Archive for the ‘Journalism Culture’ Category

#377 – Newscasts from The Office

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

pseudo-reality television and the news on timescast.

The newly-launched TimesCast daily web video by the New York Times takes us into the newsroom to get a quick, digitized sense of what stories the crack staff of the Old Gray Lady are following and writing. Watching the webcast, a strange new kind of pseudo-reality itself becomes newsworthy.

The webcast wants to bring the viewer into the Times as if we were watching a really good PBS documentary—”The Making of The Day’s News” or some such show. Or perhaps a great documentary film, such as War Room. Or maybe we are watching a reinterpretation of the final season of The Wire if David Simon had actually thought modern journalism was a success and not a total failure.

But that’s not the real story. I’ve buried the lead. What is most peculiar about the webcast is that it comes to feel like episodes of a reality series, or better said a pseudo-reality series, such as The Office. On TimesCast, the newsroom drama starts to overshadow the drama of the news.

We see recurring characters who seem like they are “acting” at being journalists. They are “making a newspaper” even as they are, in reality, making a newspaper. We start to follow them as recurring character-types even though we are supposed to imagine them as mere vessels for the stories they are following, investigating, and writing (oh, there’s the well-chiseled but pompous senior editor; there’s the aspiring reporter; hey, what is he wearing today? WHAT is he wearing today? And so on).

We not only become voyeurs for the famous Page One meeting, but are taken into conversations between editors and writers that come across as mock-spontaneous dialogues—conversations about real issues that start to feel staged by the presence of the camera. One is left thinking: do these conversations actually occur in the newsroom, or are they entirely fabricated for the cameras, or some in-between combination of the two?

I think what’s most fascinating about TimesCast is precisely this in-between quality. The show wants to rewrite The Wire, but in the ambiguous space between cinéma vérité and staged performance, TimesCast more weirdly starts to seem like a sequel to The Office than a rebuke to David Simon.

For here is the presentation of “reality” (real people making the news) done in a way that keeps shading into the feel of a pseudo-reality show (inevitably calling to mind the camera work and acting styles of The Office). And the pseudo-reality show mode of The Office, we should recall, was brilliant exactly because it imitated the reality show style that first gained popularity in the 1990s. Which, we should recall, itself was a fictionalized version of “reality.” Big Brother is watching, but it is we, the viewers, who are watching Big Brother. Real World is realer than real precisely because it is hyper-mediated, dramatized, and, ultimately, unreal.

The Office is a show about many things, but it is primarily about the effort to find something real when you have the nagging feeling that, in the modern work wasteland of postindustrial corporate capitalism, nothing is. The show’s creators make a new and painful type of comedy out of the absurd pointlessness of clerical and managerial labor. After all, does anyone really care, either on the show or in the viewing audience, that The Office sells paper?

And will anyone care anymore, watching Timescast, that the Times sells newspapers? What is on sale here, exactly, as we gaze at this strange new genre of reality television as it uneasily dances between the real and the staged?

Those questions remain to be answered, but what better mode to think about how the news gets made (or should that be how “the news” gets made?) than through this unstable and uncertain movement between the actual and the constructed, the fictionalized and the truthful, the mock-up and the paper of record.

Between just the facts, ma’am and all that’s fit to print is where TimesCast seems to cast its spell—and break its story.

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Journalism Culture, Television Culture | 1 Comment »

#374 – Bloc That Metaphor!

Friday, March 12th, 2010

the long march through the institutions has not reached the new yorker, apparently.

“Gramsci would not be pleased.” – Hendrik Hertzberg

Hendrik Hertzberg, trying to be funny in his March 8th Talk of the Town column for the New Yorker, mentions Iowa Representative Steve King’s bizarre invocation of Antionio Gramsci in an anti-healthcare reform speech at C-PAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Here is a transcript of King’s speech, in all its McCarthyist (or is that McCarhtyite?) paranoia:

Now who are we up against? I want to define that enemy. They are: liberals, they are progressives, they are Che Guevarians, they are Castroites, they are socialists, more enemies on this list, Gramsciites, ring anybody’s bell? Trotskyites, Maoists, Stalinists, Leninists, Marxists. They are all our enemies. Who’d I leave out? I think I heard that. How about I go to: democratic socialists? And I’m going to ask you to go to the dsausa.org website and take a look and see what you find there. The Democratic Socialists of America. They are the socialists. There is a game plan on there.

Hertzberg, rightfully critiquing this paranoia by joking about the obscure reference to Gramsci, writes:

Strictly speaking, that should be Gramscians, followers of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party leader of the nineteen-twenties. Ding-dong!

The journalist ends his piece by pointing out how centrist the current health care legislation is:

The health-care reform bill—which, despite everything, is still alive—is an ambitious piece of legislation, however modest it may be by the measure of the rest of the developed world. Ideologically and substantively, it is centrist. It has Republicans, and Republicanism, in its family tree. For better or for worse, it’s already bipartisan. Gramsci would not be pleased.

But if you’ve read your Gramsci, you would know that Gramsci actually might be pleased.

This depends a bit on your interpretation of Gramsci, of course. Those who use Gramsci to affirm older, clunkier Marxist theories of ideological domination by ruling economic classes would cite the watered-down nature of the health care bill as an example of what Gramsci called “consent”: the compromised nature of health care reform offers an example of how the dominant class asserts its ideology over everyone, thus limiting radical reform. In this use of Gramsci, the socialist thinker and activist would not be pleased—though he would get to say “told you so!” from the prison he was thrown into for his beliefs.

Or, more intriguingly, the centrist health care bill could be read as the beginnings of what Gramsci called a “counter-hegemonic bloc,” a new set of ideas and cultural attitudes that draws together groups that might not always agree with each other or have the same economic interests in society.

In the case of health care reform, these beliefs revolve around the realization that corporate capitalist markets do not, in fact, solve all problems—and that it may be better in the case of health care for government to step in, regulate, and shape health care to make it a right, accessible and affordable for all. With this reading of Gramsci, he would indeed be pleased about the long march through the institutions, including the Congress, to make life better for citizens.

But, if that is the case, then is King right?! Only if you think that the more than 25 million uninsured people in the United States more than 44 million uninsured and 25 million underinsured are also the enemy within.

Posted in Culture Rover, Journalism Culture, Marxist Culture, Political Culture | 3 Comments »

#361 – Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

mcsweeney’s captures the gone grandeur of the twentieth-century newspaper.

Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern takes the form of The San Francisco Panorama. Published on giant newsprint, the latest creation of Dave Eggers and gang is a kind of romanticized, fetishized idealization of the classic urban daily. It’s a brilliantly strange move, for the articles zip and zap with the energy and flash of an online news aggregator, but they make you recall the sheer beauty and thrill of the newspaper.

McSweeney’s issue 33: The San Francisco Panorama.

The San Francisco Panorama reminds one of what made the newspaper so great as an object: it compressed the feeling of living in a metropolis into a satchel. It was destined for scrap paper, butcher wrap, fire kindling, and, in more recent times, the recycling pile. It was merely a common part of everyday life. At the same time, in its heyday, the newspaper was perhaps the most important, vital, miraculous, valuable thing you owned: for without it you were stranded, lost, alone, without company, even the company of strangers. Within its columns, one accessed civilization.

McSweeney’s issue 33 recovers this feeling by its transposition of the urban daily to magazine form. You are pretending to read the daily here. The pleasure is the same as entering a great antique store. You wonder, why would anyone ever give this stuff up?

Then, clicking away, screened from the past, you realize that only when nobody wants yesterday’s papers do we start to appreciate the newsprint all over our fingers.

Posted in Culture Rover, Journalism Culture, Literary Culture, Urban Culture | 3 Comments »

#353 – The Dude Abides

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

hey, careful, man, there’s a beverage here — a refreshing look at how the dude abides in academia.

At long last, a New York Times article that does not simply dismiss academic efforts to take pop culture seriously.

In  “Dissertations on His Dudeness,” book critic Dwight Garner earnestly engages scholarly analyses of the cult film The Big Lebowski while also, with congenial subtlety, poking fun at the attempt to philosophize alongside the Dude.

This is a cause for celebration. For even if you’re into the whole brevity thing, and you don’t like mixing your highbrow and your lowbrow, Garner let’s you enjoy the fun of taking this strange, absurd, borderline-insane/borderline-profound Coen Brothers film seriously. This approach of twinkling and rolling the critic’s eye all at once is so much more refreshing than the umpteenth version of the typical New York Times reactionary response to academic studies of popular culture.

In the typical Times article, the reader, the film, popular culture, the academy all get bashed repeatedly by a “can you believe those daffy professors are writing about American Idol?” tone of incredulity that has become even more tiresome and limiting than the worst mismatches between high theory and low culture could ever be. What started out as a healthy guarded skepticism in profiles of the ivy tower gone prime time became nothing more than a long line of gimmicky, close-minded, clichéd puff pieces-in-reverse: one loud lazy whine of hack-job elitism masquerading as populist outrage.

In Garner’s review, which makes fabulous use of Umberto Eco’s essay “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” we can have our white Russians and learn how new shit has come to light too. And this, thankfully, is how the whole durned human comedy can keep perpetuatin’ itself.

Posted in Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Film Culture, Journalism Culture, Literary Culture | No Comments »

#348 – Snark with Spark

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

a critique of critique of critique.

Jody Rosen had two extremely fun and funny critical takedowns of other critics last week in Slate. The first burst burned down the bucolic barn of New York Times editorial-page ruralist Verlyn Klinkenborg. The second went at all the John Mayer haters out there.

Were they snarky? Yes. Were they ruining conversation? Probably not. For there was plenty of argument behind Rosen’s fairly vicious quipping. He had a point to make in each case, and he made it with a series of swift, magnificent uppercuts rather than any hits below the belt.

Listen to Rosen on Klinkenborg:

…bewilderment is his shtick. Klinkenborg’s columns are literary minstrel routines, starring the writer as an idiot savant—a bumpkin-seer who perceives the marvelous in the pedestrian and pivots to “epiphanies” that elude those of us who haven’t spent years watching sunlight dapple the snouts of woodchucks.

And Rosen on Mayer and Jonah Weiner’s “playa hating” of him:

Jonah, let’s cut to the chase: John Mayer is a douchebag. Or, rather, he’s a meta-douchebag—a guy who’s smart enough, self-aware enough, to know that he’s a douchebag, and to meditate on douchebaggery and its discontents in his music.

…It strikes me that Mayer and his ilk get an especially tough time from critics. Sensitive white boy singer-songwriters with easy-listening proclivities and Berklee College of Music-honed chops—they’re not exactly rock critic bait. Even in these poptimistic times, it’s still socially acceptable to reflexively dismiss the Mayers of the world. So I’ll say one more nice thing about him: the guy can write some tunes.

What’s wonderful about these critical put-downs is that after the initial sting, there’s plenty to ponder. Having pastoral tendencies, I have always read Klinkenborg uncritically, dreaming of life on ye old idyllic Hudson Valley farm; but I will never do that the same way again, even if I will still not “playa hate” Klinkenborg as much as Rosen does. And though I still, much to my own dismay, cannot remove my authentic core of rockist purity (I jest for those of you who have followed the great poptimist vs. rockist debates), I will give that Mayer another, more ironic listen.

The key to Rosen’s snark is that it has spark: it illuminates. It may open up wounds, but it also opens up conversation, deeper thinking, and more careful inquiry.

Posted in Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Journalism Culture, Literary Culture, Musical Culture | No Comments »

#312 – Accuracy in Reporting

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

at last, new york times reveals truth about neo-liberalism.

From the New York Times Op-Ed page:

Thomas L. Friedman is off today.

Posted in Culture Rover, Journalism Culture, Political Culture | 1 Comment »

#274 – All the News That’s Fit to Desire

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

the news blues.

Reflecting on the death of journalism in December, Virginia Heffernan glimpsed the deeper tidal pulls of desire from which information bubbles up:

All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.

It’s a McLuhenesque sensibility, and it feels right: older forms and ideals of journalism are giving way, but we await the new medium that is the message (and, as McLuhen put it, also the massage).

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Journalism Culture | No Comments »

#260 – How Patronizing

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

new models for newspapers.

Michael Miner’s fascinating article on new business models for local newspapers suggests that patronage rather than profit might fit the bill.

While many fret the disappearance of the local daily, and others look to the music business for journalism’s survival, I wonder if it is the art gallery, or perhaps the museum, that might serve as the model. Without ever saying so, Miner’s column suggests this. Maybe the newspaper could function like an artwork, its makers the artists funded by patrons?

Hans Haacke: Violin and Cigarette: Picasso and Braque (1990)

Newspaper Collage: Hans Haacke, Violin and Cigarette: Picasso and Braque (1990)

The artworld model gives newspaper editors and writers a sense of independence: drawing on the cult of the artist, they become autonomous creators rather than mere propagandists. (Yes, yes, I know the cult of the artist is a deeply problematic proposition, but it does exist, at least as a powerful myth.)

And while journalists become the Picassos of digital print, patrons get something even better than hoarding  paintings on their own living room walls for noone else to see: they get to show off their patronage in the public commons.

The old model of the newspaper is dying. But like all unruly forms of the commodify (music, literature, art, information, maybe even love itself), the news wants to be free. It yearns to live. This is because the news does something beyond deliver a good to market. It also delivers good to civil society.

That is, the news is like oxygen in the atmosphere of the commons: it sustains the shared space of knowledge, facts, opinions, ideas, and debates, disagreements. We’d be lonely and isolated without it (which is perhaps what the “free” market of capitalism wants). The sociality of the news is what makes it so important — and what keeps it in the air.

That makes the art patron model imperfect and compromised. Would we only get all the news that’s fit to fund? After all, patrons might censor or distort the news through their economic might. But as David Beers of Vancouver’s Tyee told Miner, the advertising model was far from perfect on this count anyway.

So perhaps the patron model offers a new way to sustain the much-needed public sphere of the newspaper in the information age.

From galleys to galleries?

Posted in Arts Culture, Civic Culture, Consumer Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Journalism Culture | No Comments »

#223 – You’re Gonna Have to Face(book) It

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

you’re addicted to…nothing about to happen.

All big Internet successes — e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft — have a more or less addictive component — they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep. – Nicholson Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia,” New York Review of Books 55, 4 (20 March 2008)

The mediated life seems to consist of waiting for something big about to happen. On cable news, you hear it in the tone of a voice such as Wolf Blizter’s. Everything he says amounts to “and now, the think you’ve been waiting for,” but then the now never arrives. You feel it when you keep asking your computer to get mail from your email account. You feel it every time you log in, reload, reset, reboot.

Has anyone written about this strange emotional quality of media such as cable news or the Internet? It seems essential to a certain kind of paralysis that one feels in our contemporary world. Information overload. Always on the edge, edgy, and then edged out. You’re standing at the precipice of a crossroads, to quote Little Carmine from The Sopranos. But you never arrive.

The link leads nowhere but to the same perpetual cusp.

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Journalism Culture | No Comments »