Entries Tagged 'media' ↓

Is it Olbermann vs. Matthews or Olbermann vs. Rupert Murdoch?

Gawker wants to know [but you'll need to click on the Gawker link to get the links embedded in this quote ---ed.]:

So the Post has posted the Page Six item Keith Olbermann was so worked up about yesterday, and it does indeed say Hardball host Chris Matthews “seemed” to be talking about a strategy for landing Tim Russert’s job at a memorial event for the NBC personality, and that Olbermann is threatening to quit if he doesn’t get Russert’s Meet The Press job. …

But the gossip item also quotes a source, ostensibly from the traditional broadcast side of NBC News, who claims that Russert himself wanted NBC News political director Chuck Todd as his own replacement, and that the network will never install someone from MSNBC on the show:

The insider said,

“They’re cable. They’re far too partisan. They have no gravitas. If gravitas is eight letters, they’re about seven letters short.”

I last wrote about Olbermann and the absurd notion that one of the MSNBC cablers would get to sit in Russert’s chair here and here.

But I reserve the right to hedge by saying that in the brave new media world, anything is possible.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m wondering when TV “journalists” will face the truth about their profession—namely, that what you see below is not just the future of “the news” but also the present.

(via FishbowlDC)

Fishbowl quotes some of the “juicy bits” from the upcoming NYT Mag article:

 

“By the way, have you figured me out yet?” Matthews said at the end of another phone conversation the following day. “You gotta under-stand, it’s all complicated. It’s not like Tim.” Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of “Meet the Press” — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous.

In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. “I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1,” Matthews told Playboy. “I would argue for a higher position for myself.”

Friends say Matthews is wary of another up-and-comer, David Gregory, who last month was given a show at 6 o’clock, between airings of “Hardball.” It is a common view around NBC that Gregory is trying out as a possible replacement for Matthews.

According to people at NBC, Matthews has not been shy in voicing his resentment of Olbermann. Nor, according to network sources, has Olbermann bothered to hide his low regard for Matthews, although when I spoke to him, Olbermann denied any personal animosity toward Matthews and told me that he appreciates his “John Madden-like enthusiasm for politics.”

Hmmm. Recognize anyone?

Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, in The Entertainer
London, 1957, photo by Snowden

p.s. The last time I used that image was here, in May 2007.

The last time I wrote about Matthews was here.

————————–

*** When I claimed my blog on Technorati two years ago, this is how I described it:

They call it news. I call it infotainment.

No one can say that we weren’t warned well in advance. See, for example, Neal Postman and Michael Schudson and Joshua Gamson.

Back when we all had a sense of humor about the buffoon George Bush, we greeted that malapropism with the appropriate skepticism.It turns out, though, that PBS has found a way to do just that—increasing its viewership for Frontline, its superb documentary series,*** by streaming it on the Web:

Executives at “Frontline” do not yet know how many people watched their recent four-and-a-half hour documentary, “Bush’s War,” because of PBS’s complicated Nielsen ratings.Online, however, “Bush’s War,” which was produced for the fifth anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq, has set a record, with more than 1.5 million views of all or part of the program, which was streamed in 26 segments.“Frontline” has streamed most of its documentaries free since 2002 (www.pbs.org/frontline), part of an effort to reach younger audiences than typically tune in to PBS. The online viewing to date of “Bush’s War,” which was broadcast in two parts on March 24 and 25, is an estimated “10 times the traffic of a normal show for us,” said Sam Bailey, the program’s director of new media and technology. Viewers are also sticking around much longer than they usually do on the site, typically for 7 to 10 minutes.

Who says that quality doesn’t sell?Think again.————–*** I have long been a devotee of Frontline. I’m on record as saying that I wish all hard-news on TV were done with the depth of Frontline documentaries. But of course I know it can’t and won’t happen.Still: kudos! serious television lives!

Dave Marash beats around the bush a lot, but eventually he explains, more or less, why he left Al Jazeera English [e.a.]:

Just as Al Jazeera Arabic can rightfully claim to be a first-class news organization with high professional standards, but one that authentically represents the point of view and interests of the region defined by the Arabic language, less defined by but certainly involved in the Islamic faith, and most particularly the gulf region, I think that Al Jazeera English is a very competent, very professional news organization that does a particularly great job south of the equator, but tends to report almost everything from the point of view of either the Arabic-speaking world or at the very least what you might call the post-colonial world. And since I’m not authentically those things, I don’t belong there.

Huh?

Marash notes a shift in perspective, dating to the flexing of the Saudi Arabian muscle during the time of the Mecca Agreement (last year), when, Marash suggests, there was a shift in the balance of power in the region [e.a.]:

BC: What changed?

DM: I think that the world changed about nine, ten months ago. And I think the single event in that change was the visit to the gulf by Vice President Cheney, where he went to line up the allied ducks in a row behind the possibility of action against Iran. And instead of getting acquiescence, the United States got defiance, and instead ducks in a row the ducks basically went off on their own and the first sort of major breakthrough on that was the Mecca agreement, which defied the American foreign policy by letting Hamas into the tent of the governance of the Palestinian territories. This enraged the State Department and was one crystal clear sign that the Mideast region was now off campus, was off on its own. And it is around this time, and I think not coincidentally, that you see the state of Qatar and the royal family of Qatar starting to make up their feud with the Saudis, and you start to see on both Al Jazeera Arabic and English a very sort of first-personish, “my Haj” stories that were boosterish of the Haj and of Saudi Arabia. And you start to see stories of analysis in The New York Times where regional people are noting that Al Jazeera seems to be changing its editorial stance toward Saudi Arabia. I’m suggesting that around that time, a decision was made at the highest levels of [Al Jazeera] that simply following the American political leadership and the American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation, was no longer the safest or smartest course, and that it was time, in fact, to get right with the region. And I think part of getting right with the region was slightly changing the editorial ambition of Al Jazeera English, and I think it has subsequently become a more narrowly focused, more univocal channel than was originally conceived.

Marash also explains what drew him to the concept in the first place:

[T]he thing that I loved best about the original concept was the sort of fugue of points of view and opinions, because I think that’s what desperately needed in the world. We need to know, for example, in America, how angry the rest of the world is at Americans. Our own news media tend to shelter us from this very unpleasant news. So if you watched and every piece seemed tendentious and pissed you off, and I don’t think that would be the case, but even if worst case the channel turned shrill and shallow, you would still want to watch them on the principle that millions—tens of millions—of people watch them every day and you need to know what’s going on in their brains.

Know thine enemy. Marash got closer than most.

Somewhere in my drafts folder, I have a long post about how TV in general and the big cable channels in particular are a “news-free zone,” and one day I will polish it and publish it—it’s a work in progress.

Meanwhile, as my ideas marinate, I would like to note that there’s a new ethos in Cable Land, most tellingly represented by Chris Matthews, one of the talkingest talking heads on MSNBC.

Here, courtesy of Gail Shister at TVNewser, Matthews explains how it is that he can send valentines to Barack Obama several times per hour every day on his show Hardball and yet claim that he is not endorsing Obama [e.a.]:

Matthews — dubbed “Rain Man” by Brian Williams in a Christmas staff video — is just reporting the facts, m’am.

The leg thrill “was an honest reaction to the speech,” he says. “I have no regrets. I report what happens. I report my reactions to speeches. I react emotionally and intellectually.

“People are allowed to criticize me. I want to be honest. I give an honest report of what I experience. It’s a fuller report than others have given.”

This kind of “reporting” is what’s considered important by MSNBC. You’ll note that Matthews’s feelings are issue number one—for him and his viewers.

Funny, I don’t see any news value in that metric.

I haven’t been following along closely this weekend—who can keep doing that and have a life?—but the bits and piece of media that I’ve taken in (from all over: TV and blogosphere) reveal something fascinating: the MSM (from Chris Matthews to George Stephanopoulos to Howard Kurtz and their panels this morning) now says that there’s no way that Hillary can win.

Indeed, Kurtz quoted a Politico story that says the press has been misleading the public (and “partnering with the Clinton campaign”) by even pushing the notion that Hillary and Obama are in a close race.

Meanwhile, there are ever more detailed dissections, analyses, and speculations being presented by Obama dissenters who do not appear on TV but who offer much more nuanced ways of assessing him than what he offers freely to his adoring audience in the media elite and beyond.

Then there’s Nora Ephron, who wants Hillary to get out of the race in the worst way:

[Nnow that we're down to two contenders, it's turned into an unending last episode of Survivor. They’re eating rats and they’re frying bugs, and they’re frying rats and they’re eating bugs; no one is ever going to get off the island and I can’t take it any more.

Got that? Nora wants Hillary to get out because Nora ends up spending too much time thinking about Hillary, who Nora no longer likes.

And that’s funny, because I was thinking just the opposite.

Barack is unquestionably the hero of this story—placed there by a media that bought in to this ready-made narrative (and who wouldn’t? it’s perfect!).

Photo by Getty Images

We’re rooting for him (who wouldn’t, when the media frames him as the Kid Who Came Out of Nowhere?).

Until she begins to fade.

And then the electorate in New Hampshire and Ohio comes through for her, and the opposition tries to wear her down.

They call her Tonya Harding!

And yet, the more appetizing they try to make him,

the more we find ourselves clapping for her as if she were Tinker Bell.

Because we’re having so much fun!

Because the outcome is totally unpredictable. It’s the very essence of (melo)drama! No one knows what will happen.

Her continued presence holds out the promise of a surprise ending!

The script hasn’t been written!

He may be the hero of the story, but she provides the best drama.

(And for those of you who are politically inclined rather than romantically taken with this delightful entertainment: the hero of this story has nowhere to go but down, but the nemesis can only improve with time …)

Dennis Prager asks a provocative question: “Why Do Palestinians Get More Attention than Tibetans?

He lists a bunch of reasons: terror, oil, Israel, China, the left, and the UN. My favorite answer is last [e.a.]:

The seventh reason is television news, the primary source of news for much of mankind. Aside from its leftist tilt, television news reports only what it can video. And almost no country is televised as much as Israel, while video reports in Tibet are forbidden, as they are almost anywhere in China except where strictly monitored by the Chinese authorities. No video, no TV news. And no TV, no concern. So while grieving Palestinians and the accidental killings of Palestinians during morally necessary Israeli retaliations against terrorists are routinely televised, the slaughter of over a million Tibetans and the extinguishing of Tibetan Buddhism and culture are non-events as far as television news is concerned.

Setting aside Prager’s pro-Tibet sympathies and his Palestine fatigue, it’s worth paying attention to his last argument, which is as profound as it is simple. I repeat:

No video, no TV news.
No TV, no concern.

That is, I believe, an underexamined (so far) reason for the American public’s lack of interest in the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, of course: there is little to no video, except when some American luminary is visiting (and then the usual terrorist suspects in Iraq piggyback on the media coverage and put on a really violent show).

As if on cue, PEJ releases a report about how last week’s “news” was dominated by a pseudo-event (Obama’s race speech) rather than by events on the ground that have an impact on how Americans live their day-to-day lives (which, once upon a time, was the province of the “news”). ETP’s Rachel Sklar notes that the over-the-top Obama coverage totally eclipsed the five-year anniversary of our engagement in Iraq.

Well, the PEJ just released its fifth annual State of the News Media report, in which I read this notable bit [e.a.]:

Citizens suggested that the press failed to deliver sufficient coverage of some basic bread and butter issues, such as rising gas prices, toy recalls, and the legislative battle over children’s health insurance. … To the extent the press covered distant parts of the world, people in some ways thought even that was too much.

PEJ suggests that we Americans just aren’t that into anything that doesn’t touch our daily lives:

This suggests that the media, in not covering Iraq, is merely giving the audience what it wants. Apparently, the majority of people who watch TV don’t want to think about Iraq. That seems to be the consensus.

I’ve noted this before, of course: the “infotainment” in Infotainment Rules refers not so much to the fluffy content offered by the MSM as to the type of coverage that the MSM gives the “news”—that is, stories are chosen for their entertainment value and they are presented with entertainment values (conflict, dramatization, exaggeration of the importance of personality traits in the “characters” [public figures] who are featured in news stories [which makes them into caricatures but also into recognizable archetypes for a mass audience], an emphasis on emotion, etc., etc.].

Turning away from our apparent lack of interest in Iraq and to the general question of what we are interested in leads to questions about our jam-packed attention economy, in which a gazillion items from a bazillion entertainment and “news” outlets compete for just a fraction of our individual focus. As a society, we suffer from information overload and information pollution, and yet as individuals we also want to be informed about the things that might affect our daily life (the “news” is an early-warning system for possible dangers ahead).

Though we say we want “news,” we force the news media (which we depend on) to compete with everyone else who’s got something to sell. We are in control, through our attention span. They are all vying for a bit of our attention.

Those who want to get our attention have to give us a valuable intangible that cannot be reproduced at no cost, says Kevin Kelly. Among those intangibles is trust. There are a bunch of others. It’s fascinating stuff; read all about it here.

The Spitzer Stunner has, as expected, dominated cable “news” since the juicy scandal broke yesterday afternoon at around 2 p.m. As I write, CNN features the unfolding details of the story (alongside old video of Spitzer the Punisher of Crime and Immorality) at the top of every hour.

This sensation has knocked Campaign ‘08 off the number-one spot on the Mediathon (Frank Rich’s brilliant characterization of the Entertainment Nation^TM we’ve become.

The cable shows started their stories of the night with Spitzer. The could hardly wait, however, to get to The Barak and Clinton Show. Last night’s episode was told from the point of view of our scrappy hero Barack, who, after several days of insults from the Evil Clintons, finally came back with a great retort. But was it too little too late? That was the gist of things. Talking heads fretted and advised. Some applauded the Clintons’ brilliant but evil genius in throwing Obama off his message (by my count he’s been off his message for two weeks, starting with their final debate). Others (like Karl Rove, on Fox) scolded him for a tactical error. Obama should have been the one to deliver the harsh message, he said; that should have been left up to his surrogates or advocates. Dick Morris, also on Fox, disagreed. He thought Obama did great. On CNN, Gloria Borger talked about the “dangerous” implication (for Obama, should he become the nominee of the party) of Hillary’s 3 a.m. ad, and how Democrats were nervous about it. Lanny Davis tried to point out that prior to the ad, the polls had shown Obama to be weak in this area. Anderson Cooper brushed him off, saying polls don’t matter now that Obama has votes (more than Hillary).

All I could think about was how the pro-Obama camp is deluding itself. Polls do matter, somewhat—particularly polls about people’s general attitudes rather than specific party-related issues. They indicate a larger trend (or a larger picture) than the concrete vote count in Democratic primaries that have been hyped by media hysteria.

I think—and I have written—that Clinton aired the 3 a.m. ad after reading a certain Pew poll that indicated Obama’s obvious weakness in the area of national security. The Evil Clintons, being smart and evil, see past the primaries. They see that Obama will be a very, very weak candidate for the Democrats. As I have said repeatedly: I’m not a politico. But I am not blind to politics, or to reality.

What I wanted to say in this post, however, is that Obamamania has indeed been punctured. He has lost not only his momentum but also his place in the Mediathon—which is what propelled him to the top. He was able to hijack the spotlight for many weeks. It’s now over. The media has had to move on.

Not only that, but, contrary to those who think the Spitzer story will hurt Hillary Clinton, I think it’s most likely to hurt Barack Obama. It’s a sobering reminder that politicians—no matter how good they make themselves look and how good we would like them to be—are mostly lying, cheating, scheming scum.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough says that “media people are living in fear“ of saying the “wrong” thing [e.a.]:

“There are all these minefields out there for Barack Obama that I think the press has been tiptoeing through,” Scarborough said. He continued, “If you attack Hillary Clinton, we have found, there are organizations out there that will bombard your sponsors, that will call the president of your network and will say, ‘Get that person off the air.’ Media people are living in fear.”

Scarborough challenged both fellow guest Farai Chideya (NPR) and members of the audience who disagreed with him, saying, “Everybody clapping in the audience obviously hasn’t worked at netowkrs during this campaign, where people take them in the back and say, ‘You’ve gotta be very careful now. If you attack Hillary Clinton too much we’re going to be called sexist. And if you attack Barack Obama too much, we’re going to be called racist.’”

I for one am delighted to hear that the architects, gatekeepers, and practitioners of the culture of political correctness tie themselves in knots as they scramble to avoid becoming its next victims. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch!

I know they mean well, but earnest policy types really need to get their heads out of the clouds or out of their policy papers or out of their own rear ends and take a good hard look at the deeply inhospitable media terrain in which they operate.***

On Sunday, Michael Signer published a piece in the WaPo that was picked up by a bunch of bloggers, and which he followed up with a post on Democracy Arsenal. Upshot: the media ought to cover the candidates’ positions on foreign policy more than it does, because foreign policy is very important.

Well, duh. Everyone knows that.

What we don’t know is how to make that happen in a cultural moment and environment in which the news media has taken a sharp turn away from any kind of hard news coverage and when audiences seem to long for a 24/7 diet of sensationalized entertainment.

We no longer have time to argue about whether or not this is what they indeed long for. Even if audiences wanted enlightenment rather than distraction, the train has left the station. Network and cable news organizations no longer talk about offering the news as a public service; they brag about their audience numbers. (And media critics often join in the horse race coverage.)

Media and news executives long ago came to the conclusion that unless there is breaking hard news that threatens to interrupt life for our nation, what we the audience really want in the “news” is reality-based distraction: fluff, drama, conflict, horse-race coverage, consumer news we can use, crisis-management advice, and stirred emotions. (It’s true that if it bleeds it leads, but we don’t want a diet too high in blood and guts.)

On this blog, I have spent two years elaborating the thesis that the most effective way for the “push” visual media (TV networks and cable channels) to reach a vast, diverse population (and electorate) under the current cultural conditions (which coincide with a time in the evolution of media when we’ve changed from a mass audience into a “mass of niches” audience) is through an effective combination of information and entertainment: infotainment. (Soft news works to get across some kind of information to “low-information” voters; the scholar Matthew Baum has written a book about it and continues to do research in this area.)

My suggestion is simple: Go with the flow. Don’t fight the trend against hard news.

Improve the quality and the information density of soft news. 

Whether your goal (like Signer’s) is to keep people informed about the foreign-policy issues that might affect them or your mission is to get more people interested in the wider world beyond their immediate environment (which is my obsession: it drives me crazy that Americans are so ignorant), it is long past time to stop criticizing the media for what it doesn’t do.

It is time to find effective ways to use the media—or to create your own media channels—to get people to pay attention to your cause.

I’m not saying this is the optimum situation. I would certainly love a more seriously informed electorate. Absent that likelihood (throughout history, most people have been ill informed; there’s no reason to believe that our generation is any different—who doesn’t love recess more than school?), it would be much more productive to work with what we have. And make it better for everyone.

——————

*** Here are some questions for Beltway-and-beyond policy wonks: Have any of you—especially those of you who sit in front of a computer monitor all day long—taken a look at TV lately? at what TV calls the “news”?

Have you watched Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric or Brian Williams for a week? Have you caught one of Keith Olbermann’s Special Moments of Stupidity? Have you listened to Bill O’Reilly rant and rave? Have you glimpsed Larry King puffing up Rudy Giuliani one day and Michelle Obama the next? Have you seen the “ladies” on The View go at it over politics? Have you tuned in to Stephen Colbert, Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, David Letterman, or Conan O’Brian? to Oprah? Dr. Phil? Judge Judy? Regis and Kelly? Ellen?

I understand that it’s beneath you to watch a lot of this stuff, but this is what you’re competing against when you want to get “foreign-policy matters” in front of the American people.

Rather than cluelessly belabor the obvious, it would behoove you to understand that this is how passive, “low-information” Americans (those who depend on TV for their “news”) learn about “the issues.” This is the stuff people watch, when they’re not watching American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, etc.

Foreign policy matters—unless they are sensational or catastrophic—cannot possibly compete against this stuff. Instead, TV reduces every “issue” to a hysterical “he said, she said” debate and every public figure to a caricature.

That’s reality. We can’t wish it away. What those of us who care about foreign policy issues should do is learn how to operate effectively in this environment.

I’m not suggesting it will be easy. But if Barack Obama can get and hold people’s attention, maybe there’s hope.