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| Sunday, April 15, 2007 |
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Lessons from Hal and Molly 
| | Her brand of commentary—intimate, indiscreet, defiantly regional, exuberantly scathing—does not survive her and will not be revisited in the corporatized, gadgetized, homogenized future of print journalism. Like H.L. Mencken, unlike a legion of pinch-faced whiners, Molly leavened her invective with glee. But forget her voice for a moment, if you can‹the voice that at its most forceful said, "Listen up, boy, Mama's talkin' to you now" and then dispensed home truths your mother never suspected in language your mother never used. Forget the voice and concentrate on the message. Whenever anyone asked me if there was an indispensable columnist, I'd begin with Molly and sometimes go no further. She was on message, column after column, for the past 20 years and more, and the message was the one our own Paul Revere would be carrying if the news still came on horseback—the only message that could possibly save this country from wrack and ruin. |
| | Every week she warned us that our birthright has been sold out from under us, that ruthless, careless corporations and the plutocrats who profit from them have created a cash-and-carry caricature of democracy. In her own words, which could not be mistaken for anyone else's words: "Oligarchy is eating our ass, our dreams, our country, our heritage, our democracy, our justice, and our tax code." |
| | Either we figure out how to keep corporate cash out of the political system, she wrote last summer, "or we lose the democracy." |
| | That's all she wrote. It's the only message that matters anymore, and you can stretch it to cover every issue that signifies‹the wars, justice, health care, the economy, the environment. While you were watching American Idol and playing with your electro-toys, boardroom bandits drove away with everything you had. Corporate flunkies like George Bush ("the master of crony capitalism"—M.I.) and Dick Cheney are not the authors of our misery any more than Donald Rumsfeld was the author of the cataclysm in Iraq. They're just pieces on the chessboard where macro-capital plays its games and are lightning rods for the occasional outrage those games provoke. If you ever doubted the organic connection between Texas oil politics and the Middle East bloodbath, you never read Molly Ivins. |
| | Ir goes on like that. Strong stuff. Especially about journalism: |
| | When a print journalist of real substance and consequence dies in mid-sentence, so to speak, it's hard in these times to separate her absence from a sense that she was the last of her kind. In Austin in November, Molly herself gave a speech titled "The Future of Journalism, Slow Death or Suicide." Amid chain-shuffles, sell-offs, layoffs, buyouts of senior staff and the replacement of columnists by blogs, a wave of retrenchment that almost no dailies have been spared, the American newspaper industry is foundering in plain view. With TV news long gone to the corporate dogs and every solvent magazine scrambling for the key demographics of dumb and nasty, where will the next generation find the free and obstreperous press on which every healthy democracy depends entirely? "Keep these little independent voices alive," was the Ivins prescription. "I think that's where the hope of journalism lies." |
| | Does journalism have a future? Back in the '60s, idealists like Fred Friendly sold it to us as a sacred calling, a kind of priesthood without the celibacy. The answer to what makes a journalist who matters, like Molly Ivins, is the same as the answer to what makes a journalist. Some of our classmates at Columbia had earned undergraduate degrees in journalism, many of them had years of newsroom experience. I remember her winking at me once—we were in the same boat, barely legal and stuffed with liberal arts—when some seasoned newsman questioned whether an Ivy League English major was ready to run in the fast lane with real professionals. |
| | Our confidence then was just youthful ignorance, the mother of arrogance. Yet experience never corrected us too severely. The recipe for an effective journalist, then and now, is 1 percent vocational training, 9 percent intelligence, talent and experience, and 90 percent attitude. The proper attitude? Picture a touchy pit bull that pulls his chain off the ringbolt every time he smells smugness—privilege without humility—and mendacity. A real journalist, we were taught, only unsheathes his pen in the public interest, defending the social contract and protecting the citizen without leverage, the underdog. If you don't believe that, you can write like E.B White and appear in 400 newspapers, and you're still a publicist, to me. |
| | Strong stuff. Read the whole thing. |
| | Back when I lived in North Carolina, Hal's wrote this kind of stuff weekly. Now his pace is closer to annual. But every one of his essays is good medicine, whether you agree with it or not. |
Public moves
| | Says here and here that WBUR is selling its Rhode Island stations — WRNI/1290am in Providence and WXNI/1230am in Westerly — so that Rhode Island Public Radio can take over. RIPR is also buying jazz station WAKX/102.7 in Naragansett. |
| | This is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to see happen in Santa Barbara, but with commercial operators selling their frequencies, rather than noncommercial operators. |
Profitsy
Live 'training
| | Vaspers the Grate: Cluetrain VS Corporate Amerikkka. In the margin to the right of that blog post is a Twitter thread that includes a pointer from "Amanda Chapel" to this post by Andrew Keen, in which Andrew, to Amanda's delight, trashes Cluetrain, Dan Gillmor and an alleged "culture of digital narcissicism in which our most meaningful cultural reference is ourself". |
| | Dan takes the bait, and a vigorous debate ensues in the comments below. |
Radio resources
| | Radio-Locator describes itself as "the most comprehensive radio station search engine on the internet". It probably is. It's also one of the oldest, starting at MIT in 1994. I've been using it almost as long. It does a remarkable job of showing available signals at a location, and what those signals actually look like. For example, here are the results for Boston. And here are predicted coverage patterns for WGBH/89.7 and WBZ/1030. While Radio-Locator gets base data from the FCC and other official sources, it depends heavily on volunteer updates. It covers |
| | FCCInfo.com is an engineering source for data about U.S. AM, FM and TV stations maintained by the firm of Cavell, Mertz & Associates. It's idea for finding up-to-date data regarding station transmitters, including applications, construction permits, power, antenna heights and directional patterns. For example, here are AM results for facilities within 30km of 02138 (Cambridge, MA). And here are FM results for the same zip. Also, here's the specific engineering data for WBUR (including a graphic that shows how the station has a signal that's dented in several directions to produce a directional pattern). And here's the data for WBZ, showing its directional pattern as well. |
| | RRC Online is another source of data, which I find partiularly useful for looking at noncommercial radio ratings (which are left out of the results at RadioAndRecords.com). I can't link to any results, because it doesn't work in a way that allows that; but still, it's very useful. |
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