Entries Tagged 'media' ↓

If Amy Alexander, writing in The Nation, can admit to it, I suspect that soon enough other women will follow:

Even though I detest her politics, as I watched Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated interview with ABC News’s Charles Gibson, God help me, I had to admire her steeliness. …

[T]here are probably more than a few of us who drift off, from time to time, on the delicious fantasy of what it would feel like to draw down with shotgun on the misbehaving men in our lives. We don’t know if Palin has ever done such a thing, but it appears she sure as hell could. I have to own up to the part of me that admires that. After watching her with Gibson, it’s safe to say that it took a spine of titanium to stay upright in that chair as “Charlie” scowled at her over the top of his reading glasses …

[B]y over-intellectualizing this steeliness factor, and by underestimating its power to sway voters, we are not being true to our cultural history. …

Progressives and feminists who sneer at women unwilling to separate that stimulus-response “I heart ballsy women!” from the business at hand–”Does she have the intellect and experience to be vice president?”–are spinning their wheels. They also conveniently overlook the possibility that Palin’s raw ambition is very close to the self-confidence we want to encourage in our daughters. Sarah Palin is a strong woman, and that is good. Her politics, and what they may lead her to create for our democracy… not so much. [e.a.]

I was encouraged to be self-confident and outspoken by my parents, and I have certainly encouraged my daughter to be self-confident and outspoken.

Judging from the softened attitude I saw this morning from Katty Kay on the Chris Matthews Show and from her pal and fellow op-ed writer Claire Shipman on This Week with George S [transcripts are not yet available at either site], the high-powered women of the MSM have gotten the message to think before they pop off their mouths, and to learn to accommodate other women’s choices—including those who don’t have the luxury of opting out of “prestige” jobs and those whose ambitions include helping to guide the United States of America toward a better course.

Fed up with 50- and 60-hour weeks and a career ladder we didn’t build and don’t want to climb, women are looking for jobs that demand fewer and freer hours. We want to work but we also want quantity time, as well as quality time, with our children. Most of us no longer buy the onwards-and-upwards drive to the corner office (or in Mrs. Palin’s case, the West Wing) at the cost of a fragmented family life. More and more, women are choosing a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success in reasonable terms — even if we sacrifice some “prestige.”

I find it very interesting that these two women, who beg for time to be with their families, who are supposedly remaking their lives, both find the time to be front and center on the Sunday talk shows (and one of them appears on air with her husband. So excuse me if I feel it necessary to ask Ms. Shipman and Mr. Carney: Who, exactly, is minding your kids while you earnestly debate John McCain’s disappointingly political campaign for president and while you pass judgment on Sarah Palin?)

any of the commenters at Gawker, as is their style, prefer to snark about the detention of graffiti artist James Powderly (along with many other protesters of all stripes) by the Chinese authorities for the display he mounted in Beijing:

But others understand that it’s no joke to be jailed in China,

I think this is awesome and courageous.

Really? Tiananmen Square was awesome and courageous. This is just self-aggrandizing and pointless.

Really? Going to prison in China is no joke. It gets a message out there for people to see and that is important. Would you do it?

how is this self-aggrandizing, exactly? He’s in prison, and I’m sitting on my ass in a (somewhat) comfy office chair reading about thinking “shit, I feel bad for the Muslims and non-Kool aid drinking Chinese when the Olympics are finished

There’s a lot of other reporting about this worrisome incident too, as you can see at this Google News link. But there’s nothing about this incident on Memeorandum.

Why is that? I thought the blogosphere is supposed to be much more informative than the TV newsbiz. The internet and TV are sharing news-viewer eyeballs, according to Pew.

I was hoping that the internet would be an improvement on the MSM. Right now, it’s Moe at Gawker—yep, Gawker—who’s reporting news that people should be aware of (because it’s a head-on collision between Western political culture [and freedom of expression] and Chinese “authoritarian” political culture [no freedom of expression].

So kudos to Moe at Gawker for going where the newsbiz doesn’t go.

Not that, say, the New York Times isn’t trying to cover China soberly–it most certainly seems to be.

[T]he Beijing police still sentenced the two women [in their 70s] to an
extrajudicial term of “re-education through labor” this week for
applying to hold a legal protest in a designated area in Beijing, where
officials promised that Chinese could hold demonstrations during the
Olympic Games.

Then the NYT goes and ruins its coverage with an almost incomprehensible level of naivete about the Chinese regime [e.a.]:

It is unclear why the police have detained people who sought permission to protest. [Really? Which part of the maniacally controlling Chinese government's motives is unclear? Huh? ---ed.]
Some political analysts say the police may be refusing to enforce the government’s order, announced last month, to allow protest zones. Chinese lawyers and human rights advocates also suggested a more cynical motivation — that the authorities were using the possibility of legal demonstrations as a ploy to lure restive citizens into declaring their intention to protest, allowing the police to take action against them. [You don't say! Fancy that! ---ed.]

When it comes to a Communist (or formerly Communist) or an “authoritarian” regime, there’s no use in wondering why it does what it does. It does it (whatever outrage “it” is) because it can, because it holds total power over the people it rules. Once upon a time, the people who wrote for the New York Times assumed that their readers knew this. Now it’s unclear whether even the journalists writing these stories know these things or if they’re just playing dumb. Oh well!

But even if the NYT were to give it to us straight up, the paper just doesn’t have a big enough megaphone among those who live online. Which, these days, is a lot of us. And the appetite for news doesn’t seem to be too large either.

Here are some more findings from that Pew survey:

• In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the
  proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has
  increased substantially over the past decade. About a third of those
  younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from
  25% in 1998.
• A slim majority of Americans (51%) now say they check in on the
  news from time to time during the day, rather than get the news at
  regular times. This marks the first time since the question was first
  asked in 2002 that most Americans consider themselves “news grazers.”
• Social networking sites are very popular with young people, but
  they have not become a major source of news. Just 10% of those with
  social networking profiles say they regularly get news from these sites.

Once upon a time the alleged John Edwards love child story was undernews.

Now it’s burbling to the surface of the MSM.

Yesterday it made Memeorandum.

Rachel Sklar wrote up the story and provided lots and lots of links to bring you up to speed.

But Mickey Kaus owns it, and continues to track it.

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.

The smearing-by-innuendo of John McCain by the New York Times drew this response from the blogosphere (via Memeorandum):

  New York Times:For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk  +Discussion: The Swamp, CNN, Washington Post, Don Surber, Buck Naked Politics, After W, The Carpetbagger Report, Outside The Beltway, Guardian, Firedoglake, Crooks and Liars, Hullabaloo, US Elections, Betsy’s Page, ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES, Bark Bark Woof Woof, Publius Pundit, The Natural Truth, Bang the Drum, Political Radar, Political Punch, The Campaign Spot, American Spectator, Los Angeles Times, TalkLeft, Washington Monthly, NewsBusters.org, Right Wing News, Politics1, You Decide 08!, South Texas Chisme, THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS, Patterico’s Pontifications, Emptywheel, Group News Blog, DownWithTyranny!, Shakespeare’s Sister, FOX Embeds, Daily Kos, Booman Tribune, Reason Magazine, Left in the West, NO QUARTER, Salon, The New Republic, PERRspectives Blog, Open Left, About US Politics, No More Mister Nice Blog, TownHall Blog, Political Machine, Riehl World View, Pensito Review, The Moderate Voice, Mercury Rising, All Spin Zone, the talking dog, Washington Wire, Wonkette, D-Day, Attytood, Prairie Weather, Jules Crittenden, Pandagon, Megan McArdle, TBogg, Politics Blog, Gateway Pundit, McCain Central, THE LIBERAL JOURNAL, MyDD, The Democratic Daily, Sister Toldjah, PrestoPundit, Commentary, Oliver Willis, michellemalkin.com, Lawyers, Guns and Money, JammieWearingFool, Truthdig, Big Head DC, BlueOregon and Brains and Eggs

 

 

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RELATED:

Josh Marshall / Talking Points Memo:

THE MCCAIN STORY  —  This afternoon, before the Times story came out, I was working on a post about national political reporters’ tendency not to give much of any scrutiny to various McCain flipflops, contradictions and bamboozlements.  Obviously, the terrain has changed a bit since …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Publius / Obsidian Wings:   McCain  —  Gotta say, I’m underwhelmed by the NYT’s McCain bombshell.

Mark Kleiman / The RBC:   The Iseman cometh  —  Apparently this has been an open secret for years.

Tim Dickinson / Rolling Stone:   L’affaire McCain?  —  Just landed in San Francisco to the news …

Washington Post:

McCain’s Ties To Lobbyist Worried Aides  —  Before 2000 Campaign, Advisers Tried to Bar Her  —  Aides to Sen. John McCain confronted a telecommunications lobbyist in late 1999 and asked her to distance herself from the senator during the presidential campaign he was about to launch …

 

 Pam Spaulding / Pandagon:   McCain and the lobbyist: the final straw for the GOP Base?

NY Daily News:   Tale’s tall on innuendo, short on proof

Bob Fertik / Democrats.com:   VickiGate  —  So did John McCain cheat on his wife, the taxpayers, or both?

Kevin Hayden / American Street:   Justice & Hope, day 51  —  On occasion, an exceptional moment arrives …

David Freddoso / The Corner:   The Times piece on McCain

Smintheus / Daily Kos:   McCain: Experienced in the ways of Washington lobbyists

David Kurtz / Talking Points Memo:   WAPO: MCCAIN’S TIES TO LOBBYIST RATTLED ADVISERS

Tom Maguire / JustOneMinute:   The Times’ McCain Scandal – Sex Or Ethics?

Michael Crowley / The New Republic:   Weaver’s Revenge?  —  An interesting footnote to the Times bombshell …

Lyzurgyk / PSoTD:   Vicki Iseman

Jane Hamsher / Firedoglake:   Late Nite FDL: It’s Not The Sex, It’s The Corruption

Noam Scheiber / The New Republic:

Bonus TNR Angle on the McCain Story  —  The McCain campaign is apparently blaming TNR for forcing the Times’ hand on this story.  We can’t yet confirm that.  But we can say this: TNR correspondent Gabe Sherman is working on a piece about the Times’ foot-dragging on the McCain story …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

 Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire:   McCain Will Hold Press Conference

Dan Collins / protein wisdom:   Olberdouche on McCain/Lobbyist Article in NYT

Krooney / The Page:   McCain Job #1: Discredit the New York Times to Rally the “Other” Base

Rich Lowry / The Corner:

First-Blush Reaction  —  The Times doesn’t have the goods—at least from what’s in the story—and shouldn’t have run it.  Let’s be honest: this story is all about the alleged affair, and all the Keating Five and campaign finance reform re-hash is window dressing.  A key passage:

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

 James Kirchick / The New Republic:   What Story?  —  So here’s the essence of the Times’ 3,000-word “bombshell” on John McCain.

Mark Finkelstein / NewsBusters.org:   New Republic Editor: ‘Times In the Tank’ for Dem Nominee

Hindrocket / Power Line:

THE TIMES UPHOLDS ITS STANDARDS  —  The New York Times smears John McCain in tomorrow’s paper, accusing him of ethics violations and insinuating that he had an affair with a lobbyist.  What is most striking, though, if you actually read the story, is how thin it is.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Discussion: The Huffington Post and protein wisdom

Marc Cooper / The Huffington Post:   Why John McCain Owes The New York Times a Thank You Card

Dan Collins / protein wisdom:   McCain Lobbyist Affair Rumor Reported, NYT

Mary Katharine Ham / TownHall Blog:

What’s the Quickest Way to Rally Conservatives ‘Round McCain?  —  A sandbagging from the NYT of just this skeezy a nature.  —  This doesn’t reflect badly on anyone but the Times, as far as I’m concerned.  The innuendo and full-on craptastic nature of the lede alone is enough to damn …

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 Jules Crittenden:   WaPo Writes It With A Lede

Ed Morrissey / Captain’s Quarters:

Slimes At The Times  —  The New York Times launches its long-awaited smear of John McCain today, and the most impressive aspect of the smear is just how baseless it is.  They basically emulate Page Six at the Post, but add in a rehash of a well-known scandal from twenty years ago to pad it out and make it look more impressive.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

:Tim Graham / NewsBusters.org:   NYT Suggests Unproven Adultery by McCain — Unlike Clinton

Ana Marie Cox / TIME: Swampland:

McCain Senior Adviser Responds to Times Story  —  Mark Salter, John McCain’s obstreperous senior aide, just responded to Time’s query about the New York Times’s long-simmering McCain-mixed-up-with-lobbyists story.  —  Speaking from a parking garage in Toledo, where the campaign is overnighting …

Jennifer Rubin / Commentary:   Rapid Response 101  —  Well so far both the Right and the Left …

Taylor Marsh:   Will McCain Story Hit New York Times Instead?

Krooney / The Page:   Morning Show Summary

Kevin Drum / Washington Monthly:   JOHN McCAIN AND THE TELECOM LOBBYIST….OK, let’s dive into the John McCain story.

Allahpundit / Hot Air:

NYT: McCain may have behaved unethically and cheated on his wife, but we’re not sure; Update: Pressured by the New Republic?  Update: McCain responds; Update: Carl Cameron video added; Update: TNR confirms?  Update: WaPo piles on  —  A sex scandal that may not be a scandal tucked inside …

Don Surber:   Sex is private, 2008  —  Dems drop the blond bomb on John McCain.

Jimmie / The Sundries Shack:   The McCain Story is No Biggie, If You Ask Me.

Noam Scheiber / The New Republic:   McCain Bombshell

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Quin Hillyer / American Spectator:Who is John McCain?  —  Here’s the deal, folks: The New York Times …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Joseph / CANNONFIRE:   A most salacious post. (”Heh heh. He said ‘post’!”)

INSTAPUTZ:   The American Spectator was Prescient.

Joe Sudbay / AMERICAblog:   NY Times: McCain staffers confronted Senator about inappropriately …

NewsMax.com:Inside Cover  —  Bennett Slams NY Times Hit Job on McCain

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

 Cenk Uygur / The Huffington Post:   NY Times Holds Stories Because They’re Afraid of Conservatives

David Kurtz / Talking Points Memo:   MCCAIN CAMPAIGN ISSUES STATEMENT

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

RADAR:WAS JOHN MCCAIN GETTING ‘LOBBIED’ BY A WOMAN 30 YEARS HIS JUNIOR?

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

 J.P. Freire / American Spectator:   McCain Affair Story

Marc Ambinder:McCain/Lobbyist Story In The New York Times Finally Drops

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

 Pamela Geller / Atlas Shrugs:   SO WHAT?  —  Now that it is abundantly clear that McCain …

Karoli / Bang the Drum:   John McCain, Ethics and the Right’s Resolve

Isaac Chotiner / The New Republic:   The McCain Story  —  In a piece that reads as if a lot of stuff …

Will / Attytood:McCain’s lobbyist friend: “A View from the Top”

Michael Shaw / BAGnewsNotes:   Moral Wrecktitude?  —  First off, I owe a hearty thanks …

Jane Hamsher / Firedoglake:   She Gets Around…  Getting publicly exposed in the NYT …

Ken Layne / Wonkette:   Did McCain’s Lobbyist Girlfriend Betray Him For Bush?

Jonathan Martin / The Politico:NYT prints allegation of McCain relationship

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

 Dan Collins / protein wisdom:   JIM RUTENBERG, MARILYN W. THOMPSON, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEPHEN LABATON

Macranger / Macsmind:   Ny Time Story on McCain …

Jeralyn / TalkLeft:   McCain Slams NY Times Article Linking Him to Female Lobbyist

 Who will get hurt more—John McCain or the New York Times?That’s easy: the NYT.

I’m neither a futurist nor an interested party (except as a book lover and casual observer of trends who looks forward to a bright future for books when their content will be offered through many channels and via many platforms), but Evan Schnittman’s scenario about the pedestrian future of e-books [bottom line: they should and will, he predicts, be free] seems plausible to me:

My thinking was somewhat influenced by the events of the last couple of weeks. First Steve Jobs is quoted about the Kindle saying “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” One week later, Don Katz sold Audible, his digital audio platform and online retail store that was to spoken word recording what iTunes is to digital music, to Amazon for $300mm. Audible licenses its platform to Apple for use on the iPod/iTunes.

In my mind a connection was made between these events as I started to wonder if Jobs, smarting over the loss of Audible’s platform, was lashing out at Amazon. Then I wondered if this was a classic Jobs line – deflecting any interest in something and then a year later releasing that very thing. However, this idle speculation ebbed and a more interesting connection took its place – a link established in my mind between ebooks and audiobooks.

I have evolved my thinking to see that a “thriving” ebook market will look much more like the audio book market than the print book market. (I should mention that I see the parallel only in size, scope, and type of audience, not in market factors, content delivery, cost of production, or experiential preference. Audio books are not about reading – ebooks are all about reading.)

If one looks closely at how people like me use ebooks, you will see that convenience and portability is what drives use. While ebooks have been around for nearly 10 years in fairly usable forms, the devices to read them have been terrible – until now with the recent generation of e-ink readers such as the Kindle. (Yes, there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy reading on their PDA, iphone, laptop, etc – but let’s be honest; they are a tiny and low revenue producing audience.)

The growth I see in ebooks mimics the audio book phenomenon- by connecting readers who commute or travel with the content they crave. Audiobooks have made a marketplace out of people getting book content when they cannot read and has taught people to enjoy being read to again. Similarly, Ebooks are a brilliant option when you can bring everything you are reading with you and an even better option when you can buy instantly wherever you happen to be – just as digital audio downloads onto an iPod have done for the folks who don’t want to schlep around CD’s or cassettes.

 Via Michael Cader at Publishers Marketplace [subscription required]:

Returning to the Free eBook with Purchase Idea
Oxford’s Evan Schnittman has a two-part post on Oxford blog asking “Do I Believe in Ebooks?” Ultimately, what he does believe is that “an ebook license be granted as part of the purchase price to anyone who buys a new print book.”

He writes: “I have come to this somewhat radical idea, not because I am one of the folks who believe all digital content should be free for the benefit of mankind. Nor did I come to this conclusion because I don’t believe there will ever be a place for ebooks. I came to this conclusion after becoming a fairly heavy user of ebooks and learning first hand what is best and worst about ebooks.

“The reality is that even if the current audience of ebook users were to grow by magnitudes over the next few years, the total market would only reach 3 to 4% of print. Therefore we must admit to ourselves as an industry that ebooks will always be a small niche player as a standalone platform and make them free with new book purchases.

“Making ebooks free with new print books will be an operational puzzle that most will scoff at. While there certainly are huge issues to overcome, there are already many initiatives and ventures in place that make such a notion feasible.

“In the end this could be a marketer and merchandiser dream. I believe moving to free ebooks with the purchase of a new print title would cost or lose the industry nothing in sales as ebooks would still be available for individual purchase for those who don’t want to spend on print. What we would gain is that books – print books – would increase in value and utility.”

Recent post
First post

I await the bright future of a world awash with the cumulative information—and wisdom—of all mankind.

And I wish for every person access to the information and wisdom that can set him/her free.

It was in that spirit that I once wrote:

If you love books, set them free.

The Daily Mail attacks the British Olympic Association for its ourtrageous coddling of the Chinese with a vivid reminder of Britain’s shame and dishonor in the run-up to World War II:

National disgrace: In a picture from a German archive never before published in Britain, the England football team give Nazi salutes in Berlin in 1938  [e.a.]

Here are the facts, from the Mail:

British Olympic chiefs are to force athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China’s appalling human rights record – or face being banned from travelling to Beijing.

The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.

It is contained in a 32-page document that will be presented to all those who reach the qualifying standard and are chosen for the team.

From the moment they sign up, the competitors – likely to include the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips and world record holder Paula Radcliffe – will be effectively gagged from commenting on China’s politics, human rights abuses or illegal occupation of Tibet.

Here’s the argument against, from David Mellor, also writing in the Mail:

The Chinese have no right to a free ride this summer. And it isn’t just because China isn’t a democracy or that basic human rights and fundamental freedoms are denied to its citizens.

China is a menace to the civilised world for many other reasons, ranging from its support for renegade regimes such as the government of Sudan, who used Chinese weaponry to commit the Darfur massacres, to its shameless emergence as the number one polluter.

The Chinese deserve as much criticism over their contributions to global warming as over their suppression of human rights.

Long live the British tabloid media!

Jennifer Rubin gets off the line of the night:

But How Could It Be?

Even the Fox panel seem puzzled that Hillary Clinton could be winning the night. Reporters, even conservative ones, buy into the Oprah-Kennedy YWC ( “Yes, we can”) festival and are surprised when Clinton’s underlying strength comes through.

This the problem with the news-free universe created by the MSM (the one where infotainment rules): the people who are charged with informing us about what is happening in those places we cannot see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears have become enraptured by the fanciful tales they weave.

One day perhaps the captains of the various media industries (old and new) will understand their vast power to shape public opinion among the ignorant, distraction-loving, and narrative-seeking masses [e.a.].

LONDON (AFP) – Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain’s most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself.

It’s always been like that, you say. What does it matter? you ask.

It matters because this ignorance can be easily leveraged through the myriad new forms of political propaganda that the Age of Technology has ushered in and unleashed.

It matters because unless we educate people (in an engaging way, not only in a boring PBS or NPR way) in their common humanity rather than pander to their tribal instincts, we are moving backward, not forward.

It means a new era of wars, not “post-partisan politics.”

————
*** Do I really have to remind you that infotainment rules?

Upset as I am that the MSM is ignoring everything happening in the world in order to saturate us with campaign coverage—which is an entirely different issue—Jack Shafer says pretty much everything I think about the kind of coverage we’re getting: why not cover it as a horse race [e.a.]? ***

[Y]ou can no more divorce “horseracism” (to pinch Brian Montopoli’s coinage) from campaign coverage than you can divorce horseracism from the coverage of horse races.

Horse-race coverage isn’t the devil spawn of the television age. Scholar C. Anthony Broh dates horse-race coverage of campaigns back to 1888 …. [H]e catalogs its many pluses. Horse-race journalism increases voter interest in campaigns, something you can’t say for the average newspaper’s delineation of a position paper. “The horse-race image encourages reporters to emphasize competition rather than to forecast results,” Broh writes, …

Shafer catalogs some of the issues that have been raised (which helps to educate voters while entertaining them) , and then he makes the most important point of all: that the media is not the be-all and end-all for those those want to inform themselves about political platforms and issues.

But even if the press corps had abandoned substance, no voter is more than a mouse click away from detailed policy papers and unfiltered campaign speeches by the candidates. If you’re not an informed political consumer this year, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

He also makes the obvious point:

A political campaign is more than a traveling debate society. Beyond the issues, voters need to know why a candidate is (or isn’t) performing well in the polls, is (or isn’t) raising money, is (or isn’t) drawing crowds of supporters, or is (or isn’t) keeping his cool. Candidates win or lose for a reason, reasons that have to do with issue papers but also with how they carry themselves and present their positions. Candidates appreciate this fact, which is why they commission private polls so they can construct their own horse-race results and act on them.

Read the whole thing.

It’s so obvious a point: Politicians are competing for our votes. Why wouldn’t we want to watch the competition?

All I would add is that how candidates hold up under the pressures of a political campaign also gives undecided voters information they take into consideration when deciding (assuming that they’re paying attention, which is a big assumption to make).

—————

*** Anecdotal evidence indicates that the coverage is a hit. I know a lot of people who aren’t very much into politics who have been following the antics—it’s just another kind of Reality TV show!

The NYT’s David Carr delivers grim news to “creatives”:

I’ve got some bad news for striking Hollywood writers: Election 2008 is a breakaway hit.

January was supposed to be the month when the writers’ strike took its toll, subjecting viewers to a menu of desiccated repeats and cheesy reality shows. Instead, the primary season is serving as the backdrop for one of the most compelling runs of event television in years, creating the kind of chatter network marketers would kill for and spectacular ratings for cable news.

Carr repeatedly tries to suggest that it’s the absence of appealing alternatives (like sports, late-night comedy, and scripted shows, for example) that accounts for the huge gains in audience numbers for “cable news” since 2004.

The Times’s Bill Keller disagrees:

“I think the level of interest in the presidential race would be intense even if writers were still churning out episodes of ‘24’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ ” he wrote. “It’s a defining race for both parties, with a cast of fascinating candidates, some of whom fall into the breakthrough category. There also seems to be a visceral national yearning to turn the page.”

Perhaps. But I’m more inclined to accept the explanation of Brian Grazer, who is not a gazillionaire producer for nothing [e.a.]:

“There is a new episode on almost every night,” said Brian Grazer, a Hollywood producer who is in what is left of the Oscar hunt with “American Gangster.” “It is very human to be constantly searching for new stories, and now that the traditional outlets of those stories are shutting down, people are finding their drama in these unfolding events.”

So, yes, I agree with Grazer and with Keller. But neither one of them will come out and say the bleeding obvious: that it is the manner of coverage of politics that is drawing in the audiences. The “drama” is being manufactured by the cable “news” networks. (In this case, it is helped along by the wide-open nature of the political race, but that only makes it easier for the networks to churn out stories with unpredictable endings.)

It is not news. It is infotainment—in other words, information (none of which is necessarily true) packaged as entertainment.  

Now do you believe me when I say that Infotainment Rules? Here’s what I wrote:

Television, however, delivers what sells, and what sells is entertainment—or stuff that is packaged like entertainment. Infotainment doesn’t have to be bad or stupid or crass. High-quality infotainment may in fact be superior to dry “news” as a vehicle for delivering information to audiences.

Once again: I do not endorse the hideous devolution of TV “news” into infotainment. I am merely trying to get people to understand that what they’re getting on TV is not “news.” It’s entertainment, and the goal of its producers is to get you to watch their channel.

They do it by hooking you on stories. If the stories are exciting and the ending isn’t known to anyone in advance (as in an election, or a sensational kidnapping, or some violent flare-up somewhere, for example), people tune in. That’s why cable “news” is addicted to horse-race coverage of the U.S. election that is ten months away and can barely turn away to give any attention to the visit of our president to the Middle East.

If you want to know the news, take advantage of the vast amount of information available on the Internet and read widely.

If you want fictional rather than reality-based (and reality-bending) entertainment on TV and you want our political process to be a little more serious and less unseemly … I don’t know how to advise you. All I do is call ‘em how I see ‘em.

Before they can get our vote, presidential hopefuls must get our attention. Hillary did that, intentionally or not (I think her tearing up wasn’t intentional but that she immediately recognized that she could make it work for her and that she seized the moment), and it worked. The other day, the New York Times, describing the desultory state of Rudy Giuliani’s campaign, said [e.a.]:

Mr. Giuliani’s campaign has been marginalized in recent weeks. Efforts to inject itself into the news cycle – including the release of a television commercial featuring Osama bin Laden and the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center – have had mixed results and been largely overshadowed by the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The real contest is for our attention.

Giuliani shouldn’t feel too bad. As I write, our president is in the Middle East trying to suggest that he’s making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians (a burning issue for 60 years), and even he can’t get any press.

I love horse race coverage! This has been fun, exciting, and completely unpredictable—the very essence of entertainment (not to mention democracy).

What I mean about the essence of entertainment is this:

It was only four days ago that Mike Huckabee had the MSM and the blogosphere and the pundits eating out of his hand. Now, it’s Mike Who? (Intellectual honesty also compels me to mention Rudy Giuliani’s seemingly dire straits. I told you I’m not a politico.

What a ride. She who was declared deader than a doornail by the most level-headed commenters only hours ago has been chosen by the Democrats of New Hampshire. Against all expectations.

In her acceptance speech, Hillary said she’d found her own voice. Interesting. I wonder what that will sound like. (Terry McAuliffe is already spreading the meme.)

Crazy! It was impossible not to get caught up in Obama-mania. Has it been deflated? Who knows!

Kevin Drum, for one, is counting his blessings:

I have several reasons for being pleased with the results of tonight’s Democratic primary:

Hillary Clinton’s victory felt to me an awful lot like a repudiation of the mainstream pundits who spent the entire weekend first dumping all over her and then playing the “Hillary in tears” tape on practically a continuous loop yesterday.

Yep, that’s a good one. Here’s an even better one:

Hillary’s victory should amp up Andrew Sullivan into even greater feats of CDS hysterics than we’ve seen so far. If that’s possible. In any case, he seems to thrive on a state of constant agitation and stomach-churning nausea, so I figure Hillary’s victory is probably good for him.

And it was the bitches in the house that came out to support her: Hillary beat Obama with women voters by 13%.

Best of all, this is a win for America (I mean that all of it—including the highly contested and jam-packed campaign, the many debates, the incessant infotainment-heavy media coverage), because people are showing an increased interest in the political process.

And that, dear readers, is why I think that Infotainment Rules! (It grabs your attention—sometimes even in the public interest and to the benefit of our vibrant democracy.)

Mike Huckabee is the new master manipulator, according to two versions of the same story (both by the same writer, Kit Seelye) in the New York Times. Here’s the one that was printed in the dead-tree paper that arrived on my NYC doorstep early this morning [e.a.]:

 In a bizarre bit of political theater, Mike Huckabee told news outlets on Monday that he was not going to broadcast a negative commercial against Mitt Romney, his chief rival in the Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa. Then he showed that advertisement to the news media, which in reporting the announcement went on to give his anti-Romney message free publicity while he claimed the moral high ground.

This version—quite negative in tone, no? Note that the political theater is said to be “bizarre” and that Huckabee was “claiming” the moral high ground while rolling around in the mud—also suggests, albeit very tangentially, the author of the successful tactic (Ed Rollins, “the Brawler,” who recently signed on with the Huckabee campaign).

In the Times, Seelye notes, at the end of her piece:

There appeared to have been some dissent in the Huckabee camp over whether to attack Mr. Romney. In an interview last Wednesday, Mr. Huckabee’s longtime campaign manager, Chip Saltzman, insisted the campaign planned to maintain a positive tone until the end. But on the same day, Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican consultant and Mr. Huckabee’s new national campaign chairman, said he expected to begin firing back in a few days.

The other version of the Kit Seelye story, which you can find here (I got the link via Ann Althouse), made no specific mention of the fact that the strategy worked but made it abundantly clear that it had worked:

In an act of political jujitsu, Mike Huckabee has halted a negative ad that he was about to broadcast on television Monday against his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. But while claiming the moral high ground, he proceeded to show the ad to a roomful of reporters, photographers and television cameras who are repeating his anti-Romney message for free while Mr. Huckabee declares that his hands are clean.

The display unfolded at the Marriott Hotel here to the mirth of the journalists who watched Mr. Huckabee’s legerdemain even as they became the conduit for his attacks against Romney.

At the same time, he pointed to media cynicism as the reason he felt compelled to show the ad, saying that unless he showed it, reporters would not believe that it really existed. It criticized Mr. Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts, saying he supported gun control, allowed a co-pay for abortions in his health plan, raised taxes and ordered no executions.

This version is a lot softer in tone. For example: “political jujitsu,” like its martial-arts namesake, is an art—something to be admired rather than loathed (like a “bizarre bit of political theater”; see above).

Kinda makes me wonder what happened between these two versions of the story. In any event, however, the strategy worked. 

Huckabee made the news, and the media carried his anti-Romney message. 

In a rare moment of self-reflection from a member of the MSM,  Seelye explains (in the more negative piece) how this happens [e.a.]:

The circumstances of the commercial and the nature of free media, particularly now with YouTube, make it likely that the advertisement will be viewed far more often than if it had simply run. There is a long history of news coverage guaranteeing a commercial publicity that money could not buy.

In 1964, the “daisy” spot, which suggested that Barry Goldwater’s election would lead to nuclear war, was broadcast on television just once. And in 2004, advertisements by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s military record, had a limited run in a few small markets before being widely covered in the press.

If I had one wish for 2008 (and forward), I would wish that everyone in the American media—reporters, pundits, columnists, bloggers, and news and entertainment executives—would get wise to how they always risk being played not just by political enemies at home but also by those abroad: the world’s bad political actors.

I’ve said it before, in “the new season from Al Qaeda Productions,”and I’ll say it again:

 Frank Rich (among many others) is wasting his brain cells developing new crackpot conspiracy theories to explain the behavior of Bush & Co.  … I wish these brilliant analysts would spend just a fraction of their time deconstructing the other characters populating the world stage-you know, the ones who are causing real trouble for us.

Since our media-saturated world is here to stay, it only makes sense to focus attention on the sophisticated media strategies, PR initiatives, and PRopaganda narratives of any player (whether domestic or foreign) who would make a claim on our attention (which is itself increasingly fractured by the many channels and niches available to us—but that’s a subject for another day).

Players who seek the attention of the media—including especially the world’s bad political actors— have all  learned to market themselves to us as if we were potential fans and customers, and a lot of naive but influential people fall for their act.

We Americans need to be alert to the absence of truth from much of that kind of advertising—particularly as more and more celebrities, who often have a deficit of political sophistication and also have a disproportionate influence on the public, get in on the act.

Dan Drezner recently explained what celebs are up to [e.a.]. 

It sometimes seems as though celebrities today are obsessed with trying to move the global agenda. Like Angelina Jolie. Think of how she’s changed her image since her breakup with Billy Bob Thornton. In February, she published an Op-Ed article in the Washington Post about the crisis in Darfur. …

Jolie is just one of many star activists. Madonna, Bono, Sean Penn, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney and Sheryl Crow — all have used their celebrity status to push their favored causes in an effort to affect what governments do and say. But why do they do it, and will it work?

Drezner’s focus is on the effectiveness of celebrities’ advocacy on policy decisions (mixed at best, since results—if any—take a long time to show up; change happens slowly in the real world). I’m more interested in their ability to influence public opinion. Drezner explains how they exert their influence—through us, their fans:

[T]he power of soft news has given stars new leverage. Their rising clout has as much to do with how we consume information as it does with the celebrities themselves. Cable television, talk radio and weblogs have radically diversified the news sources available to Americans. The more competitive marketplace for news and entertainment affects how public opinion on foreign policy is formed.

In Drezner’s formulation, cable TV (which is almost all views and no news), talk radio, and blogs are now news sources. I disagree: they’re spreaders of racy, juicy, dramatic, sensational headlines that provoke strong emotion. They are, in other words, infotainment. But I digress.

My point is that celebrities—because we fall in love with them so easily and can hardly ever fall out of love with them, because it’s their job to seduce us—have an outsize influence in this new universe  of infotainment-masquerading-as-news. We should all be more circumspect about our indiscriminate fandom.

Maybe in the new year I’ll have time to explore this topic some more.

The Flack passes along the news (from Newsweek) that al Qaeda’s main spokesman, Zawahiri, feeling burned by the media, is trying another tack—he’s now making himself available for long-distance interviews by journalists, via email questions submitted to al Qaeda’s media arm, As-Sahaab (The Cloud).

Newsweek rightly labels this a publicity tactic, and it’s a shrewd one, because it garners al Qaeda a different kind of global media attention from what they’re used to [e.a.]:

This is the first time Al Qaeda has made a formal call to journalists, although it will not be the first time the radical Islamic group has granted interviews to Western media. Counterterrorism experts believe that the posting is genuine and that it is part of Al Qaeda’s evolving tactics to use the Web as part of its propaganda arsenal. “This is a continuation of the efforts by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership to push themselves forward in the public viewpoint,” says Maj. Reid Sawyer, editor of “Terrorism and Counterterrorism” and a lecturer of terrorism studies at Columbia University

Zawahiri hopes to put himself on equal footing with world leaders by doing an “Al Qaeda Press Avail,” as the Flack calls it. As a PR pro, he’s calling bullshit on it [e.a.].

By feigning media access, the organization cultivates an image of civilized engagement among the unsuspecting masses, all the while perpetrating or planning unspeakable actions.

“Jarret Brachman, a former CIA analyst now in the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point describes this as playing to the YouTube generation. ‘It completely fits Al Qaeda’s communications strategy over the past two years, which is how to get people more invested in the movement.’”

And Zawahiri is not alone in gaming the court of public opinion by playing the “freedom of the press” card. A free media today seems more of a propaganda tool and less of a requirement to qualify as a modern society.

The Flack is certainly right to note that all kinds of international players are now gaming the court of public opinion. I wouldn’t characterize our free media as a propaganda tool, though, but rather as a rich propaganda outlet or channel-–one that the world’s most mischievous and/or bad actors (dictators and/or theocratic totalitarians) are very savvy about exploiting via PRopaganda^TM (PR-fueled “dramatic narratives”) because they are so savvy about actual propaganda in their own autocracies, dictatorships, and/or totalitarian theocracies.

Influencing public opinion is a black art in totalitarian societies and dictatorships. It is often subtle. (Even autocrats and theocrats find that it is much more effective to persuade the people to come around to their point of view than it is to have to police them and punish them all the time. Understandably, people get impatient and upset with that kind of violence and will try to revolt. So if you want to suppress them and keep them pacified, you have to be less obvious about your control over them, more refined, more convincing. Dictatorships that want to last need the silent consent of their people, so they spend an inordinate amount of time building theories and revisionist histories and other narratives that “justify” their existence. These narratives are constantly “streamed” through their societies—via textbooks, classrooms, party conference papers, academia, and of course the media, which is controlled by the state.)

Of course the world’s bad guys are going to have superlative media skills.

The Flack writes:

Think Putin, Ahmadinejad, Assad and all the other despots who’ve gutted their nation’s free media, without any real retribution.

Well, not quite. These men haven’t gutted their nations’ free media. What free media? Iran has no free media. Syria has no free media. Russia has only a nominally free media since Putin took power.

The absence of freedom (of the press, among other things) in these countries—and the (dictatorial, theocratic, autocratic, or totalitarian) mode of power their leaders hold over their people—is exactly the problem with them.

It’s important that American media organizations and media-related professionals understand how easy it is for them to be used as propaganda outlets by the world’s bad actors.

But if execs like CNN’s Jonathan Klein, for example, are any indication, our media conglomerates are so uninterested in the content of what they air (as long as it brings in plenty of dough) that they notoriously turn a blind eye to the beyond-the-news-cycle impact of glorifying, say, Vladimir Putin:

Platon for TIME

After cleverly naming my blog Infotainment Rules, I’ve been writing for nearly two years about the total collapse of the pretense that television offers programming called worthy of the term “the news.” CNN prez Jonathan Klein hammers the final nails into the coffin here.

First, he decries the absence of horrifying news events (such as, I assume, tsunamis and spectacular terrorist attacks) in the year 2007, because they would have dragged in more overall viewers:

“It hasn’t been the greatest news year,” Mr. Klein said. “There haven’t been major news events that have moved the needle.

Then he says that to compete in the 8 o’clock slot (against Keith Olbermann), CNN will use its news footage to provide yucks for viewers:

Mr. Klein suggested that Campbell Brown’s new 8 p.m. show, set to debut in February, would compete by being “more talk-oriented,” by featuring fewer “formal pieces,” and by on occasion capitalizing on Ms. Brown’s sometimes-comic sensibility towards the news, à la Comedy’s Central The Daily Show. “Jon Stewart should not corner the market on innovative uses of tape,” said Mr. Klein. “He wishes he had access to the amount of material we get in every day.”

Finally, he promotes CNN’s “documentaries”—such as the God’s Warriors by Christiane Amanpour, which suggested that Jewish and Christian fundamentalists are as big a threat to the world as the Islamist freaks who like to blow up, torture, main, cripple, intimidate, and terrify innocents, Muslim and otherwise, the world over for the glory of Allah [e.a.].

Mr. Klein said that when he arrived at CNN in November 2004, he discovered a documentary team focused primarily on “arcane” subject matter.

Under Mr. Klein’s direction, CNN documentaries have married high-profile CNN reporters with equally high-profile subjects—Christiane Amanpour and religious fundamentalism, Campbell Brown and political attack ads, Anderson Cooper and the environment. Mr. Klein said he encourages his reporters to draw conclusions in their documentaries—an upshot of which, he acknowledged, is that CNN docs increasingly “step on some vested interests, and they do respond.”

Sure enough, over the past year, CNN documentaries have riled up everyone from media watchdog types to conservative political operatives to MSNBC’s Dan Abrams to professional wrestlers. Mr. Klein suggested that he wouldn’t shy away from the hostile attention in the years to come—and suggested it probably does the network as much good as harm.

“What I love is when our competitors then turn that into segments on their shows,” said Mr. Klein. “They have nothing else to talk about other than who has CNN pissed off today. That’s great. We’ll provide fodder for their programming, as long as they get our initials right.”

See, as long as CNN is getting attention, its president doesn’t care what it gets attention for. The content of his programs is of interest to him only to the extent that it garners attention. Whether the subject is World War Three or Anna Nicole Smith doesn’t matter to him. Is he ashamed to admit it? Fuggedaboudit! He loves it! And he’s signed on for four more years!

Here’s his picture for your dartboard:

I’ve been too busy to do be my usual news-junkie self lately. Plus, ’tis the season to be jolly, and all “news” leads to mud-slinging, which is not my cuppa, so I’m not paying attention. And no late-night TV makes it much easier to avoid.

I was wondering, though: if Stewart and Colbert and Leno and Letterman aren’t there to process and massage political “news” for their audiences–which, after all, are comprised of voters (and demographically desirable ones), what’s the effect of the strike on events on the ground?

Tom Maustad of the Dallas Morning News says that the strike is “cultural buzz kill.” Moreover, one of his interviewees says, the strongest effect is on the culture, not on the candidates.

“[T]his has definitely had the effect of pretty much deleting politics from pop culture,” says Rich Hanley, communications professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. …

“Campaigns are great for comedy, that’s for sure,” Hanley says. “But the funny thing is, the strikes keep going, the campaigns keep going and there’s no breakdown, no crisis. If anything, I think the strike is showing how irrelevant, or at least disposable, this type of programming really is.”

So, yeah: obviously, the strike is bad news for those who deliver (and profit from) the “culture.” But Travis Daub suggests  the strike might also affects the candidates, in unexpected ways:

This year, fewer people will watch campaign ads

More people will watch the debates

No 24

No Leno or Letterman

No “Indecision 2008,” or Saturday Night Live takedowns of the candidates

Voters might be better informed

Bottom line, says Daub:

Taking TV out of the election will probably be a great equalizer. Suddenly, the ad dollars spent on Iowa and New Hampshire airtime are less valuable, and the underdogs have a chance to harness the Internet, the debates and other nontraditional outlets to get their messages across.

So what’s a campaign media strategist to do? Take advantage of other, nontraditional broadcasts where your candidate could be featured. Expect more candidates popping up at sporting events, on daytime talk shows, or even on the reality circuit. Will Mike Huckabee do a guest appearance on the Biggest Loser? We can only hope.

More from Daub here in an interview.

I find it pretty interesting that the candidates’ campaigns (and the observers of the phenomenon of the writers’ strike) don’t even pay lip service to the role of the traditional outlet for getting candidates’ messages out—namely, “the news.”

What’s the MSM, chopped liver? And if so, could it be because the broadcast arm of the MSM now contains hardly any traditional–i.e., “straight” news—outlets? because, well, infotainment (i.e., narrative-driven information dissemination) rules?

Via Ron Hogan at GalleyCat, I just heard about DailyLit.

What an amazingly great idea! You want to read a public domain classic (and a growing list of copyrighted works)? Sign up and get an e-mail a day (or an RSS feed) and read your book in byte-size installments.

Read all about the various ways to make this simple, free service work for you. (You don’t have to wait till the next day to read the next installment if you just can’t wait.) I’m signing up right now to get The Education of Henry Adams, starting tomorrow, in 197 parts!

Really, I think this is genius—not so much because it will be self-sustaining (I can’t see reading this way for many consecutive books … though, who knows? I haven’t even tried it yet—and, like every other lit snot, I was certainly wrong about audiobooks: I thought the idea was ridiculous, and it’s a huge part of the book business) but rather because it will certainly reignite people’s passion for reading in long form—as in, you know, real books.

At the same time, it enables those who love to read but really can’t spare the time (say, a presidential candidate or a neurosurgeon at a teaching hospital or a traffic controller or a law clerk or nurse on 12-hour shifts) to get their fix and reconnect with their passion.

Kudos.

It’s in this spirit that I embrace digitization. Again:

if you want to save books, set them free

As Spengler said in quite a different context the other day: when nothing works, you try everything.

The NYT’s David Carr makes it sound easy:  Stay out of the spotlight! [e.a.]

If Ms. Regan and the News Corporation don’t settle, the discovery and trial could be embarrassing. …

It’s not that her particular claims about the News Corporation have to stick. Pull back the blankets on any enterprise — the book business, the movie business, what the heck, the news business — and some common industry practices are not going to look so good in the cold light of the courtroom. She was in a position to know a lot, and she may be in the mood to tell all of it.

“We don’t know the truth of the various allegations, but other things may come out that are not directly related to what she is suing for,” said Mark C. Zauderer, a Manhattan trial lawyer. “You have to consider the financial exposure versus the reputational exposure of not settling.”

Carr suggests that it’s NewsCorp. which will suffer embarrassment.

So before News Corporation executives decide to tangle with Ms. Regan in court, perhaps they should remember why they hired her in the first place.

Um, no. Rupert Murdoch, his reputation as a bottom feeder cemented, cannot possibly be embarrassed. It’s the reputation of HarperCollins that’s at stake here, and publishers don’t really need bad publicity, because their business is under enough pressure as is.

But publishers do seem a tad dazed and confused about the darn pace of things these days. Why, Peter Osnos was amazed that a feeding frenzy erupted over catalog copy from a book he plans to publish in April 2008:

[W]hat was amazing about the response was that it became a huge story before anyone pursued its context. …

The first reaction to the excerpt was that McClellan, by saying they were “involved,” was accusing the president and vice-president of deliberate deception. The rejoicing among administration critics was palpable. Senators Schumer and Dodd and the outed Valerie Plame herself were immediately available to denounce the president. …

We conferred with McClellan and decided that he was better off working on his book than grappling with the media (I did not immediately realize that there was a firestorm on the Web and cable …) I explained [to the media] that … the full story must await publication.

The backlash then ensued … [T]he newspaper Web sites, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, joined in the fray with blog entries and chat sessions conveying full sound and fury and the “deflating” fact that McClellan was not accusing the president of deliberate deception.

And the meaning of it all?

Scott McClellan is writing a responsible book about his moment in history. Much of our popular media, including some leading brand names, apparently shoot first and ask later. The blogosphere and cable news operate in a universe of their own in which frenzy and vituperation are the major currency.

Well, yes: the public is eager for new entertainments, so the guardians of the court of public opinion—the media—needs a constant supply of grist for the mill. Of course they get all frenzied and vituperative. Everybody knows that.

The days of old-fashioned publicity campaigns and fancy, newfangled rollouts—controlled and controllable—are over.

No one has yet managed to harness the power of a viral media frenzy to benefit him/herself: the results are too unpredictable. That’s why everyone is—or should be—cautious about getting into the spotlight.

Courtesy of our friends at the New York Post,

Islamist fanaticism is having a Bad PR Day.

And that’s a good thing.

I’ve been re-reading Daniel Boorstin’s classic 1961 work of social criticism The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (which is extraordinarily fresh and insightful for a 45-year-old book, by the way, but that’s a topic for another day).

Underlying Boorstin’s thesis of a mid-twentieth-century American populace transfixed by images is his notion that advertising—or any kind of marketing—succeeds by holding up a mirror to potential customers and offering them an enticing, image of themselves (more on this another day, but let’s just say for now that advertising is about fantasy-fulfillment).

Now, along comes the NYT’s Elisabetta Povoledo to tell us that Italians are transfixed by a six-part TV biopic, “The Boss of Bosses,” because the mirror it holds up to its audience shows a somewhat less than flattering image of itself [e.a.]:

“Italy has always been fascinated by the Mafia, by its personification of evil,” [a reporter] said in a phone interview.

Another possible explanation for the popularity of “Il Capo dei Capi” may be that it goes beyond mere storytelling and puts Italy in front of an unflattering — if engrossing — mirror of itself. It suggests that if Mr. Riina became the most formidable and feared mobster in Italian history, it was thanks to the collusion of political and economic forces at various levels of Italian society.

“It’s not fiction — it’s a real story that tells 50 years of Italian history, and it names names,” said Pietro Valsecchi, who produced the series. “It tells us just what sort of country we have been living in, it shows us the complicity of the state, it puts the Mafia in our face.”

There’s some evidence for the notion that its roots in reality drive the popularity of the series:

“The Sopranos,” the HBO drama about Italian-American bad guys, never caught on here.

The producer gets the last word [e.a.]:

Fictionalizing reality may be the best way to educate Italy’s distracted audience, Mr. Valsecchi said. “Italians don’t read newspapers — they barely glance at headlines. But here they’re getting the full story, with all its implications.”

Well, he gets the next-to-last word. I get the last word, which is a minor amendment to Mr. Valsecchi’s proposition: Fictionalizing reality is a way to infotain an audience—that is, to capture its attention. But let’s not get carried away. That is different from educating the audience.