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| Tuesday, October 2, 2001 |
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Be there 
| | After missing nearly every movie that ever comes out over the last several years, I finally got to see one that isn't out yet: the Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. It's a very noir murder mystery, sort of. Very spare and tight. Beautifully written. Highly recommended. |
Desiderratum
Post-industrial journalism
| | When I was young I loved opinionated writers: Renata Adler on movies, Clive Barnes on theater, Nat Hentoff on jazz (and everything else), William F. Buckley on conservatism, Henry Pleasants on classical music, Rex Reed on popular culture, Gail Sheehy on suburban life, John Simon on theater, Ken W. Purdy on cars, Jimmy Breslin on urban life, Gore Vidal on politics. |
| | Even though I disagreed with some of them mightily (Buckley on politics, Pleasants on Beethoven, Reed on Aretha Franklin), I loved their artful certainty. Their opinions expressed absolute entitlement conferred by a complete education. They could be so selective in praise and scorn because, well, they knew it all. |
| | As a rookie journalist in college I stuck to humor and sports because I didn't know it all. I was less humbled by what I didn't know than humiliated by it. How could I even begin to think that any kid my age (especially me) would be qualified in the least to criticize a book or a movie? |
| | What I hadn't realized until much later — actually a few minutes ago — was that the opinionated form followed the opinion-making function, which was essentially an industrial process, like extruding rails at a steel mill. |
| | Publishing was, and remains, one of the great creatures of the industrial age. Like steel, transportation and oil, it was a huge industry controlled entirely by the supply side. It was how the few informed the many. Before publishing became an industry, "information" wasn't a product. Nor was it commodified as "content" and forwarded like freight through the transport systems we call "media." |
| | Editorials, reviews and op-ed essays are all just finished products in the information production process.Nothing wrong with them, of course. Just something absurd under circumstances where none of us know enough to have qualified opinions. |
| | Think about the dot-com boom. |
| | What went wrong was that we just didn't know enough. The people who really did know enough — Warren Buffett, Peter Drucker and Alan Greenspan come to mind — thought it was flat-out nuts ("irrational" was Greenspan's adjective). Yet those in the industries that manufacture and transport "information," "opinion" and other "content" — the cable channels, the technology business magazines, the older business pubs recently fattened by dot-com advertising, the analysts at the stock market's temporarily fortunate financial houses — were full of poorly qualified opinion. They didn't know what they were talking about. But they talked anyway. And we listened, because we're used to trusting our opinionators. |
| | Now think about this war we're sort-of having. |
| | What went wrong was that we didn't know enough. In fact, what we didn't know verged on the absolute. The people who did know — the terrorists who passed through airport security with impunity, repeatedly, and then turned four passenger jets into cruise missles that found their marks three times out of four, killed thousands and crippled an already lame economy in one September morning — are now dead and discredited beyond all hope of understanding in anything but the long term. Yet the opinionators are pumping along at full blast. The need to agree overpowers the need to seek, to question, to share. |
| | So all we get is the War Story that human tribes have been telling themselves since they first started throwing rocks at each other. It's a simple story described by the llinguist George Lakoff in "The Fairy Tale of the Just War." Bear in mind that this is a pro forma story: it's built into human nature. When a people are wronged, this is the story they tell to themselves: |
| | Cast of characters: A villain, a victim, and a hero. The victim and the hero may be the same person. |
| | The scenario: A crime is committed by the villain against an innocent victim (typically an assault, theft, or kidnapping). The offense occurs due to an imbalance of power and creates a moral imbalance. The hero either gathers helpers or decides to go it alone. The hero makes sacrifices; he undergoes difficulties, typically making an arduous heroic journey, sometimes across the sea to a treacherous terrain. The villain is inherently evil, perhaps even a monster, and thus reasoning with him is out of the question. The hero is left with no choice but to engage the villain in battle. The hero defeats the villain and rescues the victim. The moral balance is restored. Victory is achieved. The hero, who always acts honorably, has proved his manhood and achieved glory. The sacrifice was worthwhile. The hero receives acclaim, along with the gratitude of the victim and the community. |
| | The fairy tale has an asymmetry built into it. The hero is moral and courageous, while the villain is amoral and vicious. The hero is rational, but though the villain may be cunning and calculating, he cannot be reasoned with. Heroes thus cannot negotiate with villains; they must defeat them. The enemy-as-demon metaphor arises as a consequence of the fact that we understand what a just war is in terms of this fairy tale. |
| | Sound familiar? This is the story being told by AP, ABC, CNN, and the amen chorus of bellicose sarcasts that comprise most of talk radio on the AM band. This story is easy to nod along with; not only because we Americans feel a righteous patriotism, but because there is some degree of truth to the tale. By all accounts Osama bin Laden is not a reasonable guy. But by many informed accounts, Osama may not be the only bad guy with high standing in the bad guy community we're fighting. In fact the real bad guy or guys may be both hard to pin down and hard to characterize. Let's not forget that one of the reasons the Khmer Rouge got away with killing millions of their own people was that the story was too hard to tell. We had no pictures of Pol Pot. We had no coverage from the front (because there wasn't one). We had no stories of heroism and loss that were easy to put on the evening news — not until Sydney Schamberg wrote the story in the New York Times Magazine that was ultimately retold in The Killing Fields. By which time nearly all the victims that could have been saved by a high profile media story were piles of skulls stacked like cordwood. |
| | Think about this: our whole airport security system was based on a story that was flat-out wrong, and we believed it for years. The bad guys who did all that damage on September 11 were able to succeed because they knew our story better than we did. |
| | Think about this: the bad guys who starred in the opening of our new war story on September 11 were heroes who lived happily ever after in the story they told to themselves — and perhaps also to millions of others. |
| | The problem I'm having is with the (intrinsic?) nature of news coverage itself. In the early stages of a situation like this, the news comes fast and hard and for the most part, unfiltered. It was mostly facts...there was actual reporting going on. Some of the reporting was crappy, and some of it was even dead wrong, but on the whole, it seemed honest and human and generally from a place of truth. |
| | Now the spin and the analysis phase has set in. The PR machines of our government, large corporations, special interest groups, various agencies, and political parties have had time to mobilize. Everyone now has an "angle" appropriate to their political/corporate/religious/cultural affiliation. It feels like I'm not hearing the truth from humans anymore, I'm hearing careful crafted and sanitized PR from government/company/agency/media spokespeople. Perhaps it's my fault for immediately distrusting spin, but I just don't see how I can believe anything I'm hearing or take any notice of the analysis going on because it's based on incomplete and faulty information. |
| | I agree. That's why I stopped watching TV again. My only source of trusted information on the radio is NPR, which has been brilliant over the past few weeks. Most of all, that's why I'm back to reading personal journals for nearly all my news. And trying to make sense of it in a way that's as free of opinionating as possible. |
| | It's not that I'm sour on the Official Story. Again, I'm not even sure I disagree with it. I just know we miss too many facts by replacing dialog with chant. We don't know what's going on, or why. Not really. Not by a long shot. And we need to know, desperately. We need a crash course on more subjects than we can name in an hour. |
| | I think we all know that, here in the blog world. Even those of us who are most comfortable marching in the parade to war. Out here where personal journalism lives, nobody's pumping content. Everybody's seeking and sharing. Here we're more motivated by the the need to know and the need to share than by the need to tell a finished story, or to embellish the prevailing one with more tendentious facts and opinions. |
| | Here's another way of looking at what drives Personal Journalism in the Age of Terror: what we don't know matters more than what we do know. If there's one lesson to take away from September 11, that's it. |
| | Another lesson worth leveraging is the one Bill Joy taught us years ago when he said "most of the smartest people work for somebody else." This is the very essence of personal journalism. The smartest people, the most well-informed people, the best-informing people, are not you. They don't work for your organization. They don't live in your country. They don't share your religion or your value system. And, most important, they aren't busy embellishing the story you're already telling yourself. |
Just in case the story isn't clear
| | CNN wants us to know they've been properly identifying the bad guys who started this war. |
| | Thanks to J.D. for the link. |
Word of Mouse
Getting behind Full Sterne Ahead
| | My friend Jim Sterne and his company, Target Marketing of Santa Barbara, are going ahead with their eMetrics Summit November 7-9. That anybody is going ahead with anything is good news these days. But it's especially good news when one of marketing's best guys is able to keep up the work. I just leared about this from the latest Full Sterne Ahead, the email bulletin that Jim archives here. I'll point to the current one when it's up. |
| | FSA is generally full of serious (or at least important) stuff, but this month he treats us to one moment of levity (if your dial-up connection can take it): the Dancing Paul Page. It puts the disco back in Flash. Or vice versa. |
A rising tide that lifts bad laws
| | "Don't it always seem to go," Joni Mitchell sings, "that you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone." |
| | Buoyed by a rising tide of nationalism and resolve to support our government in its "war" against terrorism, the Department of Justice is floating a raft of legislation that would trash a pile of ordinary liberties — all for a good cause. The details are all over the Electronic Frontier Foundation site, so I won't clog the screen with them here. I will say we're talking about something far beyond Law Enforcement at All Costs here. We're talking about Law Creation at All Costs. |
| | For some additional perspective, check out a strong piece by Jim Flynn written in response to stuff I've been writing here on the blog. A sample: |
| | The Sep 11. attacks succeeded not only in bringing terrorism home to our shores, but in forcing us to see our government as others across the world have for decades. To them our rallying cry is not freedom, but capitalism. With us as the management, and most of the rest of the world as workers and resources. It is not capitalism that is evil, but the exploitative relationships some would have us equate with it. |
| | It is not enough that we preserve our own civil liberties, it is past time we exported them. They are after all inalienable human rights when force is not used to suppress them. I predict they would be a very popular product. |
| | My additional thoughts are here. |
The continuing collapse of business as usual
| | Cox@Home is off the air again. I'm dialing up. Their tech support line has a message for all of Santa Barbara: we don't know how long it will take, so be patient. I can't help but wonder if it's becaue Excite@Home went bankrupt. |
| | United Airlines has a message for Santa Barbara as well: good bye. Same for Knoxville, Raleigh-Durham and other places. At the end of the month, they're gone. Happy Halloween. |
Like he said
| | Declan McCullagh pointed to JPB's piece back on 9/24 in Why Liberty Suffers in Wartime. (Thanks to Zemblog for the link.) Declan points to governments' tendency to restrict freedoms in wartime. But I think it's more social than that. Political Correctness has given way to Patriotic Correctness. Hit SCAN on the AM band and check it out. |
| | But the AM band has long since turned from a Main Street of friendly local voices to a line-up of nationally franchised sarcasts with megaphones, together raising bellicosity to a modern art form. |
| | I think we're trying to do something else here. I think we're trying to learn something: about journalism, and about its natural concerns. Which are the need to know and the need to talk about it. Because what we know is more important than what I know. |
| | On September 11, the sum of What we Need to Know became almost unbearably huge. |
| | The more I learn about the Middle East, about Central Asia, about Islam, about the history of the conflicts that led up to 9/11, the more I realize how little I knew in the first place — and how much more I need to learn before I can even begin to have an informed opinion. |
| | The best thing we can do is inform ourselves and keep asking better questions. There is nothing about either that's unpatriotic in the least. |
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