Daniel Schorr

In memory, the Cronkite of the evening news and the Cronkite of "You Are There" are indistinguishable. The actor and the newsman served the same Muse, the goddess of spectacle, of history acted by men in costumes, monumentalized leaders and dramatic events fraught with consequences. But all this did was turn the drama into History: events appealed as spectacle, but like large historical paintings, they were museum pieces of no living relevance to us.

Daniel Schorr began in the now, which would trigger the memory of some lived moment that refracted the current instance. He'd strive to render both moments, past and present, more intelligible and present. His recollection, rooted in his direct observations and meditated awareness of contexts, transformed Historical Personages into persons for an audience that included Schorr musing to himself.

Schorr was musical, reflective; Cronkite, theatrical, sensational. Cronkite introduced the Beatles in 1963; Schorr delivered a eulogy on Frank Zappa in 1993.

Cronkite dispensed bulletins of News - the Official Version sanctioned by the ("that's the way it is") State. Schorr evoked events steeped in experiences - the burden of the storyteller.

Cronkite retired from CBS with dignified ceremonial auto-monumentality. Cronkite begat ingrate Rather, weepy witness of news as Melodrama. Schorr, fired by CBS for putting journalistic integrity above corporate interest, may have no worthy professional heirs.

Refusing to name source of leak in 1976

/more maybe on this later -/

NYT's lobotomy needs a lobotomy

Turns out it was Time.com and Politico, both well-financed, reputable news media organizations, that blithely stepped over the line and took what was not theirs. (**(&*(

The Intellectual Property thing has apparently gotten even dumber in the world of print journaljism. The above is from David Carr, in the New York Times, accusing news organizations of "stealing" the news.

The simple fact is, the Rolling Stone story was no longer a story about a general. The effects it triggered themselves became front page news - understanding Obama's actions with regard to General MethChrystal required awareness of the story that caused them. The story at that point was itself news.

Only the New York Times would fail to see this. Fail to see that news is inherently public property. Rolling Stone blew it by failing to be first to post its own story (then posted a really lame mark-up), but the Times blows tout court when it confuses actual news events with proprietary reportage about them, because it fails to see that these linguistic entities can indeed bleed "across the line."

The irrevolution will be televised

The Colbert - Assange "interview" is remarkable for its confluence of horror and televisible humor. It offers suppressed information about an apparent war crime, which, moved into the open, is discussed with comedic flair. The revelation involves the deaths of Iraqi citizens, harmed children, chuckling US soldiers. Assange of Wikileaks is allegedly concerned for his personal welfare.

Something seems shared here, in the provocative binding of the release of forbidden knowledge with comedy. At the very least, there's a trust, both in emancipators of repressed realities and in comedy's preference for the vernacular, that bringing something out into the public light of day will be better than keeping it secret. Indeed Colbert riffs on that theme in the segment. For Freud, jokes find socially performable ways to liberate the hostile and the obscene.

One common element between intelligence leaks and laughter is surrender of control. As forbidden speech is uttered, those who wished it to remain unspoken lose their power over it, and over the conditions of ignorance enabled by its suppression. When a comedian climbing a ladder suddenly finds the ladder heading backward to the floor, his situation is similar -- the crash is the explosion of the unforeseeable surprise, the force of the punch line.

Though here, the force derives from the detonation of an artificial stranglehold on what is true. As Zizek has noted:

Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded.  

The rhetorical features of parody -- sober, straight-faced presentation of something too absurd to be real -- are pressed into the service of its inverse: This time, the truth is not a hoax, the tongue-in-cheek presentation strangely melds with the horror of war that is always unfamiliar to the public whose soldiers are waging it somewhere else. In all comic seriousness, it's not unlike an April Fool's jape coming home to roost.

Thin sliced thoughts even thinner

Two footnotes to yesterday's comment on Andrejevic's "Thin Sliced Thoughts" piece:

1. A friend forwarded this Angier piece (in the Times, of course) about filmmaking, pink noise, and the control of attention:

Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us. This mounting synchrony between movie pace and the bouncing ball of the mind’s inner eye may help explain why today’s films manage to seize and shackle audience attention so ruthlessly...

She's all, like, gaa, with no awareness of the exploitative potential in the utility of brain scanning efforts discussed by Andrejevic.

2. As regards the very well-described effect of introducing competing narratives into the info-glut, which Andrejevic sums up as:

By multiplying the narratives—and in particular, those narratives that cast uncertainty on one another—the goal is to highlight the absence of any ‘objective’ standard for arbitrating between them.

It should be noted that this strategy has tremendous leverage -- maximal, really -- within a journalistic practice that attempts to present fair and balanced, equally weighted but incompatible judgments (or perspectives) because this sort of cravenly feckless (candyass) approach is precisely what the USian journalistic establishment calls objective.

Living Stories will have to overcome dead resistance

Living stories should introduce temporal duration into what has been a staccato news form. Sample.

Coursey: Living Stories improves the newspapers ability to deliver news-by-topic, which has proven difficult for newspapers to master.

Indeed. Let's ask why this has proven "difficult." Why have newspapers refused to clump related news in ways that give temporal duration and multiple perspectives?

One reason might be that this would actually require them to be more truthful - the stories would more evidently hold up or fall apart as news broke and developed.

Another might be that if news is thought of as something more than a pellet of a slice of time, it would cease enjoying pure commodity status. News orgs thrive on the idea that a story dies fast, so that they can sell another story. Banks of data that store and enrich themselves over periods would cease to have that rapidfire obsolescence.

It's hard to pretend you have a new product each day when, in fact, you are offering additional layers to an existing entity. An entity that would pretend to remember public understanding of events.

If nothing else, this is another way that Google, by virtue of its power to ferret, is transforming the way news orgs have to conceive of their own bidzness.

Tweet Update

Murd and Huff at the FTC hearing become the Ping and Pong, Mutt and Jeff, Clik and Clak of my Tweet

Anything that makes search less direct only fucks itself. To wit.

Goodman treated like Mooseshit at Vancouver Border

Apparently you're Osama Bin Laden if you oppose the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Amy Goodman, who says she didn't even know the Olympics were being staged there, experienced invasive treatment at the hands of border guards as she tried to enter the country to give a talk that had nothing to do with the Olympics.

CBC

Rabble

DN

Canadians: buy a clue: no one in USia gives a flying puck about yr fricking Olympics. But one has to wonder about your ideas of border proprieties, privacy, matters of public interest, and what conceivable justification you might offer for how you're handling your paranoia.

The Globe and Mail carried the story as well. Not oddly, however, this tale of the maltreatment of a journalist at the US/Canadian border is of no interest to the New York Times, which has never acknowledged Goodman's existence -- a calculated inattention worse than the New Canadian Attention.

Uncommonplace

A thoughtful piece about news by Megan Garber - if one is not utterly sick of thinking about it. Among other good things, she tells an anecdote from George Trow. Common Knowledge. (via Jay Rosen)

In blindness we trust

Robert W. McChesney on The Death and Life of American Journalism (book due in Jan.)

The problem, in short, is rooted in the longstanding tension between advertising-supported, profit-making media and democracy-sustaining journalism. . . .

the Internet will no more spawn sufficient journalism than will the old media. . . .

Jefferson and Madison and our other founders did not roll the dice and hope rich people could make profits doing journalism so we could have a Republic. Instead, in the first several generations they instituted massive postal and printing subsidies that created the independent newspaper system in the United States. The value of the federal subsidy of the 1840s, for example, in contemporary terms would be roughly $30 billion annually. That is roughly 75 times greater than the current federal subsidy for public broadcasting. . . .

These were brilliant democratic subsidies that gave us quality journalism but also a competitive and uncensored press. We need to do the same today. We need to revamp daily newspapers into independent post- corporate entities, vastly expand funding to public media and find ways to subsidized nonprofit journalism online.

All of which, yes, fine. But why look solely to private citizens for subsidy, and not to corporate citizens as well?

McChesney makes a case for the need within a capitalism run amok to support honest journalism. Still, something is blocking our thinking -- preventing us from seeing how the profits of Big Pipes can be put into a blind trust to help support Net Content.

Corporations work on multiple levels in the service of unending profit. One of the layers is human freedom. That unendingness is the infinity that perforates any usable form of balanced economic system. There is justice in redressing the imbalance.

Tom {T'i qifsha trut?} Friedman, "Fuck You"

Thomas Friedman (see preceding post for new editorial policy regarding certain proper names) regarding how it came to pass that he chose to say "Fuck you" to a roomful of people (at the Freedom to Connect Conference) trying to understand journalism:

"I believe passionately in the New York Times, a place I have worked at my whole adult life. Lord knows, it has made its mistakes. Which newspaper or blogger hasn't? But I believe that when it is at its best it plays a vitally important role in our democracy, and flippant, denigrating remarks about it, at a time when it is in economic peril and our country desperately needs serious journalism to sort through this crisis, struck me as deeply unserious. That said, when I'm trying to make a point, especially a heartfelt one, and my choice of words ends up getting in the way of that point — even if for just one person — then I chose the wrong words."

(From David Weinbergers's most recent edition of JOHO, which has much more of interest about new notions of news).

This is Dan {viech d'ase} Ratherism, only rather worse. Mr. {Bousse to la gueule}Friedman has chosen high seriousness and the priestly essence of Journalism to believe in, at a time when what one might wish to do is to look very honestly and dispassionately at the New York {Moor Kwas} Times, the falling industry it clings to, the social crises making it a reasonable question whether, given the current state of social rationality, journalism continues to be what it originally was, or whether it has degenerated, genealogically, into the opposite of its original idea,

social rationality appears to produce normative ideals, however these normative ideals are subject to historical change. Their existence in the present may have little relation to their genesis. That is, what was once normative may have over time come to be instruments of domination. (We can think of a totally administered society or the irrational consequences of rationalization.) Thus, previously normative ideals could lose "the normative kernel" over time. link

and, if so, why.

dumb q.

Tears welled in the lifelong reporter’s eyes as he discussed the dwindling number of war correspondents. #

How to trust a journalistic culture that fails to question why corporations, which are essentially wealth accumulation mechanisms, are granted human status in the United States.

The bogus analogy that will never go away.

Bernanke brought to us by Rupe

So today Chairman Ben Bernanke chooses to address the USian public via a piece under his name in the Wall Street Journal, entitled The Fed's Exit Strategy.

The article addresses matters of money supply and public policy:

My colleagues and I believe that accommodative policies will likely be warranted for an extended period. At some point, however, as economic recovery takes hold, we will need to tighten monetary policy to prevent the emergence of an inflation problem down the road. The Federal Open Market Committee, which is responsible for setting U.S. monetary policy, has devoted considerable time to issues relating to an exit strategy. We are confident we have the necessary tools to withdraw policy accommodation, when that becomes appropriate, in a smooth and timely manner.

These are issues so basic to the economy in which we all swim or sink that the placement of the article raises at least two questions.

1. Why does one of the most highly placed officials of the US choose to write for a private, subscription-based publication, instead of making his views known through some more public channel? His piece could have run in various Government - as in Open Government - websites, blogs, the Fed's own site. It could have, indeed, run on all of them. As well as in the WSJ, and the NYT, and WaPO, etc.

Why does Bernanke - here playing the role of example, not whipping boy - not think of his role and place in USian life as warranting the widest possible public distribution of his thinking? Why not share via multiple networked distribution, rather than lend visibility solely to Rupert Murdoch's private enterprise?

In brief, why is the nation's top banking official failing to understand that his official words, like his official deeds, should be shared with all?

2. A slightly different aspect of this regards the Murdochian worldview. The WSJ sells its articles, and in most instances offers a couple of paragraphs - you want more, you pay. But in this instance (and in others), the entire piece is available to anyone.

Why? Could it be because the Journal acknowledges that public communications about matters of public interest deserve, warrant, or require public access?

If we assume something along those lines, then the question of the propriety of newspapers charging for news - which tends to involve "matters of public interest" - rears its uncapitalist head. Because if all information and communications relating to public interest are commodified products owned by private info-factories, why should there be any exceptions? Why should Mr. Obama's words, or Mr. Bernanke's not simply be carried by the highest bidding private publisher?

Or, if there must be exceptions, where is the line between essential, necessary public communications that must be shared with all, and inessential, government and public communications that need not be so distributed? Barack Obama yes, Hillary Clinton no? Barack yes, Michelle no? Bernanke yes, Paulson no?

Who decides where matters of national concern leave off and those merely of private interest begin?

Private Ben

Description and judgment

Transparency is the new objectivity, says David Weinberger:

The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark.

Yes and or no. If the object is an object, and one is describing it, there is some sense in which, through trial and error and comparative observations, one can determine if the description is more or less accurate, for some purposes, some of the time.

In journalism, of course, the object is rarely an object, in that reified sense. One is dealing with characters, motives, interested speech, commerce, rhetorical ploys, misrepresentations, missing data, dubious sources, events sometimes rooted in earlier events, now hidden from view, veiled, or forgotten, for starters.

Then one is utilizing all sorts of processes of judgment, including the senses, but going beyond that to intuition, research, bullshit detection, critical thinking, imaginative interrogation, official records etc.

Transparency of the reporter as source can then be a valued element in his readers' (and editors') judgments of her/his total process of judgment. Prior to that, transparency of the reporter to her/himself is also a great plus, unless one works for Fox.

But neither one or the other of these transparencies, though offering significant interpretive clues, equals objectivity, so far as I can see, as neither speaks to the quality of the thinking, research, or intuitional sensibility informing complex acts of journalistic judgment.

Peter Sunde says Media r Funny

I don’t dislike that many of the journalists. I mostly dislike the editors that can’t even say that they’ve done wrong when it’s so clear that it happened. #

Sunde of The Pirate Bay makes a key distinction one rarely sees being made. Some editors I've known are a combination of bean counter and mid-management suck-all, looking out for the best interests of the capitalized entity that promises to pay them now, and after they retire.

Scared police is no police

While Cindy McCain and the Republicans inside the RNC shat dimes for the proleptically unfortunate of Lousiana (and admired themselves for so doing), US journalists were getting beaten, robbed and incarcerated by USian polizei in St. Paul.

• Secret Service ripped press credentials from the necks of legitimate journalists with high-level passes to the convention, and walked away, ignoring requests for ID, receipts.
  
• Minnesota Police advised the journalists to not be present in the streets, but to spy on the demos from afar, through telephoto lenses.
• Police removed batteries from journalists' cameras.

Scared police is no police.