Sex, Drugs, and Punditry / By Tom Risen

These be golden years for the pundit and the ideologue that we’re living in, Sonny Jim.

Pundits prowl wild the internets to radio, and no one is safe from their rants that they spent an entire hour researching. They drink as deep from the font of human ignorance as Joe Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, or any old-timey yellow journalist ever dreamed.

But who is this Rush Limbaugh person we’re expected to care about and what happened to that other fat white man from Fox News that kids today were raised to hate even more? Why is every crazy claim that comes out of the cheeto-crusted mouth of a radio show host so important all of a sudden?

Gather round and I will tell you a tale of the rise and decline of Papa Bear Bill O’Reilly.

With the rise of television’s availability in the 1970s, demand for broadcast news rose and for a time standards shrank.

This would have been temporary had the availability not continued to grow. In the past 10 years, broadcast media became more available than anyone could’ve imagined. Nearly everybody had a TV and more people than ever had cable TV.

Not to mention the internet.

Though YouTube was still a few years away in the 1990s, pundits were dabbling in websites and information was of course easier to get than ever. This began a turn-of-the-century boom of cable news.

But news is hard, and when cable channels like CNN started popping up everywhere promising constant news all around the clock, they found themselves in over their head..

Cable news, eager to stand apart from traditionally reliable networks, diluted the news and pandered to entertainment and celebrity news nuts, creating new ones along the way. This was the origin of the opinion news boom we see now.

Its easy news: say what you think with minimal research.

You could even just say what you think, period.

You could make good news stories, but the desire to keep up the flow of interesting news is hard for any reporter (OR BLOGGER) to reasonably deal with. Some give into the dark side.

Like Bill O’Reilly, who spent time at CBS and on ABC World News Tonight, and was offered an anchor job on the brand new FOX NEWS. It was even better than that, he got his own solo show and was paid to talk about whatever annoyed him that particular day. It was like being a rock star, and it was every broadcaster’s dream.

“Quicker, easier, more seductive is the dark side,” said Yoda, certified Jedi Master.

The O’Reilly Factor became the show of the moment after 9/11/01 when FOX NEWS was getting exclusive after exclusive, basking in the jingoism of the early years of the Bush Presidency that they helped create. Their ratings skyrocketed.

“Some people watch Fox News like it’s a religion,” said Brandon Wily of Olney MD, whose father is a Defense Department employee and loyal Fox News viewer.

There was even a merger between the White House and FOX NEWS in 2005. Tony Snow went straight from FOX reporter to Bush press secretary just like that.

Since FOX NEWS has burned out after their moment in the sun over the past few years, the man who was on the opinion scene since the beginning moved once more to the forefront of controversy. Rush Limbaugh, the original iron man of conservative radio, rode the first wave of punditry in the late 80s and never let go.

After a decade in radio where no professional station would take him because he was such a blow-hard, Limbaugh’s father’s buddies in the Reagan Administration repealed the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine had always required that radio stations give free air-time for responses to any controversial opinions they broadcast. Reaganites repealed this in 1987 and opened the floodgates for editorial commentary where jowl shakers like Limbaugh were free to denounce anybody as a communist or a cross-dresser and get paid for it. Rush promptly got a job and an audience.

Daniel Henninger wrote, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, "Ronald Reagan tore down this wall (the Fairness Doctrine) in 1987...and Rush Limbaugh was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination."

Limbaugh quickly got high on his own ranting and recently got addicted to prescription drugs. This is hilariously parodied in the movie “V for Vendetta”. O’Reilly, on the other hand, has been accused of sexual harassment numerous times, so his ratings are lower and the drug addict is the top gun of “conserv-opinion” once more.

O’Reilly’s conspiracy of a “War on Christmas” by elitist gay French liberals, his claims that the American Civil Liberties Union is “the most dangerous organization in America”, and repeated accusations and examples of conservative bias, have slowly diminished his reputation.

This is a rare example of radio has proven to have greater staying power than television. Every revolution devours its own, and I think Bill O’Reilly’s time at the top might be ending.

After talking about lame brained punditry I think I’ll end on an intellectual quote from Jean Sartre. In his play “The Flies” he writes about a false god who rules through endless fear and a young brother and sister who dare to reject him.

“Your defiance has signaled the start of my decline, but my reign is long yet,” says the tyrannical Zeus. “Join my flock or your suffering will be unending.”

[Thanks Tom for his contribution!]

Money for Nothing: eMpTyV

Whether you like it or not, eMpTyV had/has its impact on how popular music is made and disseminated in our world. Yes, and not just music, but also ideas and lifestyles.

Here's a book I just happened to bump into now about the history of music videos:

Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes

Words on Screens: Secondary Literacy in the Age of Cybertext as a New Hybrid Medium

Here is an introduction to a paper I wrote in 2005 (I will include the rest of it here later on).

“Words on Screens:”

Secondary Literacy in the Age of Cybertext as a New Hybrid Medium

“’We live in each other’s brains, as voices, images, words on screens.’”

-- Turkle, 257

“Computers don’t just do things for us, they do things to us, including our ways of thinking about ourselves and other people.”

-- Turkle, 26

“We construct our technologies, and our technologies constructs us and our times.”

-- Ibid, 46

“What compels me is that the painter has tried to find a visible expression for that which lies in the realm of the intangible. Isn’t this the most elusive and private of all conditions, that of the self suspended in the medium of language, the particles of the identity wavering in the magnetic current of another’s expression? How are we to talk about it?”

-- Italics mine, Birkerts, 78

”Words on Screens:” Secondary Literacy in the age of cybertext as a new hybrid medium

Introduction

The use of communication through the Internet is one of the most fascinating phenomena in the media world of the last decades. It gained public face as a collective network in the 1990’s, and by now has become a pervasive medium of communication impacting the everyday lives of societies and cultures all over the world. Today, people use the Internet for work and leisure, for finding information and for communicating with co-workers, family, friends and complete strangers. While in its first stages of development the Internet relied mostly on text, today it offers its users the multimedia experience of sound, image and video (e.g. webcam, earphones and microphone chats). However, regardless of emerging new possibilities, communication through text online, which I refer to as “cybertext”, is still the most widespread type of communication on the Internet. Cybertext communication includes e-mail, instant messaging, chats, bulletin boards, discussion lists, forums and more.

With the introduction of cybertext to our social world as a prevalent medium for communication, it is important to assess what has changed in our experience of the world and of language as a result. The investigation of this cultural phenomenon through the lens of media theory engenders multiple questions about the nature of this medium and its effects on society, in psychological, sociological, phenomenological and epistemological terms. This paper set out to discover what is unique about cybertext as a medium, what are its unique characteristics that differentiate it from previous prevalent media, and what are some of its current affects on language and society, as well as possible future affects. Particularly, the focus on the textual aspect of this communication connects it with questions about literacy, print and orality. I will compare between the representation of the world and the experience of language in the age of cybertext, with that representation of the age of print and of the age of oral cultures.

Cybertext differs from printed text because the text online is interactive, created by immediate dialogue by several people, often without an editor and a finished product, in contrast to a novel or a magazine, for example. Cybertext, more than print, is a medium of reciprocal communication. It differs from electronic text which is not characterized by immediacy and interactivity, even though it is flexible for editing, such as the type of writing done on electronic word processors which allows to tinker with the text with options like cut and paste. Most importantly, this paper argues, that cybertext communication is a new hybrid form of literacy which combines characteristics of primary orality, literacy (of print age) and secondary orality, with unique characteristics of internet communication. I call this new hybrid form “secondary literacy” because it is a new type of literacy which relies on “primary” literacy of the printed age, but encourages a different type of thought, culture and style. Unlike writing of the print age, cybertext is immediately reciprocal, simultaneous, and easily edited, encouraging a social interaction rather than a solitary act of writing or reading, in other words, encouraging dialogue and flexibility over the fixation of language of the printed work.

The theoretical background of this paper relies on several key media scholars: Walter J. Ong, Sherry Turkle, Sven Birkerts and Barry Wellman. These thinkers have inspired the ideas of this paper. From Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) and The Presence of the Word (1967) I took the key terms of presence and absence, interiority, permanence and evanescence, context, in order to discuss the phenomenon of cybertext in relation to sound and vision, to orality, literacy and print, and to compare some of their major characteristics, such as the unique psychodynamics of oral cultures and the characteristics of the print age. From Birkerts’ Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994), I was inspired to explore the depth of cybertext as a medium, and to compare the process and significance of reading, which Birkerts elaborates on, because his writing about reading as an elevated experience reminded me of textual experience of online communication. I use Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995) to discuss characteristics of postmodernity in online identity, and I rely on her overall theoretical framework which refers to computers as epistemological and discursive “objects-to-think-with” about our world. Finally, I use Wellman’s sociological theoretical and empirical studies of the Internet in The Internet in Everyday Life (2002), to ground some of my ideas in empirical data, as well as to discuss the effect of intimacy and emotional support online. This paper intends to converse in dialogue with these texts and to offer my own point of view about them in relation to cybertextuality.

In addition, I have relied on research online and empirical scholarly studies as well as on my personal experience in the writing of this paper. For the purpose of this study, I visited several chat rooms, read log sessions of chats from different online sources, collected logs of instant messages from online friends, and surveyed my old e-mails archive. I have also read many online articles and Wikipedia entries and visited cyber-poetry websites. One of the most helpful sources for understanding computer mediated communication, particularly in psychological terms, was psychologist John Suler’s online encyclopedia The Psychology of Cyberspace, which compares in-person interactions with online ones, discusses “text-talk” and offers psychological analyses for specific aspects of the computer mediated communication (CMC) phenomenon.

In terms of my experience, I have been an avid Internet user since 1996, when I was sixteen. The Internet as a medium has always mesmerized me, especially as a medium for communication. I have built several personal websites, one of which has a small but intimate communal discussion forum of music fans, in bulletin board form. I have communicated with people I know as well as with strangers, from my country and from different countries, in different ages, and in two languages (Hebrew and English, and sometimes some French), and in different communication program and forms: Internet Relay Chat (IRC), instant messaging (Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, Trillian, AIM), discussion groups, website interaction, e-mails, chats and more. I have also had the opportunity to meet many of the people I interacted with online, from Europe, the United States and Israel.

From Print to Digital Media: Magazines

"Digital Mag Subs Growing, Using Less Print, More Of Other Platforms" [link].


" The findings comes as the print world is trying to come to grips with its migration to digital media, and whether the legacy of printed formats will hold up in digital form. While some remain dubious, digital editions have grown to be a significant share of the subscribers of some trade publications, especially tech industry magazines."

Career Insight Conference: Magazines

I got an invitation to this event from NYU Career Services:

"Attend this one-of-a-kind conference in New York City and take your first step into the exciting world of magazine publishing. You will have the unique opportunity to meet and make connections with seasoned magazine professionals, who will share insights, strategies and tools for successfully building and navigating a career in magazines. What's more, you will find out about the many different career options that magazines offer, including Editorial, Advertising Sales, Marketing, Research, Consumer Marketing, Business/Management, Production. The sessions will be interactive, with experts on the various areas of the magazine industry offering an overview of their specialty and answering questions from the attendees. Some of the sessions include: 1) Which Magazine Job Is Right for You? 2) The 'It' Factor: What Makes an Ideal Candidate 3) Practical Advice: What You Don't Know."
[http://www.magazine.org/diversity/21204.cfm]

The lowering of standards in the American media

Here is an article by my friend Tom. Thanks Tom for sharing!

The Lowering of Standards in the American Media by Tom Risen

As I woke up today on my way to go to a town hall meeting with the misguided dean of my journalism school (who isn’t a journalist) 90.9 NPR led their report with the following:

“Anna Nicole Smith be buried in the Bahamas…in a custom pink dress and a tiara made by her friends. Our reporter (Jerry Someguy) is live from the airport where Smith’s plane left an hour ago.”

News judgment like this is diluting the already fading standards of the old school journalism. People in Walter Cronkite’s day used to believe everything they heard and saw on the broadcast news since they knew that people like him were no-nonsense and hard hitting. Now some people see broadcast news, which is increasingly filled with entertainment and opinion, as background noise.

“We keep CNN on in the background as white noise and a decoration for the wall of our tiny office,” said Jeff Jagoda, a software engineer in Frederick.

Some people watch FOX News religiously for the same reason, whether they buy into the conservative bias of the network or not. Others have been turned off by becoming suspicious of the political motives of journalists.

This trend of disinterest, distrust, soft news, and opinion is the most visible in broadcast news, but all journalism is facing the same shift.

Michael Nelson, editor of the Kansas City Star, said that the business of journalism today is faced with a shift because of technology. There are many sources of news available and the new generation raised on it expects that information should be free. This means with an abundant supply the job market for journalists is shrinking. Newspaper circulation is shrinking and the future of how to fund and produce quality journalism is being questioned.

This is the problem that concerns John Levine, the new dean of the Medill School of Journalism, who is implementing an approach called Medill 2020 in an attempt to adapt to it.

The founder of the Medill Media Management Center, he is trying to bring Medill into the digital age where its students will be educated in all forms of media tech to get out the news and compete in an uncertain job market. How he plan to do this? Link here to see his ridiculously vague circle presentation that is occupying the budget and curriculum of the school.

The journalism world is making a shift to adapt to endless blogs and the cry for cheap information.

Newspapers like the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune are publishing free newspapers that are given away on the subways of their cities. Such papers like Express in Washington D.C. and the Red Eye in Chicago contain usually contain aggregated news from the Associated Press up front, followed by sports and entertainment news, and have been very successful, especially the hipster Red Eye. The only trouble is, the free newspapers have become more successful than the ones that pay to publish them.

“I love Express since its simple and free,” said Jose Sabalboro, a researcher at the Department of Transportation.

Many people in Chicago and Washington D.C. say that the Red Eye and Express are the only newspapers they read, for some of them it is the only news they follow most days only because it is convenient to them. They also read basic news on endless sources on the Internet which is similarly aggregated from the sources like the AP.

Journalism as a business is going out of its way to not only be entertaining and make news more appealing, but to straight out ask people what they want in their effort to keep their audiences being drawn away by the internet

Radio stations that are being bought out in Washington D.C. have commercials designed to win back audiences from digital media.

“Call us and tell us what kind of radio YOU want to hear,” said advertisements of 104.1 GEORGE FM.

Levine, a former readership analyst, is similarly looking for a way to get the attention of audiences drawn away from traditional news with his new Medill 2020 program. His efforts include like focusing more time on digital media instead of writing, requiring students to by iPods and video cameras, and holding weekly seminars on “engaging young audiences.”

Many Medill students and faculty see these as pandering to a trend which might undermine the school’s traditional reputation. Is this an effort to destroy the village in order to save it? Faculty not to be named here have griped to him about the program. Every time he speaks about it Levine doesn’t seem like he’s listened. Many journalists at Medill fear Levine might not have an exit strategy if his investment doesn’t pan out.