Slow news daze
Quick review of Google News indicates we're in the handbasket, sooo... which way is hell?
The world grits its collective teeth awaiting North Korea's reaction to tougher United Nations sanctions applied this week. Ambassador Susan Rice said yesterday, "There's reason to believe they may respond in an irresponsible fashion to this," which is a revelation as illuminating as, "When you put your hand in a blowtorch flame, your fingers burn". Damn comforting that nation's leader makes Iran's wacky Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seem like the Dalai Lama.
Speaking of Ahmadinejad, there's more international teeth-grinding over disputed elections in Iran. Rioting has broken out between his supporters and those of rival Mir Hussein Moussavi, both claiming victory in the presidential vote this week, all accompanied with allegations of voter fraud and violence, customarily preambles to civil war and catastrophe in struggling democracies, backwater fiefdoms and banana republics. Since Iran perpetually is on Israel's shit list over its supposed nuclear weapons ambitions, this could add a whole new splash of gasoline into the Mideast's chronic inferno.
Closer to home, here in the Golden State, our Austro-Malibu governor has suffered some churlish vote meltdown himself, reacting rather badly to last month's rejection of his bid to soak taxpayers for cash that would keep afloat our coddled state government - long grown fat on champagne budgets and Budweiser performance. He's lining us up for Breadline California, threatening to dump social services, sell off real estate (including the crumbling L.A. Coliseum) and fling a Kardasian into the La Brea Tar Pits, a sacrifice to our diminishing Tiki-gods of Mammon.
In other words, more of the end-of-the-world crises we've come to expect in the New Millennium.
But you wouldn't know that from cable news. They spend hour after hour on the real, gritty, tough-nut issues of the day - like the feud between Sarah Palin and David Letterman.
Hour after hour after hour...
There's the update, followed by some backgrounding (we know, for instance, Rudy Giuliani figures in there, somewhere) followed by talking head authorities - political, social, psychological - telling us what it all means.
It all means SQUAT! That's what it means. Look, news isn't entertainment. News isn't information we neccessarily want to know. It's the information we must know to be responsible citizens in a democracy. Y'know: The hard, grim stuff. We're all adults here, after all.
(That last graph wasn't aimed at TPM readers - all of you know this already. It's a reminder to antagonistically obsessive Keith Olbermann, who's done everything since the election to prove his Sarah Palin fetish short of standing under her window at midnight, singing "Baby, I'm-a Want You".)
Everybody loves what used to be called, in the news biz, brights. They're the disposable tidbits enlivening and brightening news presentation, mixed in amid usual accounts of massacre and typhoon at deadline time. But now, all our news stories are "brights", all our information is useless crap that means nothing. News programs vary between stuffing us with criminally trivial nonsense, or genuine topics talked, examined, parsed and analyzed to death. It's enough to make one suspect the media barons don't want us to know what's going on.
If a news story is a full-course meal, Sarah Palin is Kandy Korn.
We're starving.
you wouldn't know that from cable news
Nor from TPMCafe reader blogs, nor from Daily Kos reader diaries, nor from HuffPo, etc. And you know, political shows on cable TV are in a business of giving viewers what they want, what will make them tune in. So they look at the blogs, and continue to give the audience what they want. Several of the times that I've watched Olberman/Maddow, I swear they are nearly plagirizing from blogs, sometimes things like terminology and citations are just too too reminiscent of what I happened to see that day at TPM.
I don't see a lot of coverage of this in the New York Times (headlines: Iran election; Obama's cyberdefense and privacy; Lender's role for The Fed; Mexican drug war), and The Wall Street Journal (headlines: Mexican drug war; stocks in the black; Iran election) that were delivered to my door this morning.
Right now as I write this, CNN has Christiane Amanpour reporting from Iran and Fox is playing the Wall Street Journal's talk show and they are discussing Obama's planning to speed up the stimulus.
So whose fault is this really? Isn't it more "the people's journalism" of the blogosphere than anything else? The coverage you are complaining about, it seems very much to me that it's a case of the primetime MSNBC and Fox producers watching what catches on in the blogosphere and continuing to milk it, giving "the people" what they want. If "the people" didn't want to continue to talk about it, they wouldn't find any profit in it.
June 13, 2009 2:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
I didn't know it was the blogosphere's responsibility to produce the content of television newscasts. There's plenty of serious journalism that cable news lifts from blogs, but to your point, there's plenty of drivel too.
Maybe we now have two giant clutterspheres: the internet and television news.
June 13, 2009 3:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ah you're giving the "it's their duty to force me to eat my spinach" argument.
By the way, Josh Marshall is against forcing people to eat their spinach. He strongly argued in this 2008 post to those who were complaining about the lack of serious coverage of issues, that during the election process not only did he think it was a good thing to give the people the "bread and circuses" campaign horse race news they craved (and which, not coincidentally, gave his website exponential growth in audience,) but that he thought it was all American. That rather than it being journalistic duty to focus on the issues, responsible grownups could seek out and inform themselves on the issues elsewhere if they wanted, but it was not his responsibility to force feed issues over personalities and horse race to the masses, and he was going to continue to cover the daily circus.
You can either have elitist "spinach" content that is edited by someone or something and paid for in some way outside of advertising, or by creating an elite niche audience that actually likes spinach, which enough advertisers covet,
or you can have "democracy" in your coverage.
I think "democracy" in coverage is what most of these complaints are about if people are honest with themselves. Just honestly look at what attracts the most comments and clicks on blogs.
Here at TPMCafe, for example, besides the reader blogs example, with the contributors, it's not William Hartung's posts on the military budget that get mouse clicks and comments, its the M.J. Rosenberg posts that have the most blatant baiting and inflammatories. Check out which book club discussions get the most traffic and which languish for lack of comments and recommends...
June 13, 2009 5:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
No, I said nothing of forcing spinach down the throats of the unwilling.
But now that you bring it up, the networks do that all the time.
Who do you think forced the "justification for the Iraq war" spinach down our throats?
Hired Pentagon officials on network newscasts?
Or TPM reader blogs?
June 13, 2009 9:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
You know what? You're right. The sludge quotient ("Madonna adopted my liver!") is heaviest during primetime, when most people are watching. Weekend news - even cable - is quite good (if, again, gratingly over-assayed).
June 13, 2009 4:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great post!
Maybe you should get in the news business and turn it round:)
June 13, 2009 3:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
I throw in bit of Bill Moyers Journal, Democracy Now! and whatever topic is on C-SPAN if I want to want turn away from the infotainment. For example, C-SPAN covered a hearing on the current debate over Health Care Reform and how health disparities are chronic in minority communities. Watching the Health Reform forum was right on time because I just finished listening to a ConFab podcast over on theRoot where someone spoke about the very subject of Health Care disparities in the United States.
Does someone from the News networks actually sit around and read the blogs to see what story is or might be hot on that blog? I actually see stories on cable news networks and say, that story sounds familiar to something I read on a blog? I've heard some cable news programs quote blogs several times.
Broadcast news has done what all "older" media has done since the time of television co-opting radio programs. They either adapt to the changing landscape or they die. The newspapers are the best example of what happens if they wait too long.
June 13, 2009 4:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bill Moyers is the standard for American journalism. And it's his work that will be remembered in any retrospectives of the world right now.
June 15, 2009 9:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Curt nice post, We dont watch television news anymore in our home, not out of a conscious choice really, it's just not a dependable unbiased source anymore. My wife and I both find what we need to know on the web. It can be biased, yes, but somewhere in the swirl is the original content, the original quote, the original facts, and from those you can figure out the true story on your own. The TV is on but we really dont pay any attention to it,it is sort of like an old uncle who sits over in the corner talking and talking but no ones really listening any more.
June 13, 2009 8:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's a wonderful analogy, Dondi. My family actually included an old, prattling relative like that; one long, chicken-eating infomercial, that guy, God bless him. For myself, I try to gravitate to high-brow shows like "Wipeout" and "Cheaters".
June 14, 2009 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Irans big news and Cal's problems should be bigger news. Largest population in country.
Like DonDi says, fewer on this site watch. I always have it on as background.
But it was a boring week newswise on tv.
June 13, 2009 10:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
The internet is pretty democratic with good and bad examples of everything. One has to work to mine valuable info, or entertainment for that matter, but it is worth the trouble. And it is proof that information and entertainment are not mutually exclusive (I offer Dick Day’s blogs as peoples’ exhibit number one, your honor).
And I'm talking to you here, SF Curt and agreeing with Dondi and AA and tpmgary and trying to pump up DD's ego, etc. The point being that this is a conversation, as is the whole web that has, in my view, some great analytical, activist, humanist, people-to-people communication debate and communion that I can relate to. I watch (or read) the news: a political-minded, weasel-worded, corporate-managed, edited, censored, and time-constrained one-to-many communication over which I have no control, and I can only think, or hope, its days are numbered and the internet will arise and kill it before it kills us.
The blogosphere (what a name) is, if nothing else, more honest and authentic. What may be more telling are the stories or the 'angles' on stories that you won’t find in the establishment media. Iran’s future nuclear attack, remotely possible in a fevered mind, is all the news, all the time. But Israel’s actual bloody war against an occupied people? Que? No comprendé. Health care or “too big to fail” economy-destroying banks? Well, er, umm, that’s simply a business issue.
An applicable idea to news proposed in a book about Vietnam coverage (linked to by Greenwald I think) is that there are three concentric circles, a doughnut if you will, where the inner circle is what is agreed upon as fact and need not be argued about, while the doughnut includes everything open to debate or the actual issues and controversies of the day as proscribed by our public institutions. But outside the doughnut are ideas that are simply not part of any discussion. They are implicitly agreed to be off limits. Of course, the doughnut’s ingredients change over time. For example, gay rights was once a forbidden topic, then an accepted, inside the doughnut part of discussion (and almost reached the inner circle of conventional fact, like gender and race equality), but is now being pushed back outside the circle. But the internet is whatever ,i>anyone wants to publish, so there are no off limits subjects.
I’ve no cable here, but sitting in a waiting room earlier today, I got a kick out of two anchors (Fox or MSNBC, I suspect) jockeying back and forth with some serious but (loosely-termed) witty commentary, interspersed with background pieces, video and graphics before going to two “opposing” experts on the issue and interviewing them from an obviously subjective or proscribed POV. The subject may have been the Lettermean-Palin spat, but honestly, for the life of me I cannot remember the topic. I’ve been sitting here typing this and stopping and coming back to it, trying to remember what that news segment was about but I can only recall my reactions. Even though I can picture both news-readers and both pundits vividly, I can’t remember one thing they said; only that it must have been verrrry serious and there were two he-said/she-said sides to it. I was left only with the feeling that it takes mountains of effort to even try to discern the truth in the most miniscule and trivial issue much less important affairs of state that affect our lives.
I mean, why are we kidding ourselves? The pursuit of truth and an informed public is not the province of news today. It's not even the same hemisphere. We have been through similar periods and have muddled through, usually with reforms too late for millions who suffered from the lack of awareness. I suspect we'll muddle through again. But today, the marketplace of ideas is only found with great effort on the internet or through conversations with those left of friends, family, co-workers and acquaintances who are not ‘on the pipe’ or vegging out on the modern opiate of the masses.
Meanwhile, back at the rants... Sorry for going on like this. It’s Saturday night, I’ve been through a coupla weeks of hell dealing with our health care system. It's something never discussed straight up by the corporate news media and I think the public option is just being put up as a bargaining chit to get a little more regulation of insurers (i.e. no real reform). But I’m going to eschew the pipe for a scotch or two and some good music. So, to sum up, I did watch cable news today. Fortunately, I can’t remember a thing I saw.
June 14, 2009 12:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Okay, and I come back here and post this way too looong comment, even complementing DD, only to go back and see he's posting about the same doughnut thingy, only better of course... ¡Aye Carumba!
June 14, 2009 2:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, with a couple of scotches, cven the chronically furious staff of "Nancy Grace" starts making sense.
June 14, 2009 11:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
See Curt. Now you have me laughing again. I was wrong, you do not have to swear to get me to laugh.hahahahaha My theory is that Nancy Grace can cause cancerous legions to appear on your duff.
No real statistics on this, just personal experience.
June 15, 2009 10:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Don, my post went on and on and on. I mean it was for effect and everything. Your summary is, of course much clearer and certainly not a waste of time.
And 'Meanwhile back at the rants..." well that is more than precious. I mean I search for weeks to find a line like that. hahahahahahaha
June 15, 2009 10:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's Entertainment!!!
June 14, 2009 2:11 AM | Reply | Permalink