Fox is , refusing to pay an indecency fine to the FCC. They’ve already succeeded in getting the fine reduced from over $1 million to $91,000, as they fight for your First Amendment right to watch reality-show participants lick whipped cream off strippers.
With the crisis in American newspaper publishing, it’s time to look how bringing readers the news, often seen as a public service, can be funded.
The current advertising-and-subscription model is failing. Most publications (save only the Wall Street Journal and a few others) put essentially the entire newspaper on line for free, so they don’t get that 50 cents a day per reader. As for advertising, oy vey.
The problem is that other models don’t work that well either. When the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) sends me letters begging for a donation, I send back the postage-paid form with three words written on it “Sell some ads!” As in KCET’s appeals for donations to ‘public’ television, my attitude is ‘Let Exxon pay for it’, in the same way that Archer Daniels Midland buys benign coverage on NPR.
Eric Alterman notes another contribution-funded effort. ”ProPublica, funded by the liberal billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler and headed by the former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, hopes to provide the mainstream media with the investigative reporting that so many have chosen to forgo.” Most newspapers and other outlets would probably look at such offerings as contributed (ie, free) articles, filler on the order of “New Restaurant Offers Intriguing Entrees”.
Government funding is another, even worse option. At best, it will deliver a Voice of America or BBC, a hotbed of bias. At worst, Pravda or the Chinese news agency, delivering articles on the ‘merciless rioters’ of the Tibet uprising–and not delivering this.
So like it or not, market capitalism, as Churchill said of democracy, the worst of all systems except for all others, will probably come up with a solution to deliver the news.
Yes, it was Easter Sunday, but this week my wife wondered where the Target Sunday ads were. In another body blow to newspapers like the LA Times, the ad insert was only online. Yes, a few trees were saved, but at what cost to readers?
Newspapers have been dying a death of a thousand cuts, from Craigslist grabbing all the classified ads (it’s hard to compete with free) and shrinking circulations and of course, vastly reduced real estate advertising. If Target and the other big retailers go away, that’s a mighty big nail in the coffin.
Newspapers are also losing some of their best writers, whether they’re pushed or jump out of the burning building. At the Mercury News in San Jose before the last round of cuts, reporters were told to wait at home by their phones. If they didn’t get a call by 10AM, they could go to work.
Dean Takahashi, a well-respected technology journalist (who I know a little bit), put it this way:
“I guess the worst thing that could happen is the business could fall off a cliff the way the music business did,” said Dean Takahashi, a former technology reporter for the Mercury News, who left last month to become a blogger just before a round of layoffs. “I worry that is possible.”
As for the content, formerly known as the news, it’s too simple to say ‘it will all go online.’ Most people I know don’t like to read longer pieces on line, certainly not on a Blackberry-sized screen.
If newspapers and the way they surprise you with local, international news, sports, fashion and more disappear, we’ll be not a little, but a lot, poorer.
I hadn’t seen this before, but I had guessed that celebrities would be the target of your typical bored, unethical passport processor at the State Department.
Bingo!
According to ABC News, “On at least two other occasions during the last eight months, contractors were fired for accessing records of Hollywood celebrities, the official said.”
First it was Obama Barack’s passport information that was violated, three times. Now it comes out that Hilary Clinton and John McCain have been snooped on as well.
While the possibility of political dirty tricks is real, a better guess is bored, ill-trained and unethical employees [or 'contractors' brought in to handle the last passport crisis mishandled/created by the Bush Administration] saying ‘Check this out!’ to one another.
Look out, Amanda Beard, Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Clay Aiken or anyone briefly in the public eye–or living next door to or dating a passport employee. Your true age, true name and destinations are probably being gawked at right now. Scott McNeely was right. Privacy? No mas.
As for the ‘contractors’ fired by the State Department, not to worry. They have a bright future at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), staring at the prescription pills of passengers and fondling their packed underwear.
No. As professor and writer Samantha Powers found out last week, you can’t do it. There is no off the record.
Powers, an adviser to Barack Obama, was quoted in The Scotsman as saying of the Hilary Clinton campaign “They’re obsessed…she’s a monster..and that’s off the record.” That late defense didn’t work; she ended up resigning from the campaign and apologizing. Her unfortunate but newsworthy comment also overwhelmed Powers’ actual agenda–to use the press to promote her new .
As a media trainer for many international companies, “everything you say is on the record” is a key point I try to pound home with impressionable young product managers and less-impressionable, ‘know-it-all’ senior management. They blanch when I tell them, “If you’re drinking with a journalist until 3AM at a Las Vegas trade show, anything he remembers will be on the Web the next day.”
If you are going to talk to the press, understand they’ll use your quotes if they’re interesting. And don’t expect to be able to take back your words; if Powers had called Hilary a “monster” on live television, whether she took it back or not, there’s no doubt that it would be on the record.
When Tucker Carlson challenged Scotsman reporter Gerri Peev for not heeding Powers’ plea to ignore her ‘monster’ comment, Gerri Peev asked, “Are you really that acquiescent in the United States? In the United Kingdom, journalists believe that on or off the record is a principle that’s decided ahead of the interview.”
Carlson may be right when he implies the UK press would sell out its mother to get a story. Cutting their teeth chasing royals, the Brits are bolder. When I worked at the National Enquirer (and made the near-fatal mistake of trying to keep up drinking with them) the unofficial motto seemed to be ‘if you need some shit get a Brit’.
But while Peev may seem like a nasty piece of work, she’s just a tough-minded journalist “If this is the first time that candid remarks have been published about what one campaign team thinks of the other candidate, then I would argue that your journalists aren’t doing a very good job of getting to the truth.”
That elusive truth is what journalists dig for. And that’s why there’s no such thing as “off the record.”
Middle East expert Bernard Lewis was recently interviewed in the Jerusalem Post. The spry nonagenarian is as witty today as 30 years ago, when as an undergraduate at Princeton, I helped him move into his offices at the Institute of Advanced Studies.
“Growing up in England and serving in the British military, was an issue made of your being Jewish? Was it ever an obstacle?
No. When I joined the British army in 1940, I was interviewed by a sergeant who, while taking down all the relevant particulars, asked, “What is your race?”
Well, nowadays, I would say “white” or “Caucasian,” but at the time, that wouldn’t have occurred to me. In England, we never spoke about race. I knew what the Germans meant by it, however. So I asked the sergeant whether I should put “Jewish” in that category.
“Nah,” he dismissed. “That’s your religion, and we’ve already got that on another line.”
At that point, I was completely mystified. “What, then,” I asked, “am I supposed to put?”
“As far as the British army is concerned,” he replied, “there are four races: English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. You are clearly English.”
So, I went to war with documents that said that I was British by nationality, English by race and Jewish by religion.”
The Daily Telegraph thinks the “Love and Consequences” debacle, following other made up personal tales of drug addiction, Holocaust suffering and priestly rape, may mean the end of the ‘misery memoir.’
I’m not so sanguine; just as readers love to see the rich and famous brought down, they also appreciate seeing people in gothic straits.
Because the life of a writer is not all that interesting (who would pay to read about someone staring into a computer screen?), the pressure comes for exciting ‘true stories’. And the decline and desperation of the publishing industry is shown by what it will do (or not do, like fact-check) to deliver these ‘authentic experiences.’
Writers are also entertainers, although almost comically unfit for the role, crippled by depression, self-doubt, procrastination, over-thinking, research mania, envy and all other manner of self-loathing. Yet they strive to give the people (especially their editors) what they want.
The latest disaster to result is ”Love and Consequences”, Margaret B. Jones’ “autobiography” about growing up among gangbangers, by a half-white, half-Native American girl sent to foster care in South Central LA after a sexual assault at age five. (Even typing that florid description, my bullshit detector is beeping.) The memoir was actually written by Margaret Seltzer, a white woman from Sherman Oaks who went to Campbell Hall, a private high school that costs over $20,000 a year.
Hell hath no fury like a newspaper scorned: the NY Times article exposing the fraud refers to Seltzer as “all white”. (Imagine calling Shaquille O’Neal “all black”.) Like the publisher, The Times has a big credibility problem, because the woman’s editor is the daughter of a NY Times editor who had run the book review section, and the Times gave the book a rave review. The Times also has to answer for this handjob of a story and slideshow.
The Times didn’t even break the fraud story–Jones/Seltzer’s sister called the publishing house, saying this “could have and should have been stopped by now.” She’s right–except that no one in the chain wanted to make a single phone call to check this ’story that’s too good to check.’
Equally repugnant, last week “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was exposed as a . “She didn’t live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn’t trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She’s not even Jewish.”
Can you say–exploitation?
We could explore why these women felt their own experience wasn’t authentic enough to write about, so they had to borrow other’s suffering. But the larger question is why should people believe anything they read when writers–and publishers–do this? Why, in fact, should they read at all?
As a writer, you should be able to speak in other people’s voices, even say that voice is one of your own voices. What you can’t say is that you are that other person.
What these ‘writers’ are saying is “I felt like a Jew…I felt like a gangbanger…’ therefore I can poach their experience, turn their trauma into a story I can sell.
My father said at the end of the day, a man’s reputation is all he has. To these writers and their enablers, reputation, truth and honesty are encumbrances to be thrown off in pursuit of fame and success.
The public is fascinated by celebrity actors. But really, what’s their life? Get up, go to a cafe, have a few cups of coffee and lots of cigarettes, obsessively check their Blackberries and cell phones for phone calls, go to the gym. If they have money they go shopping, if they’re famous they get dressed and go to clubs at night to get photographed and chat with their friends. This is for the 9 months a year when they’re not shooting a film.
Television actors have an even more boring life. They get up early for their 6AM call, then spend most of the day on the set reading or chatting (again drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes) in makeup and costume waiting for their scenes. At the end of the day they get in their cars (no chauffeured craziness here), drive home, see their families, have dinner, help their kids with homework or catch up on DVDs, and go to bed before 11PM; gotta be fresh for that early call.
The writer’s life, like an actor’s, is not all that interesting. He or she gets up, makes a pot of coffee, turns on the computer, starts procrastinating, walks around, checks email, procrastinates some more, goes to their favorite websites, blogs–anything to postpone writing. Two or four or six hours later, they finally do some writing, have lunch, go back to check the web, walk the dog, pick up the kids from school.
In short, the real life of those in so-called ‘glamour professions’ is boring.