Entries Tagged 'trial by media' ↓

Don’t you hate it when David Brooks uses his New York Times perch to remind his readers that life is full of unexpected turns, expecially ones that reflect well on BushHitler?

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. … The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

Yep. (This also applies to Brooks, by the way, who referred to the Iraq war as “a disaster” many times during what he now refers to as “the dark days of 2006.”) He’s not humble enough to acknowledge his own previous cocksureness and foolishness. But he’s out there on the cutting edge of what should be opinion right now. We’ll see how it plays.

Brooks sets the stage:

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson [about orthodox thinking] during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

It’s unlikely that there will be many such souls, but count me among those who grudgingly (grudgingly because we are of a certain [anti-Vietnam War] age) admit that Bush’s stubbornness has, on balance, been a good thing for America in the immediate wake of 9/11. Many of America’s cocksure enemies have stood down in the wake of Bush’s cowboy-like cocksure aggressiveness. Bush himself has said he regrets the language he used; I didn’t hear him say that he regrets his “going on offense” against America’s enemies, as indeed he shouldn’t.

Something else has been gained in these long seven years. Brooks doesn’t mention it, but I will:L Islamism now has many respectable enemies—including several of Britain’s most famous public intellectuals and novelists.

The New York Times doesn’t quite approve of such heterodox thoughts as this one expressed by Ian McEwan, the author of Atonement:

“As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark skinned, he who criticizes it is racist.” He added: “This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on — we know it well.”

The Independent, a British paper, referred to McEwan’s words as

an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism

and pointed out that these words could,

in today’s febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a “hate crime”.

Despite adding to the “febrile” climate surrounding this issue, at least the Independent is honest enough to give a full airing to McEwan’s views, which I reprint here with some emphasis [e.a.]:

McEwan – author of On Chesil Beach and the acclaimed Atonement and Enduring Love – has spoken on the issue of Islamism before, telling The New York Times last December: “All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, ‘I find some ideas in Islam questionable’ without being called a racist.”

But his words in the Corriere interview are far stronger, although they do fall short of the invective deployed by Martin Amis. He has said “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”, and told The Independent’s columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Muslim, in an open letter: “Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.”

McEwan’s interviewer pointed out that there exist equally hard-line schools of thought within Christianity, for example in the United States. “I find them equally absurd,” McEwan replied. “I don’t like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don’t want to kill anyone in my city, that’s the difference.”

But McEwan’s specific irritation is reserved for those who find ideological grounds to condemn his and Amis’s views. “When you ask a novelist or a poet about his vision regarding an aspect of the world, you don’t get the response of a politician or a sociologist, but even if you don’t like what he says you have to accept it, you can’t react with defamation. Martin is not a racist, and neither am I.”

Thank you, Ian McEwan. And may others join you in perpetrating the “hate crime” of speaking out in favor of freedom of expression, even (perhaps especially) when your ideas are out of favor with “expert and elite opinion” [Brooks's phrase].

[updated (twice) with some missing links]

As the writer of a blog called Infotainment Rules I’m in no position to criticize lowbrow culture—indeed, I defend it as the right of the people to choose their own entertainment (though I believe there’s a lot of room for improvement in the realm of pop culture, including its ability to inform while it entertains), and note that the long history of “lowbrow” entertainment (i.e., that which is created for the masses) includes many cultural products that evolved, over time, to become the highest-of-the-highbrow culture.

But new media emperor Nick Denton carries things a little too far when he defends a nasty gossip-and-vengeance campaign he has been running on Gawker ever since his nasty but addictive website was eviscerated in New York magazine and in n+1 in the fall of 2007 (the latter evisceration carried out after a long Gawker campaign against n+1 and its most prominent and vocal defender, co-founder and co-editor Keith Gessen).

Word of the end of Gawker (by the New York Times here and by me here) turns out to have been premature. Its nasty crab antics continue unabated.

Before its prematurely announced demise, in April 2007, Emily Gould (then a Gawker writer and at the time a good [read: viciously-anti-celebrity and anti-elitist] ideological fit with Choire Sicha and head honcho Denton) went on Larry King Live (hosted by Jimmy Kimmel that night) to defend the “Gawker Stalker” feature (which encourages people to write in with their celebrity sightings) as “citizen journalism”; she stated that celebrities were rich enough to defend themselves against unwanted scrutiny, and in any case, she suggested, they had invited exactly such scrutiny because they had wanted to be famous and become celebrities).

Gould was very young (25 or so), and she has since recanted (sorta; she hasn’t really been deprogrammed. Now that she herself has become a target of the crab antics she herself once practiced at Gawker, she seems to regret her participation but doesn’t ever apologize; indeed, some in the media accused her of continuing to malign people in order to build herself up. Others tried to explain to long-suffering “women writers” why Emily Gould (the wrong person, and role model) became famous while they continued to suffer in unpublished silence and while they witnessed the reputation of “bloggers”—all of them—being tarnished by this little exhibitionist.

So, no: Gould didn’t apologize. Instead, she tried to move on. She decided, it seems, to embrace her past as just that—the past—as she notes in this article recently published in the NYT Magazine. My take? She’s still waaaay too into herself. But she’s a good writer (no small thing, since writing is her career), and even something of a literary heroine to some of the commenters on her blog).***

[T]he piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since.

For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it. At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits.

And, most interesting from my point of view, Gould has developed her own internet ethics:

If you wouldn’t associate your real name with a comment or you wouldn’t express those same ideas in person, given the opportunity, chances are you’re a cowardly asshole who should keep his or her thoughts to him or herself.

So that’s a good bit of the backstory, if you’re still following along. (It’s trying, I know.)

Now, some months later, Nick Denton defends his relentless and personal attacks on Gould—(a 26-year-old freelance writer now formerly of Gawker) and on her personal life, which includes Gessen, whom she once attacked from her Gawker perch).

Denton asserts (in not so many words) that his vicious attempted takedowns of a new “media elite” are the essence of journalism: the public’s right to know [e.a.]:

• Nick Denton at 01:20 PM on 06/05/08

  Connectedness Index: 1764

  @Choire: The entangling of literary, journalistic and romantic relationships is a topic worthy of Gawker. You can’t understand how the media works unless you know who dated whom. Every job, every magazine commission, every anonymous quote, every resentment-they can only be fully understood if you know that X went to school with Y who introduced them to Z who commissioned X to write that magazine piece which turned into a book contract lined up by Y’s former lover. When you and I chat over lunch, that’s how we talk. Why should all this information be reserved for the private conversations of media insiders? That’s why Gawker exists: to put all of that invaluable social information out on the web and make the media machine a little less monolithic and intimidating than it can so often seem.

Now: I have written before about gossip as the ultimate weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

Here:

[[See Joshua Gamson’s book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I’m coming from with my celebrity obsession. It’s the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]

And here:

[G]ossip has traditionally been a weapon of the powerless against the powerful [which is one reason I do not criticize infotainment–i.e., institutionalized gossip–but rather accept it; in the media age, gossip may be even a more potent weapon than ever against the powerful] , as Gail Collins wrote in her entertaining and informative book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics [e.a.]:

For much of human history, [gossip] was one of the few weapons available to the powerless: servants who spread stories about their masters, peasants who irreverently speculated about the most private aspects of life in the manor. … In American history, gossip has sometimes been a reaction against heavily marketed politicians who voters might suspect were being thrust upon them against their will.

But minor media and literary celebrities like Emily Gould and Keith Gessen do not exactly pose the same threat to the people (who do indeed have a right to know) as do “heavily marketed politicians” (who may eventually assume positions from which they can perpetrate much harm on the electorate, and the country). So: invective about such minor celebrities under the guise of “media gossip”—even if it’s confined to the minuscule world of people who wish they too could be similarly celebrated—is hardly in service of the right of the people to know.

It’s “only”gossip—hurtful to those gossiped about and delightful to those who love gossip. The perfect gossip item, as Denton was quoted by the NYT as saying, is:

something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

New-media “gossip” is (formerly private but amusing and Schadenfreude-laced) dinner-party conversation released into the bloodstream of the internet, where it lives forever, as David Frum noted four years ago for New York magazine:

Frum was merely working with the rumors [about John Kerry] that everyone else was spreading around. That’s how opinion culture has evolved, and it’s been enabled by the Internet. Who cares if you’re wrong? As it happens, Frum says he does.

“I regret it,” he says now. “I read it in the paper, I heard it gossiped about, but I didn’t do anything like reporting. I joked about it on the Internet in a way I would at dinner. Then I learned the Net is like print, not like dinner.”

The “Net is like print, not like dinner [conversation].” Those sound like immortal words, right? Four years later, tell them to Mayhill Fowler, or to Arianna Huffington, both of whom have had an impact on the political campaigns of presidential hopefuls with their passing on of “dinner party” gossip.

For his part—and damn the consequences—Gessen is fighting back. He’s not fighting the gossip, mind you; he seems inured to that. He’s fighting for his literary reputation, and against ad-hominem invective (masquerading as literary criticism) written by cretins:

Nick Denton, you fucking ninny: Everyone went to the same six schools. Everyone has dated everyone. Now what? What have you got now? Because once we grant you that, you actually have to start making aesthetic and moral distinctions between actual written texts. And you don’t know how to do that anymore. Because you’re a pissy little gossip. Your brain was once trained to think and write, and you’ve gone and turned it to mush. You don’t even put commas in the right places, much less think straight.

And Choire—I like you, I think you’re a good guy, you have a good written style—and yet I’m afraid the same goes for you. Choire, the trouble is not that Gawker makes insinuations. The trouble is that Gawker doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Just like you, when you write about books you haven’t read [he's referring to this "review" ---ed.]

Interesting times indeed.

update: Bloggers attack Gessen in ad hominem rants.

Choire Sicha pounds him, too, in a Radar posted tagged “catfights.” 

———————–

*** And she has performed a public service for readers of the New York Times like my elderly mother, who keep hearing about blogs and blogging. In her immortal words: “I don’t understand why anyone would publish their private thoughts like that, and I don’t know who cares about this silly girl’s story. But now I finally understand what this blogging is all about!”)

If you were feeling guilty about following the juicy story of the Los Angeles mayor’s “journalist” girlfriend who reported that the mayor was having an affair but failed to mention that she was his paramour, you can stop feeling guilty. Now.

In a post titled “More Hot Mayoral Sex,” Mickey Kaus explains why political gossip is good for America (emphases in the original):

The lid is off: L.A.’s mayor faces some N.Y. tabloid-style questioning at a news conference. The L.A. Times reporter who didn’t get the story doesn’t know quite what to make of this new state of affairs–I detect a mild sneering tone! Luke Ford sees a “beautiful synchronicity.” … I think Angelenos may be actually getting interested in local politics for once, which will give us better government in the long run. Special interests (e.g., unions, developers) have less power when people are actually paying attention. [What will happen if all the pols in power are no longer womanizers, etc.?--ed Not a serious possibility.] …

The powerful have less power when people are paying attention. And people pay attention when their interest is piqued. One of the things that piques people’s interest is gossipy, tabloid-style “journalism.” Even that is better than their paying no attention at all … which is the alternative.

Long live the people’s interest, and may we find many infotaining ways to pique it!

Radar outs the Imus “Loyalists” and “Defectors” … and then updates with the news that CBS dumped him.

I guess we know the real name of the game now: Gotcha!

Compared to this, Ann Althouse has had it easy with only five or six episodes of Bloggingheads devoted to her one-minute reaming-out of Garance Franke-Ruta.

Knowing that I am virtually alone, I’ll go on the record and say that I sympathize with Ann, because the same thing happened to me recently … except that it happened in real life. With a friend, who recoiled. Literally.

Face it, Ann. They’re just not that into you. If they read me, they wouldn’t be into me, either. Fuck ‘em.

Speaking of Ann, she’s got this right:

Imus fired, ushering in a new era, where racist talk will no longer be tolerated in mainstream entertainment media.

You can tell that the Republicans have been in power for too long. The ongoing cluelessness about the MSM’s process never fails to surprise me. File under when it happens to one of yours, you notice:

The Times reporter, in short, saw something that did arguably raise questions. He looked into it. He found nothing. Then rather than printing nothing — since, after all, that’s what he found — he instead went to press with a story that “raises questions” — a formulation that simply amounts to a presumption of guilt. It raises the question of when America’s newspapers just threw in the towel and decided they had no real obligations to inform their readers rather than mislead them.

From such observations is a potential media skeptic made.

Also from such observations can a fair-minded person reach (eventually) the conclusion that media bias, such as it is, is not so much a political slant (because it’s not constantly one-sided) but rather a bias toward storytelling (creating dramatic tension), the better to engage the readers’ passions … and interest.

Maybe it’s a problem, maybe it’s not a problem. We human beings are “narrative seekers.” We love a good story. We love to get lost in the ongoing passions of fascinating protagonists and antagonists. We love to get caught up in the stakes. We love to root for our team. We love closure. We seek catharsis.
Which is why, particularly in a 24/7 Feiler Faster “mass of niches” culture, infotainment—the never-ending cycle of “questions” raised (and, conveniently, never answered)—rules.

by Jane Friedman. Those are the only facts we know—that her relationship with the HarperCollins division of NewsCorp is over, and that HarperCollins is taking over the very profitable Regan Books.

Eat the Press reports that it’s unclear if Regan has also been fired from NewsCorp. It doesn’t look that way, although Murdoch is certainly keeping her at arm’s length. My guess is that he’s not quite ready to let her go—she’s been a cash cow—but that the “ill-considered” O.J. project continued to reverberate inside his world in such a way that Regan had to be repudiated.

You can’t get more cynical than I am about the media and the public’s voracious voyeuristic appetite for the grotesque—particularly as we’re living in an era of almost incomprehensible horror, in which beheaders videotape their handiwork and broadcast it across the globe—but the term “shocks the conscience” was made for the O.J. project. Not only was the project offensive; Regan’s “explanation” of why she did it was equally offensive, because it was utterly implausible.

I still maintain that a culturally/socially comparable project in Britain would not have caused this kind of stir in Britain, where tabloid excess is considered first-rate entertainment, as I just mentioned here. In America, however, the Puritan spirit not only lives and breathes, it spits fire. (I’ve noted the trend for the last four or five years, and hope to explore this in depth…someday, when I get the time…because it’s central to my “infotainment rules” thesis.)

When it became public, the O.J. project stained everyone inside HarperCollins, offended everyone at Fox, and made NewsCorp look bad (yes: that’s possible). Curiously, Murdoch removed the stain from himself and NewsCorp rather easily, I thought. The talking heads gave him credit for pulling the plug. Fox got off, too.

Jane Friedman, however, works in a more rarefied atmosphere: the “publishing world.” Despite the fact that Publishers Weekly got behind her, Friedman was stained by the project. She approved it. Worse, she stained her employees with it, because, reportedly, she would brook no internal criticism about it while it was in process. She was called out on that unpardonable offense as soon as the scandal broke: HarperCollins started leaking like a sieve. Finally, she stained the authors who are associated with HarperCollins. In publishing, you really don’t want to do that: it’s bad for business. She stained the publishing world.

And the only remedy was to get rid of the proximate cause: Judith Regan. Actually, it’s a cheap way to remove “the problem” from the “publishing world,” where Regan is “an embarrassment,” as they say in polite society, and “everyone” loathes her anyway. Friedman even comes out ahead—she gets rid of a longtime thorn in her side, scores PR points (even if belatedly), and the profits from Regan Books’ coffers plump up her bottom line.

It’s surely not the last we’ve heard of Judith Regan, though. Stay tuned.

There’s a candid interview with Mel Gibson in Entertainment Weekly, where he’s the cover-boy for his hideously violent new movie, Apocalypto (the trailer was quite enough for me, thank you).

How is your relationship with Hollywood these days? Do you feel you’ve done enough apologizing for your anti-Semitic remarks?

Those were the ravings of an inebriated, angry person. I don’t know. I think publicly I have done enough. The process continues. The people I know in this town come up to me and say, ”What the f— is wrong with you?” I go, ”Sorry.” They get it. It’s not a big thing. It’s like, ”Okay, so when are we going to work together again?” The people who don’t know me, if I’ve offended them, I’m sorry.

People won’t really refuse to work with you?
No, people aren’t like that. Those are just headlines: Mel Ostracized by Hollywood! Hollywood is what you make it. There is no great pooh-bah up there saying, ”Go! You are condemned!”

What about Disney? Was there any discussion of pushing back the release date of Apocalypto because of the scandal?
I don’t know. They didn’t tell me if they discussed it. I called [president of production] Oren Aviv and he was business as usual. But even he’s suffered a little. He’s been called a collaborator.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So you don’t believe you’re anti-Semitic?
MEL GIBSON: No, of course not. I never have been and never would be. But [the incident] hit this fear thing in me. My God, I made people afraid. It never dawned on me before; I thought, Who would be afraid of me? But all of a sudden I realized I could make people afraid. And it was a horrible feeling. That’s when I said, My God, I don’t want to be that monster. I don’t want to make anyone afraid. That’s what this film is about — using fear — and I was inadvertently doing that without realizing it.

I think that’s what fueled some criticism of The Passion — fear that people would use the movie against the Jews.
I didn’t even get that. I was like, ”What the f—?” I’m certainly glad there were no negative repercussions from that movie. I just never thought it would happen and I’m really glad it didn’t.

Does all this help explain where the hostility came from when you were arrested? You’ve said it was pent-up anger over criticism that The Passion was anti-Semitic? Did those charges sting?
I did have a chip on my shoulder about a lot of things that happened [with that movie] that I felt were unjust. I’m not waiting for an apology — that’s not going to happen — but stuff comes out in a distorted manner when you’re drunk. It was just stupid ravings, from pressure and tension. But it’s not like I went to Yankee Stadium and said [pretends to bang on a microphone], ”Excuse me…”

Or said them on stage at a comedy club?
I felt like sending Michael Richards a note. I feel really badly for the guy. He was obviously in a state of stress. You don’t need to be inebriated to be bent out of shape. My heart went out to the guy. Poor f—er, he’s getting it now. They’ll probably torture him for a while and then let him go. I like him.

It’s hard to tell if Gibson really got it. He still doesn’t seem to have put two and two together about what frightened many in Hollywood and in the media about The Passion of the Christ—the fact that Gibson’s father is a Holocaust denier.

That’s what frightened people about him and about his movie. And he’s still in denial about it.

I gotta give it to him, though: he sure gets the Trial by Media phenomenon.