Politics' loss is society's gain as Sarah Palin stepped into her new career yesterday with "some straight talk" about the media and Hollywood.
"You represent," she told assembled journalists, "what could and should be a respected, honest profession, and what could and should be a cornerstone of our democracy--and that's why our troops are willing to die for you.
"So how about in honor of the American soldier you quit making things up?"
She also decried "anti-hunting, anti-Second Amendment circuses from Hollywood" that rely on "delicate, tiny celebrity starlets" to persecute peaceful gun owners with healthy appetites.
"Hollywood needs to know we eat, therefore, we hunt," she told a cheering crowd, including a woman in a red T-shirt reading "Palintologist," defining the profession as "someone who studies Palin and shares her conservative values, Maverick attitude and American style."
In these dark days, with America needing all the scholarship it can get, it comes as welcome news that Prof. Palin will be delivering her first lecture August 8th at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.
It would be a sign of scholarly solidarity if Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. left his quiet retreat in Cambridge to welcome her to Academia.
Showing posts with label American media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American media. Show all posts
Monday, July 27, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Obama, Drudge and Swine Flu
As the Drudge Report hyperventilates with 18 headline links about swine flu, President Obama tells Americans the outbreak is "not a cause for alarm" and cites the current scare as an example of why investing in research is vital.
“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” the President said today in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences. “If there was ever a day that reminded us of our shared stake in science and research, it is today.”
The contrast is more than a textbook example of sensationalism vs. responsibility but a reflection of something more basic in the current American mindset.
Drudge, who is always excited about earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, thrives on stirring up primal emotions without regard to consequences, chalking up millions of web hits daily with irresistible appeals to fear, anger and other primal emotions.
In a 24/7 world of information overload, that's a formula for grabbing eyeballs which used to be the province of tabloid newspapers, now dying off like dinosaurs who just couldn't move fast enough as their environment evolved.
But the swine flu scare is also as good a time as any to emphasize the difference between news and infotainment.
We can get a daily rush from Drudge, but it's important to have Obama in the White House reminding us that "our capacity to deal with a public health challenge of this sort rests heavily on the work of our scientific and medical community" and setting a goal to "exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race, through policies that invest in basic and applied research, create new incentives for private innovation, promote breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and improve education in math and science."
If Drudge links to that, it will probably be headed SWINE FLU SPACE RACE.
“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” the President said today in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences. “If there was ever a day that reminded us of our shared stake in science and research, it is today.”
The contrast is more than a textbook example of sensationalism vs. responsibility but a reflection of something more basic in the current American mindset.
Drudge, who is always excited about earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, thrives on stirring up primal emotions without regard to consequences, chalking up millions of web hits daily with irresistible appeals to fear, anger and other primal emotions.
In a 24/7 world of information overload, that's a formula for grabbing eyeballs which used to be the province of tabloid newspapers, now dying off like dinosaurs who just couldn't move fast enough as their environment evolved.
But the swine flu scare is also as good a time as any to emphasize the difference between news and infotainment.
We can get a daily rush from Drudge, but it's important to have Obama in the White House reminding us that "our capacity to deal with a public health challenge of this sort rests heavily on the work of our scientific and medical community" and setting a goal to "exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race, through policies that invest in basic and applied research, create new incentives for private innovation, promote breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and improve education in math and science."
If Drudge links to that, it will probably be headed SWINE FLU SPACE RACE.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Grand Old Man of the New Journalism
At 78, Tom Wolfe is being immortalized with the reissue of ten of his books in covers "designed to appeal to a new generation."
But before he is embalmed as a writer of satirical novels like "Bonfire of the Vanities," someone should remind readers how he helped change the face of American journalism and, in no small degree, politics.
In August 1966, a Tiffany-engraved invitation arrived in my mail to have cocktails and canapés in the Park Avenue duplex of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein to meet the Black Panthers. A sense of the ridiculous prompted me to decline.
But Tom Wolfe went, notebook in hand, and wrote "Radical Chic" for New York Magazine, a classic of the New Journalism that skewered the pretensions of upscale liberals parading their sympathy for the downtrodden in a setting of ostentatious luxury. ("The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny's duplex like a rogue hormone...These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three times too big...)
Along with Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer and others, Wolfe invented the New Journalism in the 1960s to open space for human expression in the growing thicket of corporate journalism.
Reporters became novelists, novelists morphed into reporters to break through the limits of who, what, when, where, why and how. Mailer's story of the march on the Pentagon to protest Vietnam filled an entire issue of Harper's and made newspaper and TV accounts look like tracts on whaling compared to "Moby Dick."
But it was Tom Wolfe who epitomized the best of I-witness journalism. Unlike imitators, he adhered to the traditional rules of reporting while using a fictional style to show what people did and why with an eye for the telling details. For better or worse, his influence is visible in magazine and newspaper reporting to this day.
Recently he sat down with editors of the New York Times Book Review and gave them an oral history of his part in inventing the New Journalism. Even if you disagree, as I do, with many of his social and political views, the Man in the White Suit is an historic and fascinating figure in 20th and 21st century American life.
But before he is embalmed as a writer of satirical novels like "Bonfire of the Vanities," someone should remind readers how he helped change the face of American journalism and, in no small degree, politics.
In August 1966, a Tiffany-engraved invitation arrived in my mail to have cocktails and canapés in the Park Avenue duplex of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein to meet the Black Panthers. A sense of the ridiculous prompted me to decline.
But Tom Wolfe went, notebook in hand, and wrote "Radical Chic" for New York Magazine, a classic of the New Journalism that skewered the pretensions of upscale liberals parading their sympathy for the downtrodden in a setting of ostentatious luxury. ("The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny's duplex like a rogue hormone...These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three times too big...)
Along with Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer and others, Wolfe invented the New Journalism in the 1960s to open space for human expression in the growing thicket of corporate journalism.
Reporters became novelists, novelists morphed into reporters to break through the limits of who, what, when, where, why and how. Mailer's story of the march on the Pentagon to protest Vietnam filled an entire issue of Harper's and made newspaper and TV accounts look like tracts on whaling compared to "Moby Dick."
But it was Tom Wolfe who epitomized the best of I-witness journalism. Unlike imitators, he adhered to the traditional rules of reporting while using a fictional style to show what people did and why with an eye for the telling details. For better or worse, his influence is visible in magazine and newspaper reporting to this day.
Recently he sat down with editors of the New York Times Book Review and gave them an oral history of his part in inventing the New Journalism. Even if you disagree, as I do, with many of his social and political views, the Man in the White Suit is an historic and fascinating figure in 20th and 21st century American life.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Media Meltdown
Below the radar of the subprime crisis and credit crunch are signs of distress in American media. ABC and CBS are cutting jobs, and Newsweek is shrinking its staff with over 100 buyouts.
According to the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 fell 9.4 percent to $42 billion compared to 2006, the most severe decline since the association started measuring in 1950.
Not only are some journalists losing their jobs but those who remain are working harder than ever. In a survey, the majority of more than 1200 media people said they are being asked to do more today that in past years, among other duties, contributing to online versions of their publications.
Little wonder, then, that in the recent Pew survey, journalists expressed more concern about "the financial crisis facing news organizations" than traditional worries about the credibility and the quality of news coverage.
As media shrink, how much more will our picture of the world be distorted? As it is, in the first three months of this year, only 4 percent of the news was devoted to Iraq, compared to 23 percent in the same period of the year before. It's so much easier and cheaper to cover every minute of the presidential candidates' days than a war that one of them will have to resolve.
News is news, isn't it?
According to the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 fell 9.4 percent to $42 billion compared to 2006, the most severe decline since the association started measuring in 1950.
Not only are some journalists losing their jobs but those who remain are working harder than ever. In a survey, the majority of more than 1200 media people said they are being asked to do more today that in past years, among other duties, contributing to online versions of their publications.
Little wonder, then, that in the recent Pew survey, journalists expressed more concern about "the financial crisis facing news organizations" than traditional worries about the credibility and the quality of news coverage.
As media shrink, how much more will our picture of the world be distorted? As it is, in the first three months of this year, only 4 percent of the news was devoted to Iraq, compared to 23 percent in the same period of the year before. It's so much easier and cheaper to cover every minute of the presidential candidates' days than a war that one of them will have to resolve.
News is news, isn't it?
Thursday, January 24, 2008
The Return of Rumsfeld
He's back, with all his contempt for the media intact. Now Donald Rumsfeld is proposing a “21st-century agency for global communications” that would use blogs, social networks and talk radio to visit verbal shock and awe on Muslim extremists.
Addressing an "information warfare conference" co-sponsored by such defenders of free speech as Boeing, Lockheed and Curtiss Wright, Rumsfeld said the US is “sitting on the sidelines” in a global battle of ideas and "barely competing.”
When Sharon Weinberger of Wired asked what his new agency would do, the former Secretary Defense referred nostalgically to the good old days when the Army paid locals to plant stories in the Iraq press until American media spoiled the fun by reporting about it.
Rumsfeld insisted that his new propaganda ministry would not interfere with traditional journalism.
“It doesn’t mean we have to infringe on the role of the free press, they can go do what they do, and that’s fine,” he said. “Well, it’s not fine, but it’s what it is, let’s put it that way.”
What the architect of the Iraq war wants to do now is “tell the story of a nation that was carved from the wilderness and conceived in freedom” to those benighted souls who live under regimes that don't respect our First Amendment, as he does.
Addressing an "information warfare conference" co-sponsored by such defenders of free speech as Boeing, Lockheed and Curtiss Wright, Rumsfeld said the US is “sitting on the sidelines” in a global battle of ideas and "barely competing.”
When Sharon Weinberger of Wired asked what his new agency would do, the former Secretary Defense referred nostalgically to the good old days when the Army paid locals to plant stories in the Iraq press until American media spoiled the fun by reporting about it.
Rumsfeld insisted that his new propaganda ministry would not interfere with traditional journalism.
“It doesn’t mean we have to infringe on the role of the free press, they can go do what they do, and that’s fine,” he said. “Well, it’s not fine, but it’s what it is, let’s put it that way.”
What the architect of the Iraq war wants to do now is “tell the story of a nation that was carved from the wilderness and conceived in freedom” to those benighted souls who live under regimes that don't respect our First Amendment, as he does.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Over to You, Vladimir
Being Time's Person of the Year is no barrel of laughs, it comes with a lot of headaches.
For the whole year, last year's mylar cover has been sitting next to the computer screen as a taunt to Time's designation of me "for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game."
That's the kind of pressure you're facing, comrade, as the newsweekly praises your accomplishments, salutes your longevity and calls you an "elected emperor" who will be the "longest-serving statesman among the great powers, long after such leaders as Bush and Tony Blair have faded from the scene."
For a guy who has never sent an e-mail in his life and whose father was Stalin's cook, you've done very well, but believe you me, that kind of talk can unnerve anybody, even someone with your Tsar's stare. If you look back at some of the other cover people, remember what happened to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Newt Gingrich. It's not exactly the Sports Illustrated cover jinx, but...
Now the crown is yours. Serving the Time correspondent a "dinner of lobster-and-shiitake-mushroom salad, 'crab fingers with hot sauce' and impressive vintages of Puligny-Montrachet and a Chilean Cabernet" was a good start.
Last year's winners salute you as they go back to their keyboards, stuffed with fast food, relaxed and ready to face a new year of solving the world's problems without all that pressure.
For the whole year, last year's mylar cover has been sitting next to the computer screen as a taunt to Time's designation of me "for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game."
That's the kind of pressure you're facing, comrade, as the newsweekly praises your accomplishments, salutes your longevity and calls you an "elected emperor" who will be the "longest-serving statesman among the great powers, long after such leaders as Bush and Tony Blair have faded from the scene."
For a guy who has never sent an e-mail in his life and whose father was Stalin's cook, you've done very well, but believe you me, that kind of talk can unnerve anybody, even someone with your Tsar's stare. If you look back at some of the other cover people, remember what happened to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Newt Gingrich. It's not exactly the Sports Illustrated cover jinx, but...
Now the crown is yours. Serving the Time correspondent a "dinner of lobster-and-shiitake-mushroom salad, 'crab fingers with hot sauce' and impressive vintages of Puligny-Montrachet and a Chilean Cabernet" was a good start.
Last year's winners salute you as they go back to their keyboards, stuffed with fast food, relaxed and ready to face a new year of solving the world's problems without all that pressure.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Milestones in Media Muck
Those who have tears to shed for our culture can reach for the Kleenex now. Today we have hospital workers scrambling to publicize George Clooney’s medical records after a motorcycle accident and a magazine cover showing a bare-breasted Hillary Clinton being nuzzled by hairy-chested Rudy Giuliani behind the bare butt of a reclining Barack Obama.
It barely seems to matter that Clooney’s accident actually happened while the political threesome is a product of photoshopping from the overheated imagination of sleazy magazine editors, justified as commentary on presidential campaigns as “lengthy spectacles...relentlessly contrived and overproduced.”
The motto of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” was “Everybody belongs to everybody else,” but we seem to have left that behind several Paris Hiltons ago.
On second thought, forget the Kleenex. Bring in the puke bucket.
It barely seems to matter that Clooney’s accident actually happened while the political threesome is a product of photoshopping from the overheated imagination of sleazy magazine editors, justified as commentary on presidential campaigns as “lengthy spectacles...relentlessly contrived and overproduced.”
The motto of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” was “Everybody belongs to everybody else,” but we seem to have left that behind several Paris Hiltons ago.
On second thought, forget the Kleenex. Bring in the puke bucket.
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Rolling Out the Iran War
In 2002, Andrew Card, then Bush’s Chief of Staff, told the New York Times why the drumbeat for war against Iraq started in September: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.”
It’s September again, this year’s product is war against Iran and the sales pitches have started.
“Iran’s pursuit of...nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust,” President Bush told war veterans last week. Promising to apply diplomatic pressures first (sound familiar?), he nonetheless vowed, “We will confront this danger before it is too late.”
In the U.K. Telegraph, a story is planted about war-gaming a blockade of Iran: “"The results were impressive. The policy recommendations eliminated virtually all of the negative outcomes."
Ever-faithful John Bolton, our unconfirmable former ambassador to the U.N. is telling Israelis via video hookup that President Bush “has made clear that a nuclear Iran is not acceptable."
Even Gen. Petraeus is not too busy surging in Iraq to observe the “malign involvement of the Iranian Quds force with the militia extremists that have been supported by them, trained, equipped, armed, funded and even in some cases directed.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, pointing out that the “Fox propaganda machine” is at work again on the Iran campaign, urges “the mass media not to play the same craven role that they played in Iraq, where they essentially collapsed and became a megaphone for Bush's policies."
In five years, it is clear the Bush-Cheney Administration has learned nothing. Have the American people and their media?
It’s September again, this year’s product is war against Iran and the sales pitches have started.
“Iran’s pursuit of...nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust,” President Bush told war veterans last week. Promising to apply diplomatic pressures first (sound familiar?), he nonetheless vowed, “We will confront this danger before it is too late.”
In the U.K. Telegraph, a story is planted about war-gaming a blockade of Iran: “"The results were impressive. The policy recommendations eliminated virtually all of the negative outcomes."
Ever-faithful John Bolton, our unconfirmable former ambassador to the U.N. is telling Israelis via video hookup that President Bush “has made clear that a nuclear Iran is not acceptable."
Even Gen. Petraeus is not too busy surging in Iraq to observe the “malign involvement of the Iranian Quds force with the militia extremists that have been supported by them, trained, equipped, armed, funded and even in some cases directed.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, pointing out that the “Fox propaganda machine” is at work again on the Iran campaign, urges “the mass media not to play the same craven role that they played in Iraq, where they essentially collapsed and became a megaphone for Bush's policies."
In five years, it is clear the Bush-Cheney Administration has learned nothing. Have the American people and their media?
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