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HERE’S YET ANOTHER, more lucid and better argued, critique of the US media, by the website most learned Bush-opponents have adopted as their favorite source for US government news—the UK paper The Guardian.
My last regular textual contribution to The Stranger, the Obits column, has been suspended as of three weeks ago. It might come back later, should the paper’s ad volume go back up.
THE MUCH BETTER NEWS: The new-look print MISC is finally ready, and should be back from the printer any day now.
It’s a regular-magazine sized,, 48-page volume just packed with exciting stuff to read and/or look at.
It’s the “Hipster Parents & Swingin’ Kids” issue. “Theme” stories include:
But that’s not all! The issue also contains these other great features:
And that’s still not all! There’s also news briefs, Ms. MISC, a David Lasky comic, a photo essay about autumn in the city, a funny In/Out list, a junk food review, recommendations of books, videos, and CDs, and even a few scattered typographical errors (can you find them all?).
The splendiforous MISC #118 will be available at select retail outlets starting in mid-January for a mere $3.95 US; or you can order it by sending a check or money order to MISC, 1400 Hubbell Place, #1314, Seattle WA 98101.
…a few items below this one, here’s a piece of more serious media criticism (actually a review of a book of media criticism). The big point here: Presidential campaign reporters got stuck on a few one-note characterizations (such as Gore as an exaggerator), then shoehorned everything they saw to fit these stereotypes.
…of lefty “media criticism.”
You’ll notice there’s no actual mention of anything any newspaper published, just a list of topics critique author Alan Miller Kunerth believes are important but hasn’t seen in the papers. Kunerth doesn’t bother to report these stories himself; he merely complains that nobody else has.
(Kunerth’s title, “The Decline of Newspaper Journalism,” implies there’d been some past Golden Age when the regular news sections of big-city dailies gave the kind of analytical, conclusion-drawing, progressive-minded work Kunerth doesn’t see there today. I’m not so sure most big US papers ever did a whole lot of that.)
While Kunerth’s piece was posted at commondreams.org, it’s of the same shtick as that perfected by Fairness And Accuracy in Reporting: Tease your readers with the hint that you know about some Really Big Shit the bigtime papers won’t tell you about, then rant on and on about why the bigtime papers won’t tell it, but never get around to yourself actually telling your readers just what this Really Big Shit is.
When I said a few weeks ago that this country really didn’t have a “liberal media” and could use one, this was part of what I meant. We need a more empowered, more proactive, less defeatist shtick than this. We need writers (on websites, in ground-level zines, and elsewhere) who are willing to tell what they believe the Really Big Shit to be; to go beyond the whine and actually make the kind of media they want to exist.
FOR SEEMINGLY EVER, the right-wing sleaze machine has dismissed liberals and progressives as naysayers, doomsdayers, and what Spiro Agnew called “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Commentator Jeff Madrick opts to disagree. He claims the politicians who claim there are inevitable limits to what we can do for our people and our land, who dismiss as unviable any attempts to improve the lot of the nonrich, are the real pessimists. Those of us who believe this nation must and can do better are the real optimists.
In this regard, the spring print MISC will be all about the “Positive/Negative and Other Opposites.” We’ve interviewed a self-help promoter about thinking your way to a better life. We’re going to interview an author-editor who wants leftists to focus more on promoting positive solutions, rather than settling for protesting and complaining. A metaphysical expert’s tentatively slated to write a piece about the “love based reality” vs. the “fear based reality.”
As usual, your contributions are also most welcome. Email your ideas now.
And the winter print MISC is just a few pages from completion and should be in subscribers’ mailboxes and at select retail outlets any week now.
One thing we’ve learned from the five-month stretch it took to make this “quarterly”: Yr. humble editor can no longer do the whole job. So we could really use more artists, designers, ad sellers and biz-side folks, not just writers. Wanna help out: Contact the email addy above.
First, thanx to those who braved the onset of autumnal rains to attend the li’l “weblogs: what the heck do they all mean?” panel Thursday night. Alas, Rebecca Blood called in sick and couldn’t show. But the rest of us had a fab time and even attained a couple of insights about this whole web-writing phenom.
Since the evening had been organized under the auspices of the Society of Professional Journalists, a major discussion theme concerned whether blogging constituted a threat to “traditional” journalism. I, for one, said no.
For one thing, many blog-type sites are full of links to stories on “traditional” newspapers’ and TV stations’ sites, and therefore help those sites attract readers.
For another thing, the “blog” tag encompasses a staggering array of different types of sites. Within the basic premise of chronological, scrolling text bits, different blogs have different proportions of links to other sites’ stuff (accompanied by longer or shorter intros to those links), discussion-board entries, personal observations, original and/or found graphics, and, yes, actual research- and interview-based journalism—all on a much wider range of topics, both “public” and “private,” than any one print publication could ever fit in.
My own site is organized the way my old print column was, as an amalgam of longish and shortish items expressing facets of an overarching worldview. It is, as I’ve always said, a classic journalistic format.
The panel’s moderator, Alan Boyle, is the author of a blog that’s part of a “traditional” journalism site (MSNBC). His mix includes three-dot-column type items, links to recommended stuff on other sites, emailed reader responses to previous items on the blog and on other MSNBC.com pages, and longish essays and news pieces with links added. The whole olio is bound together aesthetically by Boyle’s writing style and by his curatorial sense for topic- and link-picking.
Boyle’s page proves a blog can be maintained under the auspices of a big institution, and can hew to the legal/ethical rules of professional journalism, while also providing the personal “voice” that keeps readers clicking in.
Here we get to the big thing that differentiates blogging from corporate journalistic editing.
Most daily papers and TV news operations (and, to a lesser extent, radio news operations and news magazines) have tried for half a century to maintain faceless, institutional images. A big-city, chain-owned paper is written in an impersonal style, and presents a mix of what its editorial bureaucracy thinks you want to read and what its publishing bureaucracy wants to tell you (which is usually whatever the local business leaders want you to believe).
It didn’t use to always be this way. As any glance at a typical (i.e., non-NY Times paper from before 1950 can show you, papers used to know the value of a more direct rapport with readers. Writers and editors had more leeway to include emotions, passions, wordplay, and all the other time-honored techniques of effective storytelling. The papers themselves often had well-defined, well-expressed points of view that weren’t confined to one page. (Granted, most of those points of view were at least as reactionary as those on today’s talk radio, but at least you knew where they stood.)
Old-time radio had its own individualistic commentators. Lowell Thomas, Walter Winchell, and Louella Parsons entertained as they informed. Edward R. Murrow and Charles Collingwood provided extremely personal accounts of the stories they told, while holding to standards of accuracy and fairness.
The best, most “professional” blog sites combine this storytelling sense with the dynamic immediacy of the web. They represent not a threat to “real” journalism but the rediscovery of values the profession has lost.
How this might relate to the recent elections: There’s not much of a “liberal news media” these days, despite what the right-wing demagogues keep screeching. There’s the far-right conservative media, and the near-right corporate media. Democrats, especially progressive Democrats, are routinely ignored, dismissed, or directly vilified in both media camps, with relatively few opportunities to speak for themselves.
We need to build a for-real “liberal media” camp. One that goes beyond a few little magazines that circulate in ivory towers or intellectual ghettos. One that speaks to larger swaths of the populace offering agendas for empowerment, progress, justice, equality, liberty, and opportunity. The corporate media won’t, and more importantly can’t, do this.
Individual, first-person blogs can’t do it all either. No one person can cover everything (or even link to everything). No all-volunteer operation (which almost all blogs are) can fully do the same job as full-time researchers and interviewers.
But the aforementioned values of blogging—of personable storytellers, regularly delivering well-selected info, in digestible chunks, to an attentive and involved readership—can form the essential foundation of any new progressive communication outlets.
You can see yr. humble web editor this Thurs. evening at a Society of Professional Journalists gabfest, Invasion of the Bloggers. Also on the dais will be three other prolific online scribes—Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Glenn Fleishman, and Rebecca Blood.
It all goes down at 7 p.m. in the Seattle Times auditorium on Fairview Avenue (north of John Street, south of Hooters). There’s no admission fee, so be there or be rhomboid.
…not included on the station’s website, claims Seattle’s second (and Portland’s first) in the number of unmarried living-together couples. The news item claims one in four Seatown pairs haven’t bothered to get the legal certificate of wedlock, compared with one in ten nationally. The station didn’t say whether the region’s lousy economy (which causes folks to delay or forego all sorts of commitments) might have something to do with it.
A NEW REPORT ranks different countries on their relative freedom of the press. The U.S. ranks 19th of some 130 countries on the list, behind Costa Rica and Slovenia. Canada’s in the #5 slot.
…there are now weird-news sites just for people who care about specific types of weird news. One example: A page of nothing but stories about people struck by lightning.
Yr. humble web editor’s gonna be a panelist at a Society of Professional Journalists gabfest, Invasion of the Bloggers. Also on the dais will be three other prolific online scribes—Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Glenn Fleishman, and Rebecca Blood.
It all goes down on Thursday, Nov. 7, 7 p.m. in the Seattle Times auditorium on Fairview Avenue (north of John Street, south of Hooters). There’s no admission fee, so I fully expect everyone within the sound of my typing to get there.
LAST SUNDAY IN THIS SPACE, I discussed the value of continuing to read local newspapers, not just the NY Times.
But I also see value in trudging one’s way thru the Cadillac of American newspapers (i.e., it’s bigger than the others and weighted down with more luxury features, though it’s still built on the same Chevy drive train).
F’rinstance, Paul Krugman’s Sunday magazine section think-piece on America’s immensely growing economic inequality, and how it’s polluted politics, health care, foreign policy, social discourse, etc. etc.
It’s good to see something this honest in a paper that’s long (actually, just about always) been the voice of the economic elite. (I vaguely remember a writer (I don’t remember who it was) complaining a year ago that the NY Times Sunday magazine section’s editors rejected a piece he’d written about the homeless, asking him to make it more upscale.)
The backward distribution-O-wealth toward an increasingly out-of-touch Overclass isn’t exactly an untold story. But it is undertold. Or rather, when it is told it’s in a can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees manner.
Anyone who regularly peruses the “alternative” press knows about the symptoms of an Overclass economy:
A Republican Party whose “ideology” is just a ramshackle structure of excuses for big-money butt kissing and power-grabbing.
A “New” Democratic Party concerned solely with preserving its own institutional existence, by striving to become just as big-money-friendly as the Republicans.
A “conservatism” prescribing authoritarian brutality to the downscale, libertine excess to the upscale.
A “liberalism” with plenty to say about recycling but little to say about luxury lifestyles that produce all those wastes; that abstractly worships M.L. King as a courageous leader (a sort-of civil-rights CEO) but ignores most of the issues he fought for; whose favorite “minorities” are upscale white women and upscale white gays.
A ‘radicalism” centered parimarily around issues friendly to the “rebel” kids from affluent families (the fates of plants, animals, and “exotic” humans who conveniently don’t live on the same continent).
A corporate society built not around making stuff, or even around profitably selling stuff, but around supporting the insatiable material demands of top executives by propping up the Almighty Stock Price.
An urban environment defiled by smoggy SUVs.
A suburban environment defiled by minimansions, ever larger and ever further apart.
A dumbed-down “mainstream” media in which only the big-money boys’ side of any issue gets mentioned, in between lengthy pieces about entertainment celebrities.
A dumbed-down “alternative” media in which politics is reduced to demographic target marketing (“Oh how much more englightened we are than those mainstream dorks”), in between lengthy stories about “alternative” entertainment celebrities.
A “digital age” that was aggressively hyped as a tool for expression, empowerment, and equility; but which, in its pre-stock-crash form, generated even more obscene levels of stock-price and luxury-lifestyle nonsense, contributing to real-estate hyperinflation and massive demographic cleansing in many cities.
The Overclass economy might have carried the seeds of its own fall from grace. Between certain CEO scandals and a depression that’s made millions aware of their own precarious fiscal states, it’s at least a little harder this year to make excuses for giving the ultra-rich every damned thing they want.
But a fall from grace ain’t the same thing as a fall.
The U.S. economy might not currently even know how to reform itself toward greater equity, despite experts’ warnings that middle-class consumer confidence might be the only way out of this slump.
Most politicians are deathly afraid of doing anything that might threaten big-money campaign donations.
Most media outlets don’t even want to think of showing or printing anything that would tarnish the upscale image they sell to advertisers. (When I interviewed for a job at the short-lived local mag Metropolitan Weekly, the publisher’s first statement was the minimum average income he wanted his readers to have.)
No, the way out of our socio-political-economic mess won’t come from the systems and institutions that helped us get into the mess.
It can only come by developing viable, inclusive, true alternatives to those systems and institutions; forcing those systems and institutions to adapt or die.
…but Rupert Murdoch’s rabid-right UK tabloids have practiced a time-worn way to dismiss political opposition: treat it as a mere fashion fad. Hence, a pictorial on how to dress up just like a hip young anarchist.
…continues abroad.
Last year, we praised Britain’s ITV network for its heritage of decentralized and impermanent authority. Historically, ITV was “owned” by a regulatory commission, which licensed local network-affiliate stations for multi-year contracts that weren’t always renewed. The local stations produced the shows and sold the ads, under the regulator’s heavy guidelines. The bigger-market stations (including the two that split the London franchise by days of the week) had more opportunities to put shows into the network schedule. But no one company controlled the network or its schedule.
The result was a diffuse system with different “voices” and different ideas on what would make a good and/or popular show. It brought forth countless small-screen classics; including Coronation Street, The Avengers, Ready Steady Go!, The Saint, Thunderbirds, The Prisoner, The Muppet Show, This Is Tom Jones, Upstairs Downstairs, Benny Hill, Danger Mouse, Brideshead Revisited, Inspector Morse, and the original versions of Three’s Company and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
That all began to change in the Thatcher years. The 11 ITV stations in England and Wales got bought up by two companies. Now those two are merging, forming a behemoth that will control half the UK’s TV ad revenues–at least until “synergy”-obsessed mismanagement drives more viewers to other broadcast, cable, and satellite outlets.
By the way, if you click on the above link and you live in the US or Canada, you’re commiting some kind of intellectual-property crime. To which I naturally say go for it. (Another item about the story is at this link.)
UNLIKE APPARENTLY MANY OF YOU, I still believe in reading local newspapers. Sure, the NY Times has lotsa pretty real-estate ads for fantasy palatial mansions, but there’s still tons to be said for reading up about your own place.
There’s also the fun tea-leaf-gazing ritual of discerning what gets into the paper and why. F’rinstance, the Sunday SeaTimes’s virulent anti-monorail editorial and the accompanying, heavily inane, editorial cartoon by the paper’s new staff art-hack Eric Devericks. Devericks, like his P-I counterpart David Horsey, can be sort-of amusing when attacking some targets, but astoundingly unfunny and uncreative when called upon to visualize an editorial stance dictated by the publisher, who in turn probably got his marching orders from the Downtown Seattle Association and/or Washington Alliance for Business.
In this case, Devericks’s drawing portrays a quartet (actual) nuts, spouting the anti-monorail campaign’s shameless distortions of the pro-monorail campaign’s arguments. Being mere nuts, they have no facial expressions or body language. There’s no personality, no artistry, not even any vitriol.
The Oregonian once had an even duller cartoonist, an old guy with the perfectly geezeroid name of Art Bimrose. His idea of illustrating an idea was invariably to depict a seersucker-suited guy pointing to a newspaper headline and either smiling or frowning.
But Bimrose was consistently dull, day after day. Horsey and Devericks are selectively mediocre. When they draw a dud, you can be fairly sure they’re following orders—even, just perhaps, attempting to sabotage their assigned opinions by depicting them as opinions with which only a witless geezer would agree.
Elsewhere in that same edition, human-interest columnist Jerry Large ran selected, edited letters responding to a prior piece of his, which pondered whether Seattle was a good place for African-Americans to move to.
Large cleverly didn’t ask whether the town was merely “tolerant of diversity,” a phrase which usually refers to upscale white people’s images of their own smug perfection. No, Large wanted to hear from actual black people about their own actual experiences across the whole spectrum of life’s needs (love, career, family, community, finding a decent BBQ place, etc.).
Either by his own drive to be fair-n’-balanced or by his editors’ wish to preserve the “tolerant” civic image, Large made sure to include several letters from people who liked it here. These letters tended to list safe, “tolerance”-type reasons. The negative letters were more passionate. Their arguments tended toward a few main areas:
In my prior refutation of white “this town sucks” whiners, I’d said Seattle indeed is a real city, with lots to offer. But it’d have even more to offer with more Af-Ams around, what with all their immeasurable-contributions-to-the-American-milieu etc. etc.
For those Af-Ams reading this (and I know at least a few are), please consider becoming part of our city. We’re northern but not freezingly so. We’ve only got two or three indirect-race-baiting politicians, none of whom currently hold elective office. We’re awfully white, but not in a Boondocks extreme. You can find hiphop recordings here (though it is easier to find stores selling obscure German techno CDs). We’ve got our gosh-durn own African Heritage festivals, breakdancing contests, and typo-abundant black newspapers. While our local economy’s become the nation’s worst, there’s a new source of minority venture capital in the form of families who sold their city houses to rich white people at the peak of the market.
And all my dorky white brethern & cistern can do more to be fully welcoming toward (not just “tolerant” of) these neighbors. A good place to start is to start realizing black people aren’t always like what white people think they’re like (so leave those stereotypes behind). If you’re an employer, start hiring some (and not just as janitors and receptionists). And don’t think you’ll automatically become their friend if you start acting like some dorky white person pretending to be black. Just be the most honest, life-loving, gracious dorky white person you can be.
