Everything wrong with journalism

In one headline.

Years ago a friend told me the story of a British newspaper that had sponsored a tabloid headline writing contest. As I recall, he said the winning entry was something like "Palace Adultery Exposed During Rush To Hospital For Bizarre Alien Baby Orgasm Diet Scandal"

You know, I'm probably not remembering it right.

We'll I've been sniffing around this old world for a few years, and I haz seen me a thing or two.

I have fed chipmunks on a glacier.

Gotten my fingers stained red from pistachios sold to me through the window of a wooden-deathtrap-tourist-bus in Greece.

Chewed Black Jack gum in a Hong Kong hotel room.

Drunk enough Pancho Pantera at a single sitting

to kill a lesser man.

Seen a woman nekkid.

Yes I on honey-dew have fed,
And drunk the Billy Beer of Paradise.


So there I was, thinking that my travels had ‘compassed round enough of the Earth that I could go to bednights confident the "Palace Adultery Alien Baby" thingie was the best/worst headline ever.

But then this caught my drowsy eye,

and I began to fear I was wrong.

Because while the idea of two, overfed, fishbelly-white sons of ease and privilege Skyping away with each other about “identity politics” is something that SNL writers would roundfile as too broad and absurd to be funny, the idea of their little telephonic swordfight being featured in the New York Times --

Bloggingheads: Identity Politics
Peter Beinart, left, of The New Republic and Jonah Goldberg of National Review debate the seemliness of identity politics.

-- is just fucking tragic.

Really? This is really the best you can do?

Beinart has been a pundit piñata for his betters for years

From Seeing the Forest:

"If Beinart's reliance on a foreign policy analysis by a feckless neo-con like Will Marshall were not alarming enough, a discerning reader can only be horrified by Beinart's superficial analysis of Presidential politics, Beinart glosses over Watergate as a factor in Jimmy Carter's election and ignores the Presidency of Bush 41 to credit Bill Clinton's victory to the end of the Cold War. The absence of foreign policy as an issue in the electoral victories of Carter and Clinton are a very thin reed on which to hang prospects for Democratic success in either 2006 or 2008.


Beinart's next paragraph echoes Rush Limbaugh's early days as a burgeoning force on talk radio, when he constantly informed his listeners "that's the truth" every twenty seconds..."

From the much-missed Steven Gilliard's "Fine young pundits and their strawmen"

I think a far better question for Media Matt, Kevin Drum and Peter Beinart is this: why did, in the face of all available evidence, did they support the Iraq war. This argument about Afghanistan is a shell game. Beinart thought Lieberman should have run against Bush, which means he's either an idiot or insane.

...

In post after post, I've made a simple point: colonialism was a failed policy. Anyone who read the country study for Iraq, widely disseminated across the web, would have known Ken Pollack was a lazy writer and researcher. That Saddam had a complex series of strategic challenges which went beyond his mere mania for power. Iraq is a complex balance of issues, not merely reduiced to Saddam evil, lets get some people like us in charge. Remember, Osama lived in London before he went batshit crazy.

-- and yet for reasons obscure and probably unholy, he keeps popping back up again over and over and over again.

And about Doughy Pantload -- Lucianne Goldberg’s pimento-loaf of a son --

the less said the better.

So having been stung awake by that tawdry little example of gated media community inbreeding, I could not help but notice that it shares more than one set of common ancestors with this story, a few blinks down:

Extinction-Level Television Event

By ALAN SEPINWALL
Published: December 19, 2008

NBC at 10 p.m. was once the birthplace of dramas like “Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere, ” “L.A. Law, ” “Law & Order,” “Homicide: Life on the Street" and “E.R.” These were groundbreaking shows and, for the most part, mass successes — the kind of hits that plenty of people at any school or office would be able and eager to talk about. Now, because the expanding television universe is shrinking individual audiences, and because NBC has shown depraved indifference to the idea of program development for the last decade, the network has no better option for the hour than moving Jay Leno from late night to prime time.

Next fall, when Mr. Leno assumes his new timeslot, NBC will continue to schedule football on Sunday nights and repeats on Saturdays. That leaves only 10 prime-time hours for original programming, and knowing the way NBC operates these days, at least four of those will likely go to super-sized editions of “The Biggest Loser” and “Deal or No Deal.”

This reminds me of a joke Tina Fey told at the Television Critics Association awards ceremony. She thanked us “for making ‘30 Rock’ the most successful cable show on broadcast television,” and added: “Oh, it’s a great time to be on broadcast television, isn’t it? It’s exciting! It’s like being in vaudeville in the ’60s!”

We all laughed, but it was the sort of laughter designed to fight off tears, you know? The big networks have all been trending inexorably downward for years. Shows that pulled in an audience of 20 million or more viewers only a couple of years ago are now happy with numbers in the mid-to-high teens, and the acceptable slice of the demographic pie is getting ever narrower. (Expect a press release someday soon boasting that a reality show won its timeslot among redheaded girls ages 11 to 11 ½.)

As the audience shrinks and the networks increasingly program for niches instead of the general public, they resemble cable channels more and more.

…

To use a pop culture metaphor that everyone should (I hope) understand, the networks are Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. So long as they pump their legs and assume there’s solid ground beneath their feet, they get to keep moving. But as soon as one of them gives up and looks at where it is, as NBC has with the Jay Leno deal, there’s nowhere to go but way, way down.

Network teevee bleeds from a hundred cuts -- big and small -- but like newspapers, Wall Street, car companies, publishing houses and politics, one of the deepest and most arterial of teevee’s wounds comes from having spent the last 30 years earnestly forgetting what real wealth and real value even looks like.

The source of real value in every endeavor comes from the creative labor of capable men and women.

The source of real value is quality.

But quality is hard work. Quality costs. Quality comes from the professionals in the middle of the organization, which is why a quality-driven ideology is actively hostile to in-group, “Confederacy of Dunces” --

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign,
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." -- Jonathan Swift

Ponzi scheme-based corporate feudalism.

Which is why, everywhere you look across the burning wasteland of the American economy you find industries and enterprises being run by people who don’t give much of a shit about the quality of what they make; instead they are run by the lavishly compensated marketing managers, circle-jerk boards of directors and ribbon clerk-CEOs who operate the Profit Maximization Uber Alles machinery.

People who look at the bottom line and see the skilled labor necessary to create real quality and real wealth as nothing more than dead-weight overhead to be slashed as brutally as possible to amp up next quarter’s profit projections.

On Planet WalMart, the ruling caste believes as an article of faith that using stoop labor to make cheap crap out of toxic waste and then renting a celebrity to sell it is the ticket to million-dollar bonuses, while hiring competent people to create something well-made and artfully-crafted is just pissing away cash that could otherwise be used to buy them private jets.

On Planet WalMart, a Peter Beinart or a Jonah Goldberg will never miss a meal, while a Steven Gilliard will die too young, too poor and in relative obscurity.

And like the Conservatives with whom they share vast amounts of DNA, until they are driven out of power forever, this ruling clique will hew ferociously to their worldview as holy writ even as everything they touch turns to ash and dies around them.

Now excuse me as I go and invent a horrible new drink to delight the debased palettes of our plutocrat overlords.

The Trotsky: two parts Stoli to three parts Pancho Pantera.