Blog Fatigue

Back in the primeval days of personal corrective journalism--the precursor to blogging--gadflies like I. F. Stone and George Seldes would mail newsletters weekly to a tiny minority of Americans who wanted to know what was really going on behind newspaper headlines and radio bulletins.

A. J. Liebling, who did similar work in the pages of the New Yorker with occasional pieces on "The Wayward Press," once said that such efforts were hampered by the need to fill a fixed amount of space and suggested that, when conditions dictated, media critics just mail postcards to their subscribers: "No infamy this week."

Liebling's dictum is brought to mind by a New York Times piece on the short life and high death rate of blogs based on Technorati figures that show, of an estimated 7 to 10 million, "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream--or at least an ambition unfulfilled."

As a late-in-life arrival after decades in the maligned mainstream media, I can testify to the exhilaration and frustrations of blogging--the freedom to react instantly to what passes for news, the brain pressure of making meaningful connections in the chaos of it all, the all-too-human need to find evidence of being heard and, in moments of doubt, anxiety over becoming the windbag at the cocktail party who sends listeners to the bar in urgent need of another drink.

At such times, there is the pep-talk wisdom of Andrew Sullivan: "You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality."

Unlike those pioneers who had to go to the post office with cartons of newletters, today's would-be founts of wisdom don't even have to get dressed and leave home. And Lord knows there is more than enough infamy to go around.

Getting rich and famous is another matter entirely, but these days the odds are closer to those of starting on a career in Wall Street and a lot more respectable.

Truth-Tellers Who Lie

Brian De Palma has made a movie with images to “get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war."

He calls it “Redacted” to emphasize what the mainstream media has edited out of America’s picture of the war in Iraq. De Palma uses blogs, YouTube posts, videologs on the internet and the video diary of a soldier to convey the horrors of the Iraq war.

Only one tiny problem: The film, shown at the Venice Film Festival, is a “docudrama,” blending fictional techniques with all that unvarnished truth. "Everything that is in the movie,” he says, “is based on something I found that actually happened. But once I had put it in the script I would get a note from a lawyer saying you can't use that because it's real and we may get sued."

This is in the tradition of that other great Hollywood truth-teller, Oliver Stone, who filled the heads of a generation with his own paranoid fantasies about the death of a President in “JFK.” The truth ran a distant second to Stone’s inventions.

De Palma and Stone talk about art but their work is propaganda to blow-torch viewers’ minds. Kennedy’s assassination and the war in Iraq have left scars on the American psyche that are bad enough without the self-righteous, self-serving efforts of Hollywood “artists” to dig into them with their overheated imaginations.

Coppola told us truths about Vietnam in “Apocalypse Now,” but he didn’t call it journalism.

If the media have whitewashed Iraq, what purpose is served by a blackwashed version? Where are the shades of gray? If he read the polls, De Palma might see that most Americans don’t need him hammering at them to understand what has been going on in Iraq.

The Media's Princess Bride

Tomorrow will mark the tenth anniversary of the night the Princess of Wales died in a Paris car wreck while being pursued, as always, by photographers.

In my last years as an editor, Diana’s was the face that launched a thousand magazine covers, a Cinderella who rose to the height of celebrity after marrying Prince Not-So-Charming.

In less than a year, she transformed herself from a shy, somewhat chubby teaching assistant into the world’s most stylish woman, a never-ending feast for the cameras.

But it turned out to be more a Faustian bargain than a fairy tale. She did her part by giving birth to two heirs, but the price was a cold husband who preferred his former mistress, royal resentment of her popularity and constant sniping by the palace establishment.

Soon the couple was caught by cameras bickering on a ski slope, her cell calls were taped and made public, and finally after an unseemly royal divorce, she took up with the heir to the kingdom of Harrods department store.

Just before she died, People ran a cover story labeling Diana “the poster girl for Smart Princess, Dumb Choices” and characterizing Dodi Al Fayed as a “tomcat” and “a billionaire deadbeat.” Time ran a snippy item about the “fractured fairy-tale princess.” The Diana backlash was in full swing.

But as a cynic once said, in the media world death can be a great career move. The postmortem issue of People eulogized her “wisdom and strength” and announced a gift of $100,000 to the Princess Diana Fund for AIDS victims. Time memorialized her with two consecutive cover tributes. The magazines were best-sellers, of course.

Now once again there will be those glamorous images of her while two Princes mourn the mother they lost too soon, a sad reprise of the fairy tale that reflected no glory on all of us in late twentieth-century journalism.

Murdoch to Buy Bush Administration

On the heels of the Dow Jones deal, Rupert Murdoch has made an offer to acquire the assets of the nearly bankrupt Bush Administration, reliable sources reported today.

Insiders speculate that, among other moves, the media baron plans to merge the White House Press Secretary’s Office with Fox News in a 24/7 effort to counter liberal media bias.

The synergy of the proposed merger is intriguing media analysts, who foresee joint efforts by the newly acquired Wall Street Journal and the Treasury Department to ease trade imbalances and stimulate corporate investment as well as initiatives by the State Department to improve relations with the People’s Republic of China where Mr. Murdoch has been making significant progress in advancing U.S interests.

Off the record, Mr. Murdoch has reassured stockholders of continuity of top management in the White House but has not ruled out lower-level changes such as replacing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales with a legal expert of Australian extraction and moving Karl Rove to the New York Post as editor of Page Six, which has lost some of its bite of late.

If negotiations should fail, Mr. Murdoch is prepared to settle for a smaller acquisition, reported to be one or both houses of Congress.

Another possibility is the Supreme Court, where News Corp. has previous ties with a $1 million book advance to Justice Clarence Thomas.

Getting Murdoch to Bid Against Himself

One of the iron rules of negotiation is that it takes more than one buyer to raise the price. For a week now, in the final stages of capitulating to Rupert Murdoch, the owners of Dow Jones have been trying to use their reluctance as a lever to get him to up his offer.

No sale. Conning the most relentless media acquirer of our age is a waste of time, especially when his bad reputation is your only tool. Murdoch has stood fast, and now the deal is back on track, if the soon-to-be-his Wall Street Journal has got it right.

But in an act of largesse, Murdoch will leave the Bancroft family a tip by picking up the $30 million tab of their advisers on the deal.

Bill Clinton's Backside: Political Issue

The “Hillary Is 44” guerilla bloggers are giving her campaign a new dimension by attacking MSM. Their weapon of choice yesterday was the former President’s derriere.

Between Obama-bashing and enthusing over Joe Wilson’s endorsement is an item: “Big Media writers prove themselves to be numbskulls on the most basic of human levels.”

The object of ire is a passage from the New York Times account of the Clintons campaigning together in New Hampshire:

“Mr. Clinton seemed to struggle with the proper posture for him at his wife’s side, alternately sitting up straight on his stool or slouching slightly, crossing his legs or crossing his ankles, keeping his hands in his pocket or putting a hand on his chin.”

A “Hillary Is 44” media critic deconstructed this sabotage of the Clinton campaign:

“Why does such drivel make it onto a writer’s pad and through the filter of any conscious editor? Answer: because that silly drivel, not the news, is actually the center of the Big Media narrative. Notice, earlier in the article we learned that Bill Clinton ‘took a seat on a stool on stage’. Have you ever tried sitting on a wooden stool on a platform in summer heat?

“Ask any person the size of Bill Clinton how it feels to sit on a wooden stool?

“Padding foam does not help. ‘Natural’ padding does not help. The only thing to do is fidget. Move from one buttock to the other, hook shoe heels to foot rests, fold arms, unfold arms, elbows on knees, hands under buttocks, move head forward, move head back...Our plush padded princes of Big Media don’t know about plain wooden stools. They do know how to disguise the drivel as news to push their narrative.”

Now that this mainstream media villainy has been exposed, on to other serious issues: Bill’s hair styling? The war in Iraq? Hillary’s pants suits?