I went off on a ramble about pretending a few weeks ago in commenting on Bill Moyer’s interview with David Simon.
The Holocaust Museum shooting this week made me think about pretending from a different angle—from the vantage point of conservatives who deny the evidence of systemic failures all around us. A thread runs through the thinking of a lot of political conservatives:
- The angry lone nut shooter isn’t influenced by the angry right mob
- Bernie Madoff is a bad apple; there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Wall Street
- Abu Ghraib minders were just bad apples
Systems failure is way too scary to contemplate. If patterns seem to emerge, the safest course of action is to look away so you can pretend it isn’t there.
The Tea Partiers aren’t revolutionaries. Everything is just fine, or it would be if we could cycle back to 80s Reagan ideas, and deal with those pesky bad apples one on one.
David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, who continues to organize and try to raise money, popped into my inbox this morning to ask for $25 to fight the healthcare swiftboaters:
We knew healthcare reform would face fierce opposition—and it’s begun. As we speak, the same people behind the notorious “swiftboat” ads of 2004 are already pumping millions of dollars into deceptive television ads. Their plan is simple: torpedo healthcare reform before it sees the light of day by scaring the public and distorting the President’s approach.
He doesn’t come right out and name the “same people”, though, and it reminds me of something I’ve been wanting to explore. Public discourse of special interests usually is very vague. Politicians are chickenshits about it—all but the most liberal. So are the media—all but the most liberal.
As an example of a media outlet that won’t come right out and say who’s working behind the scenes, take MSNBC. It’s playing to the current leftward mood in the air, and making some interesting choices for new programs, ramping up the rhetoric as the clock approaches midnight, like a pop radio station that rocks harder after 7 p.m. But you know what MSNBC could never afford to do? My pet pipedream format for telling what forces are really operating in the public sphere.
My pipedream format
I see it as a TV news program, but it could be a blog or a magazine or a comic book or an on- or offline radio program. It’s organized around issues and interests and it tells the truth about businesses and other organizations who lobby for issues on all sides (sometimes there are more than two sides, contrary to all popular wisdom).
The format is really simple: This is the issue; these lobbies are for it because x; these lobbies are against it because y; these groups are silent because z. I think such a structure would tend to tease out truth.
It would be so refreshing. When have you ever known an interviewer to ask “Who’s lobbying you for this, and why do they say they want it, and why do you think they really want it?” Never happens. Is there a gentleman’s agreement that it would be just too gauche? I think there must be. You didn’t see Dick Durbin getting complimented on his courage when he said banking interests own the Senate. Rather the opposite; I sensed commentators looking the other way, nervously, as though Durbin had a tail of toilet paper spilling out from the back of his pants.
If the issue is energy, the oil companies don’t get to come on or send their surrogates to tell about their commitment to wind power, because they’re not very committed to it. That’s why MSNBC would never make this show. The network depends on energy and pharma advertisers with their messages calculated to persuade me how much they care about saving the planet and about people who can’t afford their prescriptions.
Instead of a format like my pipedream, we get vagueness all around. We’re fed an illusion of the inside story with tales of the maneuvers of elected officials and their staffs, but rarely hear details about the influence of special interests, only amorphous generalities. I’m hungry for some blunt talk. I’d watch or read, and so would others who’d like to know what actually happens in Washington and other centers of power.
(I wonder if many Obama supporters are still responding to donation pleas. I was moved to give my little bits during the campaign, but feel slightly put off by the appeals now.)
What a story: AIG is dragging its feet on medical insurance payments for injured Iraq war contractors.
I listened to the interviews about it on the Democracy Now podcast during a morning commute this week. (Don’t you just love taking in your news on podcasts? You can stop them and let certain bits sink in, form your own thoughts, and dip back in for more.)
Two impressions formed as I was barreling up I-355:
First, why in hell isn’t this all over the place? It’s got everything: an already-disgraced bailout recipient; wounded personnel from Iraq, the contractors’ corollary to the Walter Reed scandal; a real human-lives consequence of the healthcare crisis. Heck, the contracting company, KBR, is even a former subsidiary of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old firm. Why isn’t this one of the handful of stories cable news is running over and over?
Second, I was interested in the provenance of the investigative journalism. There’s been a partnership between the website ProPublica and ABC’s 20/20 program to cover the story.
It could be that I’m uninformed or naive—always a very real possibility with me —but I couldn’t recall another such partnership. Pairing public interest internet outlets with mainstream media on certain big stories could be one answer to the big whining question that always arises out of discussions about the decline of newspapers: “Who’s going to do the important, time-consuming investigative legwork? [snort!] Bloggers?”
Well, yeah. Maybe. Remember that Talking Points Memo took the lead on the story of the U.S. attorneys who were fired for their politics. One of TPM’s sites is even named ”Muckraker.”
Doesn’t it make sense? A public interest blog has the will to dig, while a partnering MSM outlet lends its credibility imprimatur. A grassroots outfit can mobilize its volunteer following to paw through government documents, saving on expense, and it has a unique ability to whip up a fuss to make things happen.
You don’t always need a big budget or lawyers to make things happen. I’ve heard Carol Marin, a local Chicago TV journalist, argue in a couple different forums that only big media have been able to afford the lawyers it takes to shepherd through FOIA requests. She uses it as a counterargument against future reliance on internet journalism. I don’t buy it. Everything in news is going to change when newspapers go down; it’s already starting. We’ll find ways to get government documents for free—probably by raising a huge squawk about it—just as easily as we can now do live video remotes for free.
Maybe I’ll propose that Dave Winer and Jay Rosen kick this around on their Rebooting the News podcast. (By the way, happy birthday, Dave. Welcome to fiftyfourhood. Fiftyfournia? Fiftyfouratopia?)
You have to watch the interview with David Simon, co-creator of The Wire, on Bill Moyers Journal.
I’m so full of admiration for Simon’s missions and his skill at storytelling that I feel a little sheepish for blurting earlier on Twitter that he’s a print guy ‘til the death. During the Moyers interview he refined my understanding of where he stands on what brought newspapers to their present condition.
A former Baltimore Sun reporter, he tells about taking the paper’s third buyout some years ago, and puts some context around the current debate about charging for internet content. He explains how constant budget cuts in the service of bigger profits devalued the newspaper product to the point where, when the internet threat finally did come along, the online product wasn’t worth enough to charge for it.
The larger share of the interview concerns systemic failures in all kinds of institutions—what The Wire was all about. He’s right, you know, that just electing the right guy isn’t going to yank this empire out of its self-imolation. Barack Obama knows that, too. At least that’s what he kept telling us in the campaign, when he talked about change being everybody’s business.
Still, now that Obama’s in office, he’s more centrist than some of us pretended he might be, and he spins a narrative, because that’s the way things work. When Moyers and Simon talked about “juking the stats” as a common thread that runs through the trouble with various institutions like education and law enforcement, I was thinking the real problem is something related to spinning the stats, but broader than that.
Ayn Rand talked a lot about pretending in her novels, especially in Atlas Shrugged. That’s the theme that makes me return to her, despite some of her uglier and now old-fashioned ideas. (I guess you take what you like and leave the rest from any thinker—from Rand with her female characters who thrive on contemptuous treatment, or from Simon and his apparent dismissal of the idea that decent reporting can be published in most any mode. The internet isn’t inherently fluffy and derivative.)
But about pretending. Don’t you think it’s the root of many evils? We delude ourselves personally, all the time. Our leaders and institutions seem to spend a whole lot more effort on framing what they’ve done or will do than they spend in the actual doing. Then we help them. It starts dawning on Dagney Taggart, the railroad exec in Atlas Shrugged, that she’s been enabling the behavior she despises, and she finally comes right out and says “I’m not going to help you pretend.”
Time to be blunt. That was the beauty of The Wire. Raw truth. Can we take it?
I can’t wait for Simon’s new series about post-Katrina New Orleans.
The jingle is funny, and outrageous in the sense that it’s silly it even exists, and I like it. I like the weekly show, too, and generally listen to it.
Sometimes, though, the show is overall just a little cute and bouncy, so I’m glad we also have Bob McChesney‘s Media Matters. It’s produced from AM station WILL, an NPR affiliate owned by the University of Illinois, and there’s a podcast. McChesney has a frankly liberal agenda, and so do his guests, who take calls when the Sunday show is done live. The newest podcast usually doesn’t show up until Tuesday.
Check out Dave Winer’s and Jay Rosen’s fairly regular Sunday media talks, too. Both bloggers, Dave is an internet pioneer, while Jay is an NYU prof, so their take on the future of journalism is pretty unique.
The way Arrington describes the uses for his science project—a low-cost PADD—it sounds like a toy.
The key uses: Internet consumption. The virtual keyboard will make data entry a pain other than for entering credentials, quick searches and maybe light emails. This machine isn’t for data entry. But it is for reading emails and the news, watching videos on Hulu, YouTube, etc., listening to streaming music on MySpace Music and imeem, and doing video chat via tokbox.
Music on MySpace? Not very enterprising. OK, he’s managing expectations. That’s cool.
Actually, a device like the CrunchPad could accomplish data entry in a really rudimentary way. Think checklists.
Vendors of business software for mobile devices try to protect their turf and warn prospects that the only workable solution for data input is a complicated Blackberry app that syncs with the corporate datastore; wifi isn’t available, they say—and you sure as hell can’t trust it. I don’t know. I’m not sure syncing will be the default in a few years and in a lot of cases it’s not required now.
I love the idea of the pad and have been following its development, even dreaming up scenarios in which my employer could marry its safety inspection checklists with the pad hardware as a bundled product. Enable the chucking of clipboards in an economical way, all online.
I don’t know if commercial producers, ad agencies and their clients are gauging reaction to TV commercials on Twitter, but they should be.
Thinking the Kia hamster commercial was very cute—especially the cool passenger’s crisp little inverse nod of recognition to another hamster at a stop light—I took to Twitter to see if others reacted as I did. The Twitterati likes it mostly.
Strikes me it’s an incredibly objective view. If you’re a marketer, you reach out to consumers with a phone survey or recruit them for a focus group and you’ve attached a lot of importance to wanting to know. You look at blogs for a sense of the pulse and you have to figure the bloggers have attached a certain measure of importance to the act of writing about your product, or may even have some agenda. It takes some effort to publish a blog post. But a twitterer doesn’t make a big investment of time in blurting out a tweet. A collection of opinions tossed out in this way seems very real, honest.
mooshki: If I had any $, I would buy a Kia Soul because of the hamster commercial.
<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=6e09afd2-a7f1-4be6-93a7-6ca89e29e695" target="_new" title="Trying the beta">Video: Trying the beta</a>
Not a lot of controls, but it is very easy to make and publish. Not that the publishing part is anywhere near as populist as YouTube. Click on “Soapbox” in the embed. You go to an MSN video page that’s dominated by MSNBC videos. Soapbox user videos, the thing you thought you were clicking to see, are relatively hidden away behind a little link on the top nav. That seems to be changing with the new MSN video site. (See preview.) But the change doesn’t favor the creations of everyday folks; it seems to tilt from an emphasis on news to an emphasis on TV shows.
I guess they’re feeling their way. Microsoft is getting quite live and webby—in some quarters of that big place. Pretty soon now you won’t even see dialog boxes when you install stuff, like “You may now disconnect from the Internet.”
Couple days ago Sharepoint Designer was freed. First thing some IT folks thought about? Lock it down in enterprises. Can’t have that now. Everybody publishing? Shudder.
I’m sure it must be hard for Microsoft to balance all the interests. They can’t diss the protectionist IT cops who are their customers for servers and Office, but at the same time they have to listen to the reality out there.
Control vs. contribute. I haven’t looked at it lately but there used to be a similarly interesting balancing act performed by Adobe in marketing Contribute on their site. As I recall it, there was practically no summary of the product on the microsite home. You forked immediately to pages for IT or publisher and each audience got a different story. Editors were told they could do anything! IT guys were assured they didn’t have to let anybody do anything.
Every once in a while I go on a sentimental journey back to websites I once maintained. This morning, for the first time in a number of years, I checked out the IU Alumni Association site that I tended 12 years ago.
It’s undergone I-don’t-know-how-many redesigns since my day, but I never mind. Time moves on and I’m sure I’d hate the looks of my 1997 idea of cool if I had a look at it now. In fact, I don’t even want to check the wayback machine for fear of a cringe attack.
I did spot one little bit of my snarky copy that was either preserved or overlooked on the license plate lobbying page:
“What do Indiana, Tennessee, and New York have in common?
Maybe only one thing: IU license plates!”
Funny to think about web development back then. If anything interactive was needed for the site, I was all about CGI/Perl, and flat text files were the only databases I thought I needed. And we got by; it was fine for the time.
I used to subscribe to Rolling Stone, a long time ago. I even tried to sell a t-shirt from the classifieds in the back of the book in the late 70s (Linda for First Lady; got a cease-and-desist).
While I’m loathe to visit a newsstand anymore I almost did pick up the new issue for a little better reading experience of Matt Taibbi’s The Big Takeover. A skim shows it would be worth the effort for a more energetic person. A tidbit: he reveals that AIG, by forming a savings and loan, was able to choose to be regulated by a laisse-faire regulatory agency in no way able to watch over it. If we’re going to focus on a narrow piece of the story, like the bonuses, why not that piece instead? It seems pretty important.
But I can’t get with reading long articles online. I tried to print it out but was short on ink.* I want it read to me like an audio book. RS, why don’t you give it a try as a podcast? Not every story, maybe not every feature. Just a selection of nice long meaty articles that people like me might want to luxuriate in.
Would I pay? Maybe. A little.
*How often do you print? Me: I’ll go a month without turning on the printer at home, maybe twice a week at work, usually to pass something around for review and copyediting.
On the latest This Week in Tech Leo LaPorte said his network will be dropping its exclusive arrangement with Stickam so the shows can be viewed live on other services.
He also mentioned in passing that each service would use its own chat tool, and that’s what got me wondering about something. If the chat is going to be further fragmented anyway, I wonder if Leo would mind if a few grownups gathered in its own chatroom to watch some of the shows.
I’d like to be able to watch the Gillmor Gang while chatting with a more mature group like the old NewsGang. In such a room, we could be as profane as the panelists if we wanted to be. It’s less offensive to me to see the occasional naughty word than it is to swim in a stream of whining “advice” for Steve on getting a decent mic or learning about lighting or shutting up about Twitter or shutting up about the Beatles. We could post links, too. Not all links are self-serving spam. Used by grownups, they probably would provide background on the topic under discussion.
My mother’s intuition tells me the snark comes from very young men—a sort of Digg, YouTube commenting crowd. I’m glad for Leo that he enjoys such a following; that crowd is necessary to achieve a really decent-sized tech audience. Their conversation just isn’t to my taste. Also I’m not so sure it’s his advertisers’ most desirable audience. Maybe he could even get a sponsor for a different sort of room, or make it into a premium service by serving it up with one of the video streams on special page.
Update (April 6): Christian Burns suggested a Friendfeed room would be good for this purpose. Today it happened in Friendfeed, in the beta interface and it didn’t even need a room.
—but I couldn’t recall another such partnership. Pairing public interest internet outlets with mainstream media on certain big stories could be one answer to the big whining question that always arises out of discussions about the decline of newspapers: “Who’s going to do the important, time-consuming investigative legwork? [snort!] Bloggers?”
