IN ANOTHER EXAMPLE of the kind of story we’d see more of if there really was a “liberal media” in this country, the ever-pesky UK Guardian has a huge would-be expose on new, more easily-corruptible US voting machines running Windows 2000.

The NYU professor and longtime showbiz-basher passed away last Sunday, but (perhaps appropriately, given his contempt for all things media-esque) the papers didn’t mention it until Thursday.

The following is not intended as a “flame” message, but I always felt frustrated at Neil Postman’s writings. He said he wanted people to avoid deceptively simple ideas, but his books were full of those.

In the past, I’d publicly belittled Postman as a grumpy ol’ baby-boomer elistist of a character type I used to know in college, whose examples were always stringy-bearded, always disdainful of anything in culture or entertainment that didn’t remind them of The Late Sixties, and always contemptuous of anyone who dared commit the mortal sin of being younger than them.

This past February, some of you might recall, I was asked to join a panel discussion at the Tacoma Public Library entitled, “Are We Amusing Ourselves To Death?” (from the title of Postman’s best-known book). I found myself essentially arguing against the premise, vs. a stringy-bearded baby-boomer film critic who essentially argued that anyone whose lifestyle or demographics were different from his was automatically a dumb mainstream dupe.

I argued, and would still argue, that popular culture is not intrinsically evil (and neither are heterosexuality, meat, or non-co-op grocery stores). I would also argue that the world situation is not nearly as one-dimensionally simplistic as Postman claimed it to be (even while he denounced the masses’ excess simplicity). The books of his that I’d read were full of a priori arguments, gross overgeneralizations, ageisms, sexisms, and us-vs.-them dichotomies (although, like all my stringy-bearded professors, Postman often said “us” when he really meant to say “them”; when he wrote “we,” you could tell he meant “all those ignorami out there in dorky mainstream America who don’t know what we know and wouldn’t understand it if they heard it”).

Some of you reading this might imagine that I must be a right-winger who disliked Postman as a left-winger. NO, NO, NO. I believe Postman wasn’t too radical, he was too conservative. He was too comfortable in his hermetically-sealed ideology. As far as I’ve been able to determine, he never acknowledged that life, politics, et al. are complex, and that our schoolchildren need to learn to deal with these complexities; that there are more than two sides to most issues, and that there are a lot more than just two kinds of people in this country.

If I can now say something positive on Postman’s behalf, it’s that, at times, he did proclaim the need for critical thinking, even if he insufficiently practiced his own prescription.

I’M COMING TO LOVE the Chicago Cubs’ playoff baseball adventure, particularly the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the Tribune Co.-owned Cubs. One feature article asks seriously, “Is it OK to pray for the Cubs?” The paper’s website home page also includes a Wrigley Field photolog, including a shot of a guy bearing a banner reading, “CUBS IN OCT. TEMP IN HELL: 32F.”

None of this praise, natch, is meant to slight Wednesday’s other baseball-playoff triumph, the Boston Red Sox’s righteous thrashing of the loathed Yankees.

SOME MORE REASONS TO KEEP THE P-I IN BUSINESS:

• Its unexpected, back-of-the-sports-section history lesson about the day legendary Nat-Am Chief Joseph attended a UW football game.
• Its tell-all headline about the latest city-budget mess, “Cut somewhere else, everyone tells council.”

HERE’S A QUICK GUIDE to one of the most-used conservative-media attack schticks.

POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST JOHN LEVESQUE points out the central irony of the P-I‘s strategy in trying to preserve the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times: “The paper that wants to put the Post-Intelligencer out of business is responsible for selling ads in the Post-Intelligencer.“

To restate the obvious: This marriage cannot be saved.

Last month, the P-I won the first round of courtroom battles over keeping the JOA. The Times wants to kill the agreement and, at the same time, the P-I. The P-I claims it can’t survive without the JOA, in which its printing, sales, delivery, and PR functions (everything except the paper’s editorial content) is contracted to the Times. Given the lousy job the Times has done (deliberately or otherwise) at maintaining the P-I‘s ad volume and subscriber base, I’d say the P-I can’t survive with the JOA.

Seattle still needs two dailies. It needs two separate dailies.

The best-case scenario for settling this flap would be a compromise court settlement, in which the P-I gets its own sales force again, while the Times still prints and delivers both papers until new arrangements are made (such as the Times selling its job-printing subsidiary in Tukwila, Rotary Offset Press, to the P-I). But don’t expect such a rational move from a Times management out for blood.

Underlying the whole dispute, but not overtly mentioned by either party to it: The fact that the traditional big American daily paper is an industrial-age anachronism. As I mentioned around the time the Seattle dailies went on strike three years ago, I believe there is a way for newspapers to become more competitive, with one another and with other info/advertising media–if they became leaner and more specialized, and established a more direct rapport with their readership (without necessarily turning to Fox-esque sleaze).

If the P-I does succumb to the current courtroom wars, and even if it doesn’t, there’s a great opportunity to create a new kind of newspaper for a new media age. Nothing like this has been tried in the U.S. since USA Today was first formulated 20 years ago.

Wanna help create it? Lemme know.

Read, and be haunted by, The Onion’s spoof of Bush’s inaguration speech: “Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over.”

…but yr. web-editor just might (repeat, might) have had either a panic attack or a “silent” heart attack late Monday night.

It was at the long-belated end of an extremely long and extremely stressful day, in which I’d found myself gasping for breath to the point of giggling. By the time I finally got home around 11:30, I felt intense pain in my lower abdomen and left shoulder (but not further down either arm). I tried to relax enough to sleep, but only kept getting more tense. At the episode’s nadir, I had to fight to breathe and felt searing pain when I did.

But then I finally did relax enough to sleep, which I did until 2 p.m. Tuesday. Since then, I’ve continued to maintain my regular activities (applying for jobs, writing, schmoozing, shopping). But some shoulder pain has remained, and intense headaches have come and gone.

At no point in any of this has my heartbeat felt too slow, too fast, or erratic.

I still don’t know what happenned. I might not until sometime next week. But for now, I’m trying to take things easy. So I might not see y’all at Bumbershoot ’03. But please rest assured I’m alive and more-or-less well now.

SO AT THE AGE OF approximately 46 and a half, I’ve finally had an intimation of mortality. Until this week, I’d been holding onto the pseudo-invulnerability of youth all this time. Long-term friends have gone bald, had kids, undergone nasty divorces, won Emmys or Pulitzers, or moved to Germany. A few have passed on, due to everything from suicide and drugs to cancer and HIV. Others have valiantly fought back in the face of doom and become stronger, wiser people.

I never wanted to become middle aged. I’d always associated it with those annoying guys whose lives had essentially ended at the end of The Sixties, and who ever since wouldn’t stop alleging that Their Generation was some sort of superior species. I’d planned to stay sprightly and open to new ideas. Either that or become an unabashed crochety old geezer. (My short-lived Tablet column was even titled Back In My Day, Sonny.)

Nowadays, there are at least some role models out there for ’80s-generation fellas growing older, if not gracefully, at least forcefully. Elvis Costello, and to a lesser extent Joe Jackson, are making some of the most provocative music of their careers. Locally, so are Kim Warnick (in Visqueen) and Scott McCaughey (in the Minus Five). Peter Bagge’s comics and Charles Peterson’s photographs keep getting better.

This time has not come for me to, as Charles Aznavour sang, “pay for yesterday when I was young.” It is time for me to start seriously considering what I wanna really, really do with what I fully expect to be the many, many more years I’ve got.

…but largely irrelevant news stories, it’s hard to find a better topic than a sports coach getting fired over a scandal that has little or nothing to do with his/her job performance.

Such was the case last month with ex-WSU football coach Mike Price, who was hired by Alabama then promptly fired after he spent a lost weekend with a Florida exotic dancer.

Such is also the case with now-ex-UW football coach Rick Neuheisel, canned this week after four years on the job. The UW didn’t dump him when word got out about recruiting irregularities at his former employer, Colorado. The UW didn’t dump him when he tried to get hired by the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers and didn’t bother telling his current employers. The UW initially didn’t dump him when somebody snitched that he’d been betting on (non-UW) college basketball games. But athletic director Barbara Hedges later changed her mind, presumably after consulting with some of the big-money boosters whose donations help keep the Huskies among the sport’s most prominent programs.

(The above link also includes a further link to a .pdf graphic showing all the UW football coaches since 1908!)

It’s the final cue for David Brinkley, TV news legend/crank and longtime working partner of ex-Seattleite (and Frances Farmer ex-boyfriend) Chet Huntley.

MEANWHILE, one of Brinkley’s ex-colleagues Bill Moyers recently gave a speech in DC, in which he lambasted “the new corporate aristocracy, as privileged a class as we have seen since the plantation owners of antebellum America and the court of Louis IV,” and in which he also called upon all concerned citizens to fight back for the true American ideals:

“…that a Social Security card is not a private portfolio statement but a membership ticket in a society where we all contribute to a common treasury so that none need face the indignities of poverty in old age without that help. That tax evasion is not a form of conserving investment capital but a brazen abandonment of responsibility to the country. That income inequality is not a sign of freedom-of-opportunity at work, because if it persists and grows, then unless you believe that some people are naturally born to ride and some to wear saddles, it’s a sign that opportunity is less than equal. That self-interest is a great motivator for production and progress, but is amoral unless contained within the framework of community. That the rich have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more homes, vacations, gadgets and gizmos, but they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else. That public services, when privatized, serve only those who can afford them and weaken the sense that we all rise and fall together as “one nation, indivisible.” That concentration in the production of goods may sometimes be useful and efficient, but monopoly over the dissemination of ideas is evil. That prosperity requires good wages and benefits for workers. And that our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive “half slave and half free” – and that keeping it from becoming all oligarchy is steady work – our work.”

Among the seminar speeches and dry-research releases put forth at the recent newspaper-biz convention in Seattle was one study that claimed the elusive youth market started reading daily papers more often during the Iraq war, but didn’t stick with the habit. The trade mag Editor & Publisher quoted the survey company’s boss John Lavine as saying:

“Coffee in a can is a dead ringer for where newspapers were: It was a mature product, it was dying, everybody said its time was over — and then Starbucks came along.”

We’ve already written that the current push by the Seattle Times to kill its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer, and by extension to kill the P-I itself, could instead be an opportunity to reinvigorate the P-I as a truly independent paper, and by extension to revive the newspaper biz.

I’m convinced it can be done. Yes, a JOA-less P-I would need to get its own ad sellers and delivery vans, and either buy or hire printing presses. Getting the financing for such a venture just might be easier if it were for a new paper for a new era, something this country hasn’t really seen since USA Today first targeted the everywhere/nowhere of shopping malls and airports 21 years ago.

A post-JOA P-I, or an all-new paper that could be launched in the wake of the current JOA mess, could be a paper devised from scratch to meet the ink-on-paper needs of the Internet age. It could be neither old-American-journalism boredom nor Murdoch sleaze, but something lively and forward-looking and written to be read.

I’ve freelanced in the past for the Seattle Times, and hope to do so again. But that doesn’t mean I want it to succeed at its current drive to become a true monopoly paper.

I opposed the original joint operating agreement between the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, which took effect 20 years ago this month. Unlike the JOAs in some two-paper towns, which set up a joint-venture agency to handle the papers’ non-news operations (sales, printing, distro, promotion, etc.), the Seattle JOA put both papers’ fates squarely under the Times’ control. The Times was free to undersell the P-I to subscribers and advertisers alike, or to be laggardly about trucking the P-I off to outlying corners of the region. All of which it’s been accused of doing at one time or another.

The 1999 revision to the JOA only increased the Times’ capacity for mischief. When the World Wide Web came along, the Times ruled that a P-I website would fall under the promotional duties ascribed under the original JOA’s terms to the Times. In other words, the Times got to choose what kind of website the P-I could have, and naturally chose a bare-bones PR page without any actual news items. In return for the right to put its full text online (and a slightly higher share of the JOA’s proceeds), the P-I agreed to a revised JOA that would allow the Times to (1) come out in the morning, and (2) invoke an escape clause should it report three consecutive money-losing years.

The latter clause, in retrospect, was a lot like the escape clause former Mariners owner George Argyros demanded from King County in the mid-’80s. Argyros claimed, and the Times and P-I editorially agreed, that the only way to keep the M’s in Seattle was to rewrite the team’s Kingdome lease so Argyros could more easily move the team to Tampa. (Really!) Argyros got his new lease, then promptly attempted to invoke his bug-out option at his first contractual opportunity; the team’s future wasn’t secured until the 1992 sale to the Nintendo-led group that still owns it today.

Similarly, the Times took an agreement that was ostensibly meant to keep both papers in business, and has reconfigured, interpreted, and exploited it in order to try to kill the P-I. The Hearst Corp., which has owned the P-I since 1921 while allowing so many of its other once-mighty dailies to die over the decades, is taking the whole mess to court.

It could end up in any number of ways. Times bossman Frank Blethen says he wants the Times to emerge alone from the fray, and he insists it’ll do so with his family still in charge. But there could conceivably also be a full merger of the papers into one lumbering goliath, or a Hearst buyout of the Times.

What nobody’s openly considering is a return to full competition, with Hearst or some future P-I owner amassing a separate load of presses, trucks, and ad sellers.

But that’s what I’d like to see.

It’d be a perfect opportunity to try and re-invent daily newspapers for the Internet age, when the tiny-print items that have continued to make dailies essential for urban society are more handily available online (movie times, stock prices, sports stats, want ads). In the TV age, dailies survived (albeit in consolidated, monopolized forms in most cities) as the only place you could get such data. With that advantage gone, what would a paper need? Perhaps a strong aesthetic, a sense of the zeitgeist, a coherent package of articles and pictures that at least pretends to try and make sense of a crazy world.

That’s where the P-I, the closest thing the Northwest has to a progressive daily, shines best. Its livelier copywriting and more aggressive feature coverage make it a more intriguing read than the Times has ever been (though both papers were sufficiently compliant suckers for the Bushies’ propaganda massages this past year).

I prefer the P-I as a news product, but I want both papers to live. Any industry that can’t figure out how to make that happen ain’t much of an industry.

…there’s been another sign of semi-intelligent life on the WSJ editorial page—Daniel Johnson’s piece recommending that occupied Iraq be put through a process similar to the post-WWII “de-Nazification” of western Europe. That’s something else we could use here. I invite all of you to email your suggestions about just how aw the U.S. could be successfully de-Reaganized.

…has become a peurile playpen for W.’s infantile power-suckups; unchallenging and unreadable except as a cheap energy-boost (if you already agree with those guys) or a cheap laff (if you don’t). So it’s surprising to find something intelligent there, such as Stanley Kurtz’s longish peace detailing what it might take to bring real democracy to Iraq. Kurtz’s scenario involve supporting many of the same institutions (especially schools that teach critical thinking instead of mere rote memorization) the GOP sleazemongers are systematically out to destroy over here.

This, of course, begs the question of what needs to be done to establish real democracy in the U.S. Several egghead theorists have written long, near-impenetrable tomes on the topic. I hope to read some of them in the next couple weeks and get back to you.

HAROLD MEYERSON ponders whether the current White House occupant might be the “most dangerous president ever…”

…WHILE ARIANNA HUFFINGTON explains “Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right.”

…things to say about this current mess, I’ve gone back to a couple of the past century’s most famous social thinkers. So have some other present-day commentators.

I’m about a third of the way through a dog-eared used paperback copy of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. The pop-critic’s best known “serious” book popularized the catch phrases “the medium is the message” and “global village.” But it also presented a detailed, reasonably coherent worldview, built around the human senses and how various generations of media effect/extend/attack/desensitize/alter them. He claimed it was the phonetic alphabet, more than roads or weapons or force of will, that brought about the Roman Empire, and by extension the later western powers’ conquests around the world. My the mid-20th century (the book came out in ’64; he was working on it as early as ’59), the “cool medium” of TV (as defined by the degree of the audience’s attention and involvement) was overtaking such “hot media” as radio and movies. This, McLuhan claimed, was starting to change North American society’s whole perceptions and attitudes.

A recent symposium in NYC discussed how these and other McLuhan theories could be used to try to make sense of the current nonsense.

Certainly, the war is the ultimate example of what later PoMo media theorists called “The Spectacle.” It’s both a real war with real death and a media event made with an eye toward home-front PR. TV has become a “hotter” medium since McLuhan’s time (more detailed, less aloof), and live war coverage is “hotter” still. Sleaze-talk radio, the Bushies’ favorite medium, is ultra “hot” by McLuhan’s definition: It not only gives a dumbed-down, one-sided worldview, it orders its listeners precisely how to respond—with anti-intellectual, passive-aggressive obedience.

I’ve previously referred to demagogue radio as a 24-hour version of the “Two-Minutes Hate” scene in George Orwell’s 1984. Lots of folk have noticed the increasing parallels between Orwell’s world and ours. Among them: A new satirical student group, Students for an Orwellian Society. (Slogan: “Because 2003 is 19 years too late.”)

Certainly we’ve got a milieu of economic catastrophe for all but the members of the “inner party,” a regime that loves war, loathes sex, vilifies rational thought, and thrives on fear. The regime wants total knowledge and control of every citizen’s thoughts, words, and deeds. It preaches eternal self-sacrifice for the masses but reserves untold priviliges for itself. Its media minions disseminate nonstop war “coverage,” deliberate detailed lies, exhortations toward “patriotic” fervor, and demonizations against all perceived opponents.

But today’s Republican INGSOC doesn’t yet have the total power its agenda ultimately requires. It might never attain that total power. In the Internet age, information and communication may be unstoppably diffuse, despite the monopolistic efforts of Fox and Clear Channel. Neotribalism, multiculturalism, and the media’s own push toward fractured demographics mean there’s no undifferentiated mass of “proles” to be easily controlled.

But a gang that can’t get total power can still inflict a lot of damage trying to get it.