Monk

Until a couple of years ago, I also read physical books on paper, and then shifted to cheaper, easier, lighter tablet versions. Then it became a hassle to get the physical NYT delivered in Provincetown so I tried a summer of reading it on a tablet. I now read almost everything on my iPad. And as I ramble down the aisle of Amtrak's Acela, I see so many reading from tablets or laptops, with the few newspapers and physical magazines seeming almost quaint, like some giant brick of a mobile phone from the 1980s. Almost no one under 30 is reading them. One day, we'll see movies with people reading magazines and newspapers on paper and chuckle.

-- Andrew Sullivan

This is in response to Newsweek's announcement that it is going out of the print business and continuing wholly online. It saves trees and is less messy, right? Nevertheless, I still hope that books remain viable as a real item. I enjoy e-books, but one likes the option to have the thing in itself. But I do tend to be rather fetishistic.

It's well acknowledged throughout the media world that female Fox News anchors are typically more, er, coiffed than their liberal counterparts. There are YouTube videos dedicated to Fox women's short skirts, a fully functioning website called www.FoxNewsGirls.com and Allure once penned a feature declaring, "With its bevy of babes, the network should be called the Foxy News Channel."

-- ONTD

Ah, yes! I think they have actually tamed down the sex appeal in recent years, at least as far as short skirts and 'leg shows' and panty-peeks go. Oh, but I remember the early years! I was addicted to their news casts. I would even tape them to watch them later in slow motion or in freeze-frame.

I fondly remember Linda Vester, too, a pretty blonde who did not mind working her legs. I remember when they would take calls from the audience, and a male viewer would pantingly comment to her about her sexy legs, and she would just smile brightly and express what sounded like sincere gratitude, very flirty.

I suppose it is a good thing that they don't really do that anymore, because I probably wouldn't be able to resist watching, and, frankly, the day is too short for such hollow diversions.

In a little over twenty years, CNN devolved from the most important television news organization in the world to another channel to skim through or skip over.

-- John Ellis at The American Interest

Of course, in those twenty years, CNN has picked up two serious rivals, Fox and MSNBC. But the problem is no doubt deeper. A lot of people argue that CNN only needs to develop more of a point of view, or to put it bluntly, be more partisan. Personally, I feel there is room for some serious talk and analysis and without being on a political team. I love Rachel Maddow, but we could use a serious overview of the whole game of American politics and news. When I check out a show at CNN, and admittedly it has been a long time since I have bothered, I always get the impression that I am watching "Sesame Street" for adults. It seems so simple and empty and a waste of time. Before Fareed Zakaria got shut down, I was a fan of his Sunday show. That is at least the kind of stuff I can use. I can imagine better, but at least they had the idea. I know Americans have been dumbed down in the past few decades, but it might be worth going higher brow, to try to wow us with cutting brilliance and revealing discussion, and even if you fail, because too many Americans prefer fascist Fox fantasies, at least you cannot hate yourself for giving us the best you had to give.

We are familiar with the decline of newspapers in the Internet Epoch, and although we probably should not be surprised that this applies to magazines as well, I thought I'd get down this latest jeremiad on the passing away of the Age of the Printing Press:

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you put on the cover of your magazine if no one will look at you. A few weeks ago, I was in a busy doctor’s office with a dozen others, absently paging through the magazines on the table. The table in front of us was stacked with the pride of American publishing, all manner of topics and fancy covers yelling for attention. Ever the intrepid media reporter, I looked up from scanning Bon Appétit to see what other people were interested in. A mother and a daughter were locked in conversation, but everyone else was busy reading — their phones.

Though, I am not sure I see the problem if we are simply talking about a change of medium. So what if people are now reading, say, "Newsweek" magazine on their phones and computers rather than the hardcopy magazine itself?

Maybe it is the proposition that Internet ads do not generate as much revenue as when readers had to buy their own hardcopy newspapers and magazines, and people do not expect to have to pay hard money to read e-news, and too many readers will happily turn to secondary outlets if the premium sites, such as the New York Times and such, put up paywalls. That could be a problem. Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for access to premium journalism, but who has money?

(Source: David Carr at The New York Times)

[T]he people who tend to not ever sign up for cable are young -- and the youth is the future. Americans ages 12 to 34 are spending less time in front of the TV, found another Neilsen study. As of February 2012, for three quarters in a row, there have been declines in viewing among Americans under 35, The New York Times' Brian Stelter reports. He attributes this decline to a shift to streaming. "Young people are still watching the same shows, but they are streaming them on computers and phones," he writes. Right now the cable industry has maintained stable subscription rates because of an elderly population that's watching television more, adds Stelter. But, those people won't be around to change the future. The broke twenty-somethings who survive off of Hulu, Netflix, bootleg streams of their favorite shows, and stealing each others' HBO Go passwords now, might get used to a life without paying for cable, causing a generational shift in the way Americans consume things.

-- Sully's Dish

Fareed Zakaria apologized publicly for passing off New Yorker writer Jill Lepore's work as his own in an essay he wrote for Time magazine. Not to put too fine a point on it, Zakaria committed egregious plagiarism, as Alexander Abad-Santos of the Atlantic Wire reported.

-- Jim Sleeper at Huffington Post

That's a bit of a surprise and a disappointment. That piece also linked to another article from "The New Republic" magazine on their list of the most overrated thinkers of 2011, upon which Mr. Zakaria figures prominently.

Though, I don't think we ever understood Zakaria to be a true scholar and public intellectual. He is a bona fide member of the 'official' commentariat who runs a good chat-show table, an opportunity that was probably due as much to his darker skin and non-Western name as much as anything else. No doubt he's a genuine smart guy who can argue 90% of we commoners under the table, but not a leading intellect.

I expect that he will suffer a little spanking on account of this incident, and everything will go back to being business as usual. We cannot really afford to lose Zakaria as one of the prominent faces of the American establishment. He makes us look that much more cosmopolitan.

( A few of those overrated thinkers )

Is our media today too easily contrived? A new book argues as much, "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator" by Brian Holiday. To wit:

Holiday created fake personas and sent fake scoops to blogs, then wrote fake comments and provided fake traffic time and time again. This resulted in the scoops becoming real, the article being republished across the world, and history changed to the way that suited him and his clients (he'd use these articles as citations to prove the fake news in Wikipedia).

[...]

The way the media is organized today is bad, he argues, because it no longer cares for quality journalism. Sources aren't checked. Facts are dubious guesses at best. Mistakes are never corrected. No, the media cares more for gossip and things that make readers emotionally charged -- as that's what makes us share stuff.

I'm a little skeptical that we are this bad off. Let it be known: Mr. Holiday is all of twenty-five years of age. I can see how Amazon ratings might be distorted, and maybe a matter of some triviality might be buzzed up, such as celebrity news, and no doubt the blogosphere can be caught up in its own dreamscape, but we have some giants in the media game with some heavy-hitters. I am sure that our media is not infallible, but I don't think we are a house of cards. And why believe Holiday? He's a liar.

(Source: Thomas Church at Huffington Post)

Ted Koppel chimes in on the unfortunate evolution of news into another sort of consumer commodity. This is already an old theme, but Koppel brings some force and gravitas to the subject, being a genuine genius and a genuine journalist. His old “Nightline” show was one of the best examples of journalism, and it is funny to recall those old shows, how non-partisan they were. And so he now comments on the death of real news:

The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's oft-quoted observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.

And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

Like a lot of people who comment on this phenomenon, Koppel arguably goes too far in drawing a moral equivalence between MSNBC and Fox. Although the MSNBC stars are partisan in the sense that they are effectively advocates for liberal Democrats, choosing issues and analytical frameworks most flattering to them, they at least seem to play fair with the facts that they use, even if they are a bit selective in choosing what facts to present. Fox, on the other hand, is willing to make up facts out of whole cloth, or at least distort them out of all recognition, and Fox also works directly to elect their favorites, effectively being a quasi-campaign organization. Maybe I don’t even need to stick on that ‘quasi’.

But the main point is well-taken. In a digital world rich with virtual realities, it is unsettling to see that even news and our understanding of the real world has become yet another venue of virtual realities. I suppose the real reality is that thing crumbling under our feet.

Ms. Dowd is still beating the newspaper horse, as though she is really afraid that she is going to be out on the streets any month now. In this discussion she shares an interesting analogy:

Senator Kerry’s hearing tried to determine, in a metaphor that was whipped to death, whether there was any way to shut the barn door now that the ink-stained horse has gotten out into the virtual pasture (making readers pay for content now that they’ve gotten used to getting it free online).

David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” who worked for 13 years as a Baltimore Sun reporter, testified that “high-end journalism is dying,” and when that happens, and no one is manning the cop shops and zoning boards, America will enter “a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.”

He said he thought the horse could be lured back into the barn. “I work in television now,” he said, “and no American, for the first 30 years of television, paid anything for their rabbit ears. Now they pay $60, $70 a month for better content.”

Of course, the Times actually tried this, and I was even one of the saps that paid (such being my devotion to the bosomy and witty Maureen Dowd), but it obviously didn't work. Presumably, you would have to get all the major papers and periodicals to agree not to let their stuff go online for free, but while the biggest players might easily sign onto that deal, the relatively weaker players would have their eyes set on moving in for the kill.

_ _ _

Frank Rich also makes a hearty cry for the need to pay for reporters and journalists. He makes the pointed argument that we shouldn't be fooled by the pleasure of easy opinion writing, and that it is with professional journalists that scandals like Enron and the government's warrantless wiretappings are cracked:

We can’t know what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts are digging night and day. Those reporters have to eat and pay rent, whether they work for print, a TV network, a Web operation or some new bottom-up news organism we can’t yet imagine.... Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.

Now that information transmits so easily and freely, I suppose there is less incentive to spend a lot of time and energy digging for it. Bloggers, much less LJers, doubtlessly are a poor substitute, though I venture to wager that we will always be as effective as ever at catching celebrity upskirts.

"Build a bridge and get the fuck over it already."

-- ONTDer

This must be a classic expression, but I cannot recall ever hearing it before and I rather like it. Maybe I should hang it on my wall for when I wake up in the morning.

This is in relation to a discussion on the Supreme Court effectively reinstating the fine against Janet Jackson's boob flash in the halftime show of the Superbowl. With respect to the ruling, in light of the greater liberal turning of the Obama Admnistration, it is depressing to see the Supreme Court taking it's stand against booby flashing. They also recently stood up for keeping the sharp fines for the fleeting use of bad words. Well, so long as they don't try to extend that to premium cable and beyond.