Death and Media

Don't normally recycle old posts, but in light of the 9/11 anniversary observation going on in the media, this one seemed worth resurrecting:

FRIDAY, APRIL 08, 2005

eternal life will not be televised

papolatrie - the help of ritual - bigness, inflation, costumes, dirge, convenient fixity of death.

Probably nothing more and less like news than death. It's factoidal, verifiable, and opens media elan to savor a perfectly controlled routine. It's control over the news, not the news, that we want. Not news, but a sort of mechanized Big Gulp O' the Thrill and the Chill of Memento Mori, the frisson of horror slowed to images of a gelid crawl of thousands of the assembled, moving in medievalesque slo-mo, the hyperbolic elongation of the photo-op.

more

Merdest proposal

For all Media, Bloggers, Tweeters, etc. When you wish to say "bank" in any financial context, say "bunk."

To wit:

Bunk of America.

Just do it.

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)

Poll up your arse?

an NBC poll last week found that 45 percent of those surveyed believe the measure would allow the government to make decisions about cutting off care to the elderly -- a figure that rose to 75 percent among Fox News viewers. Kurtz.

As if anyone still needed to disabuse themselves of the discovery value of polling. Some elements that factor into polls:

• Sampling method
• Topic
• Wording of question(s)
• Wording of possible responses
• Timing of poll vis a vis media coverage, other events
• Body language of pollster (including tone for telephone)

Doubtless there are more. And the weight of each element all goes to the work of innuendo, social manipulation, etc. For the tweeterers: Do social media help or hinder our awareness of the limitations, distortions, of broadcast polls?

Afterthought: It is with commercial products like polls that one can, I think, make advances toward enlightenment by invoking David Weinberger's notion of Transparency (see his post, Transparency is the new objectivity).

For years I've ignored polls. Instead of providing objective evidence, they are mostly about serving some insect lord's nefarious agenda. That's a reasonable inference, since they usually fail to provide any of the transparency David calls for.

I.e., knowing all about how the poll was conducted: seeing the questions, watching the questioner speaking them, looking at temporal context, understanding the sampling method, and knowing who paid for the poll -- all this can give the dumb, silent public (which is always what's posited as the receiver of broadcast commodity information) a means of gauging the "objectivity" of any particular poll. So long as that information is withheld, the poll is useless.

With that in mind, I'm tempted to modify David's formula. Transparency might not be co-terminous with objectivity, but without what might be called genetic transparency - how a thing was made - we will never begin to gauge the complex bearings of political media messages.

So, given that all news programs are, before anything else, performances (shows), it stands to reason that what we end users want is not the show itself, but a window into the making of the show - the places where the story choices, emphases, editorial decisions, reportorial obsessions, advertorial repercussions - are made manifest. Again, like polls, news commodities are designed to hide the very things that would help customers reach informed judgments.

What we need less of is the stage. The fourth estate needs no fourth wall. Stop re-porting what you think is the news, and start bringing us into the news Room, the space of the news. That might not ensure objectivity, but it could provide a vantage from which a useful evaluation of your reportorial and analytic skills could begin.

Haque and Doc on news, evolution, and bucks

Attention to the dire straits of news as insolvent, failing enterprise and what to do about it goes on. Interesting discussions include that of Umair Haque, who suggests that nichepapers may provide a clue to how content can make money in the future. He makes a distinction between news - the commodity that is immediately available everywhere when something "newsworthy" (Michael Jackson dies) happens and knowledge, which is "meaningful" and "lasting."

Doc comments on Haque, offering a tantalizing suggestion about how the new news is larval, how it pixellates via many witnesses and sources, and how this may over time evolve into something rich and strange.

The results paint a mosaic, or perhaps even a pointillist, picture of news sourced, reported, and re-reported by many different people, organizations and means. These are each portraits of an emerging ecosystem within which newspapers must adapt of die.

Where Haque is looking at the hierarchic depth of knowledge as gleaned from informed sources by discerning journalists, Doc is watching the world scan itself, reacting with almost a visceral immanence, seismically, to events. Twitter picks them up and gossip bubbles up.

Somewhere between Doc and Haque may lie some future -- place? medium? manner? -- of instant information channeled and built into useful knowledge.

One thing both writers speak to, but implicitly, I think, is the current complexity of what is now knowable as news. Newspapers can still position themselves as significant cullers of local news and information useful and desired by their local audiences. But no single newspaper can hope to match the scale and complexity of the Internet as a sensorium resonating with the quickening awareness, wit, and free comment, learned or ignorant, moving all around us. Nor can any modality other than the Net contend with the complexity and intricacy of, say, the Federal Government or Organized Crime in all their tentacular scope.

Rather than compete with the Net, newspapers - no, news organizations - will need to adapt and work with it. Haque and Doc are both saying this, but I'm emphasizing the evident difference imposed by scale that makes this not an option, but a new norm. This is why TV studio local news has become nothing more than a joke - its simplicity beggars belief in a networked world of information.

But the other side of this - how to make a profit - is still unclear in Haque and Doc. According to Haque, successful nichepapers like HuffPo are indicators of how money is made:

"What is different about them is that they are finding new paths to growth, and rediscovering the lost art of profitability by awesomeness."

I'm less persuaded that content alone, no matter how stunning or seductive, can establish reliable, viable earnings. Which is why I have been trying to formulate one simple observation -- that we who use the Internet think of the Net as both mechanism and mind - pipes and content. We believe that when we've paid our Internet Service Provider, we've done our share. The stuff we find when we connect is what we have already paid for.

Only, the corporate "owners" of the pipes do not see it this way. They make a clear distinction between pipes and content (and then proceed, if they're Verizon or Comcast, to offer miserable excuses for content), and tell us we are only paying for the pipes.

What strikes me in all the discussions, white papers, and bloggery among journalists and commentators is, they apparently buy this hokum -- hook, line, sinker, and mouse turd. Not once have I seen the savvy content gurus suggest that the money we end users intend for content is all being waylaid, ripped off, by the pipe guys. Somewhere back in the day when the pipes were being laid, there was a logical moment when Big Pipe had to think: "What if no one puts any content out there? Then who will use our infrastructure?"

Fortunately for Big Pipe, no content provider apparently ever raised the issue with them, saying, in effect, "That's a nice pipe you've got there - want some content? Let's make a deal."

That deal has yet to be made. The discussion involving the economics of content seems trapped inside Flatland's notion of content. They extrapolate from antique models of moneymaking and apply them to the future, instead of journalistically analyzing the lie they've all been fed, and all believe, that the Internet can, in the eyes of its paying customers, be divided neatly into monthly infrastructure charges on the one hand, and then, on top of that, an infinity of charges to the same customers for the privilege of reading or seeing anything.

My $.02 is that this entire economic system of the Net has to be revisited. The mega profits generated and hoarded by Verizon, Comcast and their keiretsu buddies needs to be shared with content makers -- not just with news, but with anyone doing worthwhile stuff. This is what I've been trying to speak to in recent posts here, as you'll see if you scroll down.

My proposal (caution: Language!) recommends creating an independent pool of funds generated from the income streams of the ISPs or ILECs -- funds which then can be shared among providers of content via an equitable micropayment system.

I don't mean to imply this is the way it must be. I'm saying that I've yet to see any economics of content - including that of David Simon - that makes better sense by leaving out the economics of the totality, which includes the infrastructure. I'll be happy to be pointed to a better idea.

pools of common patronage and micropayments by use

via Stowe Boyd:

Posner Wants To Ban Links To Save Newspapers

juicy bit:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary...more

Very rough analogy: Before there was central water, people dug wells and paid for delivery equipment to provde them with clean water; each habitation its own system. Centralized water eliminated the need, and well diggers and equipment providers largely disappeared. People still pay to access water, just via other means.

News organizations need to divorce what we want from the physical encasements that no longer are quite so essential (tho' the net-deprived might disagree). They and we seem to believe that the end of the need for paper is the end of the need for news. It isn't.

Similarly, we think of the necessary costs of Internet provision to consist of the cost of the pipes, the delivery mechanism. An analysis of the actual pipe costs would help us understand why it is that pipemakers are so happy to be in this business. Perhaps some of that profit could be applied to subsidize use.

Not as in giving the New York Times a basic content emolument for existing, but maybe more as in a micropayment method by which, when users choose to look at a story in the Times, a tiny sliver of funds goes to the Times. Not directly out of the pocket of the individual user, but out of a common fund, generated from the pipemakers' profits.

That is, end users fund the pipes and contribute to content costs, but content providers earn their keep by justifying their existence. Links are free and the more you are linked to, the greater the chance of getting those micropayments -- $.0000000000007 or so, nothing huge - but it will add up.

Such a means of common, shared costs of patronage might seem silly, or full of difficulties and obvious problems, but it is surely less so than invoking antiquated and misguided law to "bar linking."

Times' mirror

I can't recall seeing a newspaper do what I'm about to describe, but why not?

Here's a Times story from Oct. 23, 1999:

A NEW FINANCIAL ERA: THE OVERVIEW; ACCORD REACHED ON LIFTING OF DEPRESSION-ERA BARRIERS AMONG FINANCIAL INDUSTRIES

The Clinton Administration and top Republican lawmakers reached an agreement early today to overhaul the financial system, repealing Depression-era laws that have restricted the banking, securities and insurance industries from expanding into one another's businesses.

The Times should run that story again. Verbatim, page 1. Make itself, its own understanding of that event, the news. Publish the analyses offered by people with a decade's hindsight. And keep this up until someone sorts out what exactly happened - not just the event, but the Times's coverage of it, and the understanding of that coverage then, and now.

Insuring Insurance is Good Business, Clearly

"Risk controls at the company were clearly inadequate." That's Bill Bergman, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. in Chicago, who also said, "AIG keeps getting hit square between the eyes by the housing-finance meltdown."

Given the new bad news about AIG's weakness, and the new good news therein for certain elements in the market, one might want to press Bill Bergman to pin down more exactly what he understands by "clearly."

For his sentence to be clear and adequate, he must mean: "Fraud enabled AIG to operate with these clearly inadequate risk controls."

Or he means something like, "These risk controls were so inadequate that they have resulted in losses so clearly catastrophic that it's clear we'll do all we can to mitigate them, hastily, without clear policy controls, without clear monitoring -- without, in short, clarity. Some, of course, will profit."



Interestingly, the AIG site sports no AIG logo, and doesn't even pretend to be a company. It's just: "Insurance Website."



The company, or website, or whatever, remains under the stewardship of Edward Liddy.

[update] See Golby.

¿Qué pasó?

What is an event?

A few years ago I recall talking with Jon Husband and eventually some people from flickr about a breaking news facility that would put work from photographers at a breaking story into a basket that could be summoned by a simple tag.

AllVoices (via Dr. Weinberger) is going that idea a few better, it seems. Events become instigators of aggregated sources about them -- other news stories, blogs, images, comments (so far, no tweets even though the concept and map seem related to twittervision).

Curious to know more about the methods of aggregation. And of course to see whether we end up with original news, an additional column of the Nu YorK times, tabloidal enthusiasm, or something else. It seems very clever.

phyzzics of nooz

Solid: A small community of speakers can probably agree, more or less, on what's the news.

Liquid: A larger community, with a broader spectrum of the real and of views thereof, has more difficulty, and probablistically will be happier with algorithms than with any single vendor's version of "the" news. Especially when the vendor's life support consists mostly of vending advertisements for entities that aim to control credit markets, environment, intellectual property, "entertainment," etc.

Gas: Scale up beyond that larger community and the very notion of "news" begins to sputter, undergo another phase change. What scalable technique, method, or epistemology do we have to sensibly represent "the news" to the gathering digital maelstrom of global voices? The news about the war in Iraq is that there is no news, no single report, however complex, that can adequately acquit itself to all speaking communities of all nations of all earths.

We see the shinola, where's the shit?

Kia on the sad state of book reviewing; on what it means to educate the book audience; on Cyril Connolly and Marvin Mudrick; on the stupefaction of stupid fiction; on the reasons she reads; on the relation of a news timeframe to a literary timeframe; on Mudrick's method of reviewing and his kind of good judgment; on remembering that "nobody gives a shit about you"; on academic "collegiality":

The great virtue is collegiality, the maintenance of this specious chumminess among people who secretly and violently loathe each other. What brings them together is saying shit about the stupidity of students and grad students and (I suppose) of those untenured phantoms who roam from campus to campus, living on Top Ramen, doing the actual teaching.

on preferring British book reviews to the USian species; on the wellsprings of USian essay tedium:

in order to say anything critical about anything and keep your mass audience you have to play the self-deprecating curmudgeon. “Oh, don’t you mind Uncle Frank. The Katzenjammer Kids set fire to his underpants again.”

on a certain parallel between contemporary essayistic (/blogistic) finery and the somnambulent procession of 19th century Augustanism; on getting "a pretty strong sense of the difference between shit and shinola," among other things.

I've not been reading many blogs lately. And whatever happens on Twitter can stay on Twitter. Who has time for Facebook? But this is like suddenly being hauled out of the ClichéoSphere with a Swiftean smack of sanity. I warmly recommend the whole thing.

Sic et non

sic:

At any moment there are 40,000 stories out there claiming to be the gospel truth. Many of them are good as gold, presented by people with the best intentions; many are lies and distortions sponsored by people with the worst. Most are muddle and nonsense. It takes years of experience or constant immersion in the news cycles, or both, just to begin to sort them out.

non:

"If you can't explain a stock or an investment principle in under a sentence to me, chances are you're not serving the audience. So clarity counts. Getting to the point counts. None of the on-the-one-hand, and on-the-other-hand stuff."

"That crocodile will never be a pet."

"When we came in here, we arrested everybody. . . Everybody is in jail, everybody has a relative in jail. . .we can make, we can make huge friends if we can help to release them." Two-part video here.

Take away the precious thing, barter it back. End of the day, we're friends.



Update: The alleged Lawrence of Arabia of al-Anbar reportedly is no more.

One last delighted glance at Sven

Sorry for the re-eructation, but Sven Birkirts' meditation upon blogs (noted here below) gets richer, funnier, the more rumination it receives. See, he does that fair and balanced thing, he pretends to find a few "virtues of the blogosphere" -- not that he bothers to note any. Then without ado he wheels out his Big Creaking Blunderbuss:

The bigger question, if we accept that these are the early symptoms of a far-reaching transformation, is what does this transformation mean for books, for reviewing, for the literary life? %$*#

That someone in 2007 deadpannedly advances the anadiplodic catacosmesis that the fate of the literary -- the art that foregrounds the defamiliarized, the fictive, the sign of the trope, the rhetorical panoply, the improper -- hangs upon how many goobers pick up and read the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and even here, in the city where America's literary culture was born, at The Boston Globe... is truly one of the most "LMAO-LMFTO-PMSL" events of humor to come down the pike in a very long time. Thanks, Sven!

(I would dare to say, for sheer hilarity, it stands shoulder to shoulder with:

1. JSTOR blocking human beings from human knowledge, and - close second -
   
2. Rupert Murdock buying The Wall Street Journal -

the three at one time are more than anyone (except maybe Melmoth) can bear.)

Mute the Press

It's a little difficult to tell through a search of the New York Times whether it has actually covered certain stories or not. Ok, more than a little difficult, it's totally impossible. Insert your search term and retrieve however many links to "free previews" of stories going back a ways. Since the previews are snips containing the search term, there's often no way to say for sure that the story is actually centered on someone, or just mentions them in passing.

It might be worthwhile to ask how it can be that the News Organ that pretends for all the world to be the authoritative newspaper of record on all newsworthy things can simultaneously withhold from public view whether it even is or is not a source for stories that one might wish to research.

I happened to be trying to see whether the Times has ever done a story about Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. You can do the search yourself, and let me know if you have any better luck. She's mentioned in passing, dissed in a film review, sort of a tangent quote here and there. But her feat of becoming a serious and respected conveyor of news by quilting together hundreds of small, local media to build what's essentially a grassroots national alternative radio and television network -- a story that would seem, in the information age, at least as relevant as the release of a new DVD of Mario Bava films, this story seems to remain to be reported by the Mother of all NewsFitToPrint.

I was checking on whether the Times had gotten around to Goodman after looking at and participating in this thread regarding, in part, the quality of information, the level of public discourse, in the US these days, in light of a pointer there to Umberto Eco's remarks on the nature of Fascism, "Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt."

The question being, how a fifth rate anything like Mr. Geo. W. Bush could talk his way not just into the most powerful position on Earth, but then further wartalk his way right up into his own arse with the most reductive view of reality, the most puerile ideas about life, politics, and co-existence, the most dumbed-down, porcine representations of others and evil and freedumb etc. ever offered to the USian political arena -- clusters of idiotic speech and venal nonthought that would not pass muster in a 5th grade classroom in Boston in 1828. I mean, it makes one wonder.

Wonder, e.g., what illumination was not offered by mainstream media. Yes, it's a blogger's duty to wonder that. But what specifically seemed wonderful is that so many instances of lucidity present themselves, a spectrum of informed visions of life and reality that just don't seem to make it into public consciousness.

When was the last time Naomi Klein, eg, was invited on the nightly news to ask,

When you can create such a booming economy around war and disaster, around destruction and reconstruction, over and over and over again, what is your peace incentive? Democracy Now

(via here)

Klein, Goodman, and a great many others are spectral nonentities, Amurhikan Non-idols. Unsurvivables. They never got to the island in the first place. Gesturing vainly under the giant Mute Button we call Secure Corporate USian Media, or SCUM.

The Times cannot countenance Goodman. Or, it can, but it would then have to make up stuff about why its representation of the world seems so vacuous by comparison. Instead of taking an honest journalistic position that might say, "this journalist's critique is one we should emulate," it's so much easier to just hit mute, and kill any search utility while you're at it.