BusinessWeek has proclaimed the death of the “Mass Market” in the U.S.

With the rise of tertiary cable channels, ultra-specialized magazines (my current fave: Physicians’ Travel), and the Web, advertisers are increasingly moving to media that target specific audiences. Caught in the resulting fiscal death spiral: Network TV, local TV, and daily papers.

Perhaps you won’t miss the days when half the country watched the same sitcoms, and 80 percent of households received “the paper” (typically a dully-written, Republican-partisan sheet) every day.

But if Procter & Gamble or General Motors wishes to no longer support general-interest journalism, who will? Not web ads, not sufficiently, at least not yet.

A lot of us lefties have had our beefs against the news coverage from the networks and the daily papers this past year and a half. To a great extent, the big media’s superficial, authority-driven war coverage was driven by the twin drives to keep costs down and to gain readers/viewers with spectacular stories/images. Thus, the mania in 2003 for “embedded” reporters, who got to cover the war up close as long as they saw and said what the White House wanted them to see and say. Undercover, investigative stuff is much more labor intensive, and doesn’t guarantee any flashy payoff.

As a long-term-unemployed journalist myself (will someone out there please hire me please?), I’ve seen the long-term effects of this shift in ad support. It’s undoubtedly the real reason the Seattle Times wants to end its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer. It’s the real reason chain-owned radio stations are decimating their news departments, and national magazines are buying fewer freelance articles. It’s a trend that won’t be fully reversed even when the general economy improves.

So what’ll save quality news in the U.S.? Pledge drives? Church subsidies? Foreign imports?

I haven’t the answers. If you have, lemme know.

“Agit-doc.”

…I’ve found with the already famous, yet extremely rare, Lauren Jackson nude photos from the Aussie art-mag Black & White.

As you might expect, the Seattle Storm basketball star is not only a great role model, but also a great model. Her taut muscle tone is the product of working out, not of surgical treatments. Even in monochrome scans, her life energy bursts forth.

…and those of us who simply love old pop ephemera, can view entire issues of pre-1970 skin books (even the articles!) at Vintage Girlie Mags.

On the weekend of Ladyfest Seattle, Friday’s Wall St. Journal has a cute feature story (available online only to paid subscribers) about “mom bands,” punk groups not only fronted but entirely operated by women who’ve got kids. One of the groups profiled even has a song called “Eat Your Damn Spaghetti,” vaguely reminiscent of the 1983 Seattle stage musical Angry Housewives and its signature song “Eat Your Fucking Cornflakes.”

David Neiwert, a local author who specializes in investigating hate crimes and other examples of rabid nonsense, has issued a “Media Revolt Manifesto.”

Like many of us, Neiwert’s mad as hell at the GOP cheerleading and pundit-blather that passes for “news” in today’s US mainstream media. Thankfully, he wants us to get beyond just complaining and protesting about it.

He sees rescuing US journalism as a multi-faceted, multi-fronted task. At the center of this new media paradigm will be the so-called “new media”:

“Blogs… can and should play the role abdicated by the mainstream media both in monitoring their own behavior and ethics, and in providing enough diversity that a wealth of viewpoints are given fair treatment, as in any healthy democratic society, and the public properly served.Blogs will not and cannot do the job alone, of course. The whole purpose of the revolt is to foster an environment in which mainstream journalists, from the lowly ink-stained wretch to the well-coiffed network anchor, are both allowed and positively encouraged to provide truthful and meaningful journalism that provides vital information to the public and does it responsibly and thoroughly. So that will mean recognizing and positively celebrating when superior journalism does its job well; such reporters and truth-tellers should be lauded, promoted, and in the end well remunerated for their work. It will mean channeling the marketplace to reward organizations that do their job well, too.

Finally, the Media Revolt will tap the energy of the citizenry through traditional means as well: Letter-writing campaigns, voting with our pocketbooks, organizing politics and funds on the ground — without which, in fact, anything that occurs on the Web may prove meaningless. The idea is to turn from simply critiquing the media to taking concrete action.”

Of course, some of Neiwert’s goals are easier to accomplish than others.

He’d like to see more websites that don’t just rehash or comment upon stories from the traditional media. He’d even like to see “the creation of viable newswire services beyond the current Asssociated Press monopoly.” But he acknowledges the difficulty of funding original reporting, particularly on the web (Salon’s bleeding red ink, and Slate survives as a Bill Gates vanity project).

So he also calls for a mass groundswell of support for breaking up the media conglomerates, bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, and otherwise reshaping the media we’ve already got from “a press corps addicted to trivia and inanity” into something that actually serves the needs of an active democracy.

“I think the tools for serious change are finally within our reach,” Neiwert says. Can it happen? Only if we all, those of you who read news and those of us who write it, do our part to help make it happen.

…and congrats to fellow Stranger refugee Charles D’Ambrosio, who appears in the current New Yorker with a short memoir about hopping freight trains. It’s a fun, beautiful essay. Read it now.

• Leonard Pitts asserts that the news media “have embarrassed themselves this week. They have rewritten history and slapped on a happy face.”
• William Greider, expectedly, calls Reagan “a fabulist” who “launched the great era of false triumphalism that continues to this day among American leadership.”
• In These Times quotes historian Wakter Karp describing Reagan as “Like Death not knowing itself”: “Yet what brutal truncation, what cutting back of the plant, produces that splendid bosom! What lopping away of knowledge, of curiosity, of truthfulness, to produce that public aura of candor and confidence. What lopping away of realism, foresight, even the very capacity to govern. Reagan is ignorant, deliberately, willfully ignorant, scarcely knows who works for him, rarely asks a penetrating question.”
• Randolph T. Holhut remembers the Reagan era as “an exercise in horror and frustration, but it turned out to just a warm-up to a presidency that is even worse.”
• Gary Dretzka insists that the also recently-deceased Ray Charles “probably did as much for lifting the veil of tyranny on imprisoned nations as Reagan….”
• And theater critic Frank Rich likens Bush to Reagan’s “Stunt Double”—”But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts to affect a jus’ folks geniality are invariably betrayed by nastiness whenever someone threatens to keep him from getting his own way.”

In the end, the corporate media’s Reagan hagiography, in which the smiling countenance was lauded and the cruel policies ignored, could be interpreted as little more than the corporate media’s (and even the “alternative” media’s) business as usual, in regard to dead famous people. The media tend to act as if someone’s media image was someone’s whole being. They don’t care what you did, just “who” you superficially were. Hence, Ken Kesey was principally described in most obits as a “sixties icon,” not as a novelist.

I began this thread a week ago by mentioning that I’d been reading a lot in self-help books about the importance of maintaining a positive attitude. I’ll end the thread by mentioning another concept in some of these books—the duality between “doing” (masculine/yang/western) and “being” (feminine/yin/eastern).

Some of the books’ authors claim modern society has overemphasized the “doing” aspect of human lives, and ignored the “being” aspect.

I’d say certain parts of modern society overemphasize a shallow slice of the “being” aspect, and always have. The current White House occupant didn’t get there due to anything he did (other than schmooze big campaign contributors), but because of what he “was”—his daddy’s boy. Over the centuries, too many incompetent people have attained too much power due to such trivial criteria.

In Reagan’s case, he worked and clawed his way up from Illinois radio and into the easy life. This self-made status made him a good figurehead spokesman for the silver-spoon set, a more effective one than either of the George Bushes. He attained the power to do good things for many people, but instead helped create the sleaze machine that’s still trashing this country and this planet.

We are all “doings” as well as “beings.” And both count.

• Joe Strupp, in Editor & Publisher, reminds us that Reagan’s not the first leader to have gotten undeservedly fawning media obits, and that Clinton actually had higher popularity-poll ratings than Reagan.
• Eric Pianin and Thomas B. Edsall note in the Wash. Post that the lavish praise given the man “obscures that much of Reagan’s record through eight years in office was highly controversial and intensified social and political divisions. Even now, nearly 16 years after he left office, some major interest groups and key voting blocs most adversely affected by Reagan policies remain bitter about his legacy.”
• The Village Voice‘s Tom Carson calls him “A noted fantasist… perhaps best remembered for the eight years he spent believing he ruled an entirely fictional United States. To the old trouper’s delight, this was a delusion shared by most of his compatriots, which is why his imaginary nation still subsumes ours to this day.”

After three days, I’ve decided I sorta like the new-look Seattle Times.

The three-deck headlines on most major articles are a convenient and nearly-poetic throwback to the old days of newspapering. The newly consistent headline style on brief stories makes it easy to find what you might want to read. The new text typeface seems larger, without significantly reducing the amount of verbiage per column-inch. Even the photo reproduction seems higher-res.

No major move in a corporate enterprise takes place out of context. There are reasons for revamps such as that of the Times. The paper’s trying to put its joint-operating-agreement “partner,” the Post-Intelligencer, out of business. It wants the local reading public to believe the Times deserves to be Seattle’s only big daily paper.

From the ’50s through the ’70s, the Times was the fat and unsassy voice of the local business establishment, as dull as dishwater and as awkward as a bad karaoke singer. Redesigns in 1980 and 1992, and the JOA’s launch in 1983, put the paper on the road to higher readability. Now, it’s a real newspaper again. (I still don’t want it to become the only paper in town, though.)

…“the FCC should die.”

• Christopher Hitchens, making a sudden return to “contrarian” status after his prowar rallying last year, writes at Slate that “Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn’t like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see.”
• Kevin Brennan reminds us that Reagan didn’t defeat the USSR; it failed on its own accord, and in spite of the neocons’ faulty “intelligence” that exaggerated the Russkies’ economic/military strength for political reasons.
• UK historian Archie Brown teaches that the Soviet dissilusion was one of the most peaceful transitions of power ever seen in a major country, and was caused almost entirely by the central government’s calcification under power-politics gamery.
• MIchael Bronski claims Reagan was just as insensitive about AIDS as the James Brolin TV movie claimed he’d been.
• Bill Mon claims, “He was, for all his cornball folksiness, the ultimate class warrior, or class front man, anyway.”
• Juan Cole asserts that “Reagan’s policies thus bequeathed to us the major problems we now have in the world, including a militant Islamist International whose skills were honed in Afghanistan with Reagan’s blessing and monetary support; and a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which the Reagan administration in some cases actually encouraged behind the scenes for short-term policy reasons. His aggressive foreign policy orientation has been revived and expanded, making the US into a neocolonial power in the Middle East. Reagan’s gutting of the unions and attempt to remove social supports for the poor and the middle class has contributed to the creation of an America where most people barely get by while government programs that could help create wealth are destroyed.”
• And Phil Gasper calls Reagan a “venal and vicious man, who was happy to slash workers’ wages, see families thrown onto the street, support sadistic death squads and bomb other countries, if this was in the interests of the American ruling class.”

(Stanislaw Lem, Poland’s greatest speculative-fiction export, from One Human Minute (1986)):

“The mass media, it said, are never completely objective. In fact, the pattern is like this: the worse the news in the local press, the more freedom there is and the better conditions are in the society that prints it. If journalists are wringing their hands, tearing their hair, predicting the end, and bewailing imminent ruin, then the streets are rivers of glistening cars, the store windows are packed with delicacies, everyone walks around tanned and rosy-cheeked, and a handcuffed wretch brought to prison at gunpoint is harder to find than a diamond in the gutter. And vice versa: where prisons are overcrowded, where gloom and fear prevail, where poverty is terrible, one usually reads—in the papers—news that is cheerful, uplifting, determinedly joyous (telling you that you had better participate in the general happiness), and syrupy press releases paint life in rainbow colors (except that it is a rainbow that will shine—but not just yet).”

Finally saw a complete episode of American Idol. Like most “reality” shows, it constructs a very specific, detailed fictional “reality.” This particular show’s fabulist conceit is that the banal rehashing of ’70s soul music is, and always has been, the main and only form of popular vocal music in the U.S.

A few years back, some baby-boomer intellectual wrote a book in which she whined about Those Kids Today, whose music didn’t got the same soul as that old time rock n’ roll. I don’t know if that author’s an Idol viewer, but the show’s conceit might fit her idea of a musical utopia, in a “be careful what you wish for” way.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, KOMO-TV anchordude Dan Lewis has started each 11 p.m. newscast on the station’s roof. This serves no journalistic purpose. I can only imagine three non-journalistic purposes for the ongoing stunt:

• To make the broadcast seem Important and Relevant, even though it’s usually a rehash of the most gruesome personal events already exploited at 5 and 6:30;
• To show off how Lewis’s carefully sculpted hair can remain perfectly in place, no matter what the weather;
• To let Lewis repeatedly drop the name “Fisher Plaza,” the station owners’ block-long, massively under-occupied office development.

…almost-vaguely-sort-of, for some of its past pro-war cheerleading: “…We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been.”

Elsewhere on the same shovelware site, our ol’ pal and Oly indie-pop legend Lois Maffeo defends the right of oldsters such as herself to keep going to rock shows, and the right of youngsters to make their own music even if the oldsters don’t approve. (Here’s the original essay to which Maffeo’s responding.)