, & Muslim fellow citizens have been demeaned and feel terrified?
Let’s have a fresh start, and hope that pro-Trump trolls will cease bullying women into silencing themselves on social media
Let’s have a fresh start, because it will take time to learn how the president-elect has prostituted his office for personal gain
Let’s have a fresh start, because 70 year old men afflicted by narcissistic personality disorder often suddenly become better people
Lets have a fresh start, because it’s only fair play to give would-be kleptocrats a 6-month head start before we act to stop them
Let’s have a fresh start, because Trump’s contemptuous assumption of media gullibility is fully justified.
Turns out Lemkin|5 came a few days too soon; here we have a bit of follow up that reaches all the way back to dickity-nine. You no doubt fondly recall the sad tale of Kimber VanRy, the man who received a $25 summons for just sitting there, drinking his own beer, on his own stoop, all safely enclosed behind his own gate there in Brooklyn.
Well, they’re at it again. The New York Times (again) reports that this time it’s Andrew Rausa and a few friends that were sitting on a similarly figured stoop behind bars; each received a summons. Even one friend who “was holding a red plastic cup filled with soda” received a $25 summons. This is hardly surprising, in that they made the cardinal mistake of pointing out the inherent foolishness and likely illegality of this sort of enforcement. Gentlemen, to the iPhone:
Holding his phone, Mr. Rausa approached the officer and said that because he was sitting on a private stoop behind a gate, he was not breaking the law.
“I don’t care what the law says, you’re getting a summons,” the officer said before rolling up his window, according to Mr. Rausa.
Frankly, he’s lucky he didn’t get his face used as a door opener for a few hours while the cops made their rounds. At the very least, a savage in situ beat-down would have ensued in various parts of town. Even in the absence of all that, a simmering rage gradually built over the $25 fines:
“We had an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” he recalled. “They were like, ‘No way, we’re going to fight this. This is injustice.’”
[…]
“My issue is not some yuppie, I-think-I’m-above-the-law-issue, it’s the fact that I brought to the attention of the police officer that he was not in the right and he was not receptive at all,” Mr. Rausa said.
File that last sentence under “least surprising thing ever reported by The Times of New York.” I’m not even entirely sure Mr. Rausa is still speaking English at that moment. But he’s right about the legality part. And that’s something, isn’t it? Rest assured we’ll be watching for the outcome of this one. If CourtTV hadn’t long ago switched its programming to only Bahrani hard-R independent films, we could all expect extensive coverage. But we can’t. So it goes.
Regarding the mechanics of the piece itself: what beers were they drinking? How many? Crown tops or twist? Where did you learn your trade, Vivian Yee? Clearly not from Clyde Haberman, who I trust is still with us. But, in partial recompense, Vivian does offer up some spicy VanRy where-are-they-now:
Since contesting his summons [and having it dismissed on a technicality], Mr. VanRy has moved from Prospect Heights to a brownstone in Windsor Terrace, but he hasn’t stopped enjoying his beers outside
Thank FSM for that. And godspeed to you, Andrew Rausa. A parched nation looks to you as you defend our freedom to drink a beer quietly whilst safely ensconced on our own property.
“Jon [Stewart] has chronicled the death of shame in politics and journalism,” says Brian Williams, the NBC Nightly News anchor who is a frequent Daily Show guest. “Many of us on this side of the journalism tracks often wish we were on Jon’s side. I envy his platform to shout from the mountaintop. He’s a necessary branch of government.
I see, so being the Nightly News anchor for a major network, which recently drew 8,040,000 viewers and regularly leads the "National Nightly News” pack, doesn’t actually constitute a “platform” to “shout from the mountaintop.” Then what the fuck is it for? I’d seriously like to know.
Stewart, on the other hand, gets “about 1.8 million viewers each night.” What a mountaintop he has. Truly the envy of someone with more than 8 times as many viewers; more than Stewart, CNN, FOXnews, msnbc, and probably a few other notables combined in that time slot. Every night. But that doesn’t constitute a “mountaintop” from which to do silly things like inform people with rigor and insight. Oh my no. That sort of thing only happens over on Comedy Central where the corporate overlords apparently aren’t quite so twitchy about letting a little actual information seep into the nightly colorcast. Which is fine by Williams, if these quotes are to be believed.
This attitude, this ceaseless and unstoppable form of pseudo-intellectual nihilism is killing the country. Measurably. It’s what Krugman calls “Invincible Ignorance.” Oh, and that kooky rube Stewart knows about it and has long recognized it:
The pettiness of it, the strange lack of passion for any kind of moral or editorial authority [from the MSM], always struck me as weird. We felt like, we’re serious people doing an unserious thing, and they’re unserious people doing a very serious thing.
Brian Williams, case in point. Pettiness and lack of passion of any kind incarnate. Tonight on NBC Nightly News!
[All quotes from this excellent profile]
…its members are falling away; background sounds once familiar have been silenced. The jangle of the pay phone on the wall, the click of the lighter, the snap and hiss of a match being lighted.
To those retired players in New York City bars, add the hulking workhorse in the back of the pit. It played all night: thunk, thunk, thunk, as the coins dropped into the slot, followed by the grinding crank of unseen gears as the rod was yanked out. The short solo ended modestly, like a tap on a high hat, with the whisper of a pack of smokes wrapped in plastic film sliding into the tray below.
The cigarette machine.
–Michael Wilson, bringing the poetry in an elegiac piece in the NYT about the passing of the old-school mechanical cigarette machine.
I always liked the Art-O-Mat idea: cigarette pack sized art projects you could buy out of re-purposed machines. Gumballs for adults.
Because the boundaries of political debate in Washington are also the horizons of the discussion on “Washington Week,” the show has no grace, mystery, edge or dissonant voice. What if the system is broken, the political elite is failing the country, accountability is a mirage and the game is a farce run by well-educated people who manipulate the symbols of the republic? Whenever those things are true, “Washington Week” becomes a lie.
Robert Niles provides an absolutely essential bit of reading for anyone in the content-delivery world. Also known as “traditional” media (Yes, you. You are all in denial.), re: their efforts to invent new revenue models for their 19th century, dead-tree product line [emphasis added]:
You’re wasting your time. Please, stop. There is no new revenue model for journalism.
Done and done. In tweet length, no less. But no! Niles goes on to break it right on down into simple concepts for even the dimmest of bulbs. We are, after all, trying to get through to the likes of Rupert Murdoch here.
There are three ways – and only three ways – that publishers can make money from their content:
1. Direct purchases, such as subscriptions, copy sales and tickets
2. Advertising
3. Donations, including direct contributions and grant funding
Niles breaks down the first and potentially most important point using the basic economics of products you might see today in a bookstore, with emphasis on the relative price-points (e.g. papers are by far the cheapest thing in there and still aren’t selling):
Without a home-delivered hard copy, the commodity information available in most newspaper has no financial worth to most readers.
[…]
Because of this, no one is going to be able to craft a paid content model that elicits significant payment from more than a handful of readers for commodity news. And, despite what “proud parents” in the newsroom might think about their work, almost everything produced by all U.S. newspapers and broadcast newsrooms falls into that category.
Exactly. Why pay for “commodity information” that you can get on many phones? Your pay-walls won’t do a thing to stop that, either. Well, not a thing unless you count directing people to other sources and, worst-case, coercing them into learning how to use Pipes as a “thing.”
I’d extend this overall concept of economic value even further and say: without a home-device delivered copy, tuned to individual specifications, most newspaper-derived information has no inherent financial worth (incidentally, this is also why demographics are slowly and inevitably killing the Tonight Show). News can and will be gotten from anywhere. Again, publishers, you are selling your editorial judgment, not the actual content. Yes, the content had better be good, but I want to know what is critical to know, and not just the various bits of arcana and other nonsense that have simply been automatically included in papers since the 1950s because “that’s the way we do things.” I want to be able to go deep, instantly, on a subject of interest to me while still reaping a quick-hitting, broad view of the state of affairs on my block, in my state, in my country, in my hemisphere, and in the world. You’re not going to be able to have your own employees covering all those things, but you damned well better know how to leverage all the various individual sources that do, compile them, maybe add some value or viewpoint, and then present the best of it to me. Every second of every day, whenever and wherever I want it, whether as bullet point, abstract, or 50,000 word exegesis.
All that said, the thing somebody out there in charge of a major paper has really got to realize is this:
it’s time to take a hard look at the other side of the ledger, and work to find a publishing and production model that allows a news publication to live within its current income means. That’s where the real change will happen in news publishing
Modern journalism in the form of newspapers is entirely an ad printing concern. Subscriptions just pay to bring the paper to the door, not to print that which is brought. Everything about the current model is designed to maximize the capability to create and print a big package of paper ads with some interstitial articles in there (yes, and a little sex, too). This needs to change. The first publisher with a national reach (in terms of name and reputation) to divest itself from the print albatross and concentrate fully (or very nearly so) on providing flexibly deep coverage in a RSS-style, fully user-customizable package will win. Big. People want excellent, well packaged information and are willing to pay for it (witness Cook’s Illustrated, the only successful thing going in the print world today and entirely predicated on a fee for service model). You, the broader news media, provide those people with mediocre information and, generally speaking, inconvenience because of your colossal tunnel vision relative to “how things have always been” and how you get back to that model as soon as possible and forever. I’ve got news for you: always is over.
Michael Kinsley wants to cut down newspaper articles by removing “legacy code,” overlong or overly florid lines that, while checking some traditional journalistic content box, don’t actually advance the story or inform the reader. Fair enough. Felix Salmon more or less agrees, again going on mostly about story length, noting that the Atlantic still does long stories in print (so wonderful for the train!) and but has shorter, web-only content online (along with those dreaded longer stories “reprinted” from the physical magazine). He points out what he sees as the crux of difference via a newspaper example:
…newspaper conventions have been built for physical newspapers, and can look silly in the age of the web — especially when the stories themselves appear, pretty much unchanged, on newspapers’ websites. It might make sense for the physical LA Times to run one big story about Afghanistan, but once that decision is made, no one is going to chop that one big story into three smaller ones for the website.
Right off the bat, he implicitly accepts an assumption that the web version needs to be shorter. If anything, the online edition should be longer, with a note in the physical version to go online for more depth about this or that tribal issue, interactive maps, whatever. That way, when you’re reading the Times on your 2025 model iTablet, everything is suddenly knit together in a way that allows you to expand or contract the amount of information you’re taking in based on your wants/needs of the moment.
I’m not exactly sure why this concept is so hard to understand: In the electronic era, there is no a priori limitation to the relative length or brevity of a story. It need not be artificially and randomly cut to 250 words to squeeze into a particular newshole or avoid a page-jump (think: USAToday), nor stretched to 15,000 words to buff up its apparent “importance.” Stories should be exactly as long as they need to be. I agree with Kinsley that all false equivalencies and labored prose that largely represents today’s idea of journalism needs to go, and soon. This means that if you can cover an important (but expected) House vote in 75 words by excising the fat, then by all means: do so. If providing useful, analytical context demands you go to 400,000 words on the same subject: then do so. THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE SELLING NOW. Editorial opinions (e.g. what is news?) are your only asset. Everyone working in media today should be entirely focused on maximizing the electronic product. Period. Forget about page impressions. Forget about the physical product (e.g. the monthly Atlantic or the daily NYT) and focus on making the best stories you can, whatever their length. Then repackage the very most important of those from your website (that naturally updates whenever it needs to, not on some arbitrary, print-based schedule) and you move it from there into the necessarily very scheduled, physical box that you still put out as best you can (hey, what do you know, that’s where your only physical constraints relative to length and layout are).
That neither Kinsley nor Salmon, both at one level or another tasked with rethinking how journalism works in the internet era mention this at all, and furthermore go so far as to make a case for ever more arbitrary cutting is, shall we say, depressing. That all of legacy media seems to be responding to this by utterly decerebrating their writing, then chopping it up into arbitrary “next page” chunks (even when the story is less than 50 words long), and then festooning the whole package with great gloopy wads of aggressively intrusive advertising that would make Vegas blush is, shall we say, demoralizing.
… whatever a person may think of Van Jones, he simply wasn’t a major White House player. Glenn Beck ran a largely crackpot crusade against Jones, often disinforming millions of viewers in the process. Jones “went to prison and became a communist,” Beck would constantly say. (That clip comes from his August 4 show.) Cracker, please! That’s “apocalyptic” junk. And guess what? When millions of people get disinformed in such ways, that might qualify as news too!
The Post didn’t report that disinformation—the process by which millions of people were told that Obama had an important “czar” who “went to prison” and “became a communist.” But it didn’t occur to Alexander to ask why the Post was silent about that. We’d say there are two likely reasons:
First, Alexander has absorbed a Republican point of view about whose outlook dominates Washington.
Second, there is no countervailing Democratic point of view! There is no narrative which might have made Alexander think twice before he joined a famous old band. For decades now, conservatives have spread the idea that liberal notions dominate Washington.
The notion was silly by the mid-1990s, of course. But when have Democrats spoken?
Well, Bob, when so-called Democrats with daily access to microphones do speak, they all too often recite internalized GOP talking points. Let’s take just one set of recent examples centered around attempts to remake and refine the United States’ Afghan policy going forward. Here we have (the normally quite good) Mara Liasson, when asked if Bush administration policies have anything to do with Afghanistan as Obama found it:
[Obama] owns the war in Afghanistan
Indeed, Obama did start and then ignore said war in Afghanistan for the better part of a decade. Whatever domestic and military issues that remain to be solved there are totally his fault, and have nothing to do with anything that went before. And, just to let you in on the news of the future, success in Afghanistan (should it come): total NeoCon victory, and was all Bush the whole way, largely despite Obama, and certainly not because of any new policies. Failure, or simply staying mired in the present quagmire, well that was because Obama failed to execute W’s brilliant strategeries.
Now let’s take Juan Williams on the same subject:
[Afghanistan] becomes President Obama’s war in such a way that people would say he has gone back, he has become a war president, and how ironic for a man who ran against the war.
You see, Juan, the problem here is: Obama ran “against” the conduct of the war in Iraq. If anything, he was arguing from day one for a more aggressive, more involved stance in Afghanistan. And he’s repeatedly, repeatedly said that Iraq was a “distraction” from the hunt for al Qaeda and action against the Taliban remnants. You might recall, these are the two groups responsible for the attacks of 9/11. Too bad none of that material was in the GOP’s talking points memorandum for the day.
Krugman, writing in a blog post, notes the same utterly detached form of group insanity that Joe Klein observed at a recent Arkansas town hall:
The point is that whatever is driving all this doesn’t have anything to do with the realities of what I, or, much more important of course, Obama say or do. Obama could have come in proposing to pursue an agenda identical to Bush, and he would still be a socialist/Commie/fascist, with those of us who don’t see it that way lying Nazis ourselves.
Something is going very wrong in the heads of a substantial number of Americans.
At least on the point of the communist nonsense (and, if you haven’t been following the output of the nuthatch: Obama is secretly larding his White House with Marxists), I think we can parse the madness pretty damned easily. The first signs of it emerged from the fact that various high-level advisors who report only to the President are commonly referred to in the popular media as “Czars.” That must refer to some kind of a Marxist, right? Why, there are more “Czars” in the Obama administration than in Old Russia! Where there was one… and the more frequent english spelling there is actually, uh, “Tsar.” But let’s take it at fully idiotic face value: never mentioned or grasped is the seemingly equally critical fact that Obama’s is the first administration since Reagan (whose team seemingly popularized, but didn’t invent, the term “Czar” in its modern US political usage) that has actually stopped using the term at all. Early on during the transition period, the administration went out of its way to put a stop to the common usage, going so far as getting out there and providing quotes that made it into various stories, such as this one in Politico, which specifically note that:
“Obama aides say that Browner will not be called a “czar,” a term they dislike. They say she will simply focus like a laser beam on energy-reform issues, which the president-elect has named as a top priority and one of the linchpins of his economic recovery plan.”
Of course, the media positively loves the term. And continued to use it. Even when specifically corrected:
Reporter: On Ken Feinberg, I think that he’s maybe the 20th czar-type position you’ve named.
Gibbs: No, I think the title is “special master.”
And now fans the flames of this nonsense by failing to mention any of this, ever. And act as though this is the first administration EVAR to have such positions and to call them something like “Czars”, and it is all so much more evidence of secret Marxism in the Obama administration.
Secondly, that “Something” of Krugman’s post is largely personified in the form of one Glenn Beck. Who holds particular disdain for one Van Jones, Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). See, absolutely no mention of “Czar” in there anywhere. Why, that gets us one closer to the number of Tsars around in the time of the Romanovs. In fact, I think we can all probably agree that Jones is a secret Marxist because Color of Change, an organization he co-founded has, as of this moment, successfully peeled off no fewer than 57 advertisers from Beck’s show. Clearly, only a secret Marxist would do such a thing, and a grateful nation owes Glenn Beck much for so selflessly pursuing this issue… That most of those advertisers still have contracts with FOXnews is troubling, but at least it’s a start. One might think that there’s a good MSM article in there somewhere, tracking the various personal vendettas that the right-wing echo chamber turns into grist for the mill. But, no, not interested. It’s just a “strange thing we’re observing on our various excursions flying across the hinterlands. Wonder what that’s all about?” Or, more succinctly:
“Sometimes in life you want to just keep walking… Sometimes, I think, just keep walking…. Some of life just has to be mysterious.”
God help us if we ever get a functional media class. People might actually learn something. Starting with those people in the newly functional media class.
Lemkin 