http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/04/05/who_will_pay_for_the_news.php
about the cheapness of opinions and the costliness of reporting. There's some deep pathos in it:
Thirty-five years ago, when I was an adolescent Watergate junkie, I couldn’t read The Washington Post’s coverage. I lived outside New York City, and it was impossible to find The Post. I still recall the delight I experienced when I passed through the Atlanta airport during a family vacation and walked by a newsstand that sold out-of-town papers. There was a copy of The Post....I can't go on. Read it yourself, if you're stony-hearted enough to weep at the death of Little Nell. As usual, however, sentimentality eventuates in passing the collection plate:
[People] benefit from the work produced by big media institutions, but they do not pay for it. They have become accustomed to obtaining information for free. But it costs newspapers, news networks and magazines a lot to field reporters (even underpaid ones) and editors who produce the stories that can then be obtained for no pay on websites and that are grabbed by aggregating sites. There has to be revenue to support these operations and infrastructures.Self serving? Since he's a pay-for-play guy, needless to say, the answer is yes. But there really is a problem under that rock, even if he's turned it over for reasons not becoming a gentleman.
How do we get news rather than conditioning messages? Not just how do we avoid fake Christmas braodcasts from a fallen Stalingrad, but more endemically, how do we not become the dreck we eat 'cause its all we've got?
Knowing the chow's killing you leaves two choices. Choice one, the choice we mostly take, short of abstaining unto starvation: we try to pick out the least harmful parts and make do with elaborate Sherlockian inference.
But are there any decent bits or bits of bits -- really? Hence plan two: get out there and be the news. First hand is the one hand they can't stop grabbing the facts, unless they chop it off -- and that may beat slow starvation.
Personally, I've made it a habit to eat as much junk news as possible -- indiscriminately gorge on it -- take it in by the bucketful. My conjecture: it will sift itself, sort itself, transmute itself by its own diabolic metabolism -- like a Madison house of Reps -- into nuggets of golden truth. By eating yards and yards of lead-pipe lies I hope to shit out about one troy ounce of truth every month.
Obviously, one job action, one street freak, is prolly worth more than ten leagues of lead-pipe eating. But hey, we all do what we can.
Comments (7)
Corn's complaint is a rehash of a common one. In the Big News model, most columnists are entertainers, media personalities. Their schtick can't compete with people who opine for free based on the same wire reports they use. Plus, there's a limited demand for factual reporting. Sad, but true. People want to be amused, titillated, reassured, given "safe" opinions to share and they want their neighbors to be propagandized. When a serious reporter breaks a big story, people prefer to forget about it as quickly as possible.
Posted by Scruggs | April 7, 2007 5:45 PM
Posted on April 7, 2007 17:45
scruggs
all this is a deduction from one axiom
no news is good news
notice the wild flow of conflicting meanings that line can produce
and is this also true
good news is no news
okay i here that pip squeak
saying
" well but what about yes news OP ???"
Posted by op | April 7, 2007 6:04 PM
Posted on April 7, 2007 18:04
I never did get to your main point, which might be called the yes news. But, I do agree that it's better overall to sift and create. I'm trying to puzzle out why I read the newsies myself. It's all irrelevant to what I do on a daily or yearly basis. Call it my merit class yearnings, Owen, or even fuel for diatribes. To be known to be in the know gets you in the door (shortly thereafter, it's bum's rush out of course).
Posted by Scruggs | April 7, 2007 6:30 PM
Posted on April 7, 2007 18:30
Alright! Another guy who likes to slog through the shit so everybody else doesn't have to.
Not to mention that no editorial cartoons get done unless I do slog through the shit, which for me includes taping/viewing/reading Meet The Press, the first half-hour of the Today Show (though Today is becoming more and more pointless), the Drudge Report (for the fun of guessing which of those sensationalized, absurd, or freakish wire-service reports will wind up leading off the show on the next morning's Today Show), Keith Olberman's program (when I'm in the mood), and little bits of the Nation and the Wash Post.
Besides, if I hadn't made a habit of chomping down a bit of MSM junk news every week, I would've missed Colin Powell's infamous Meet The Press interview in May of '04:
http://flow.mediavac.com/ramgen/sinkers/2004/NBC_MeetthepressMay1604.rm
Still, I don't have it nearly as bad as my DW, who, because of her work and her educational discipline (Enviro Law, GWU '71) has been for well over thirty years a total shameless junkie for all the televised MSM network news she can suck down: every Sunday-morning newsmaker-interview and pundits' showcase on every major network affiliate, plus the syndicated pundits-sitting-in-a-circle-yelling stuff, plus whatever she can catch on the dish after she's done chugging down the Big Three, plus the Sunday Post "Outlook" section (as if she might actually catch something that isn't the same old crap from the same old people). I've known that woman to actually fall asleep during Chris Matthews' program -- and that blowhard can get louder than the goddamn' commercials sometimes; I'll come down from the studio on the way to the kitchen, check in on her, and there she'll be, out like a light with Chris Matthews leaning into the camera and bellowing right in her face. That's just sad.
Posted by Mike Flugennock | April 8, 2007 10:25 AM
Posted on April 8, 2007 10:25
i read
you slurp up Drudge
and i think
" no please mike
not that hat please
give yourself a little kindness here "
but then this
" I'll come down from the studio ..."
studio !!!!
i forgot your are a glamorous
political cartooneer
f you big pen
nopw i think about it ...
drudge 24/7 is too kind a sentence for you
i sentence you to
perfect fatuity
with out a drop of unintended humor
ie reruns
of snl news update
and
the daily show
Posted by op | April 8, 2007 1:10 PM
Posted on April 8, 2007 13:10
Aaaaauuuuuggghhhh.
Dear god, give me anything but modern-era (post-1985) SNL/WU bits -- even as the original cast of SNL pretty much defined the genre of satirical fake newscasts -- and that goddamned full-of-himself, taking-himself-too-seriously, still giving lame-assed blowjob interviews to movie stars and politicians, Jon Stewart.
Actually, I love Drudge because he's such a window on what's not important -- hence my personal "pick the Today Show's lead story for tomorrow" game -- and on what's scaring/pissing off the GOP. The Washington Times' front page is good for that, also; it's like they may as well start each headline with a mention that GOP Leadership Angered By (Insert Event), or perhaps GOP Leadership Frightened By (Insert Event/Issue). The Washington Post front page, however, is not so much a specific indication of what's pissing off/frightening the Donkeycratic leadership as it is an indication of what's pissing off/frightening the Ruling Class/Chattering Class/Opinion Leaders in general.
Interesting, too, that the Post's official song is a march by John Philip Sousa. I don't know if the Washington Times has an official song, but if they did, it'd have to be some dusty old piano concerto played by Condolee-ee-eezza Rice (as Toby Keith and Daryl Worley are a bit too coarse for your more refined and cultured inside-the-Beltway fascists).
Posted by Mike Flugennock | April 10, 2007 9:03 AM
Posted on April 10, 2007 09:03
never show your soft spots
now you've confirmed what i guessed
t'will be a steady diet of jon stewart cultics
for u
the WT is rev moon's trog panderings
i doubt any one inside the beltway reads that
its for the ozark bare foot babbits
and the volk radio hot tonsil types
-------------
ps fascism is only one shade of black and brown
its a losers sop
and thus nerdy and un-Amaxican
ten gallon authority comes like wild flowers
out of the barrel
of a texas peace shooter
and a georgia tree halter
Posted by mike | April 10, 2007 10:32 AM
Posted on April 10, 2007 10:32