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Tuesday, July 22, 2003
You might try again 
| | If you tried to send me an email this morning, there's a good chance it fell through the cracks while the searls.com server was down. So, like the headline sez... |
Red Pill journalism
| | My favorite columist of all time, bar none, is Hal Crowther. His byline has been all over the place (I remember when he covered television, which he generally despises, for Newsweek back in the 70s); but for most of the last two-plus decades he's been embedded with local weeklies in North Carolina. I see he's still with The Independent, out of Durham. |
| | The culture that produced King and enriches him is of course the culture of celebrity--the tabloid culture--and his schizoid talk show that breezes without apology from Clinton on health care to Madonna on child care epitomizes the most dismal of television's many ethical failures, its fatal refusal to segregate news from entertainment. |
| | If Larry King is a journalist, Tammy Faye Bakker is a theologian. But it's hard to deny that news sometimes occurs on his watch, more or less in spite of itself. In TV's general flight from integrity and public service, it spawns things infinitely more disreputable than Larry King Live ... |
| | "I don't want to hear any more about the line between news and entertainment," said Steve Friedman, executive producer of CBS News' The Early Show . "There is no line. We have to compete." |
| | So there it is, an epitaph for television news, in the killer's own words... |
| | It's possible that television, that colossal waste of talent and technology, has created an environment toxic to all intelligent life. TV tells us we can enjoy a healthy economy without benefit of culture, compass or conscience, and never miss them at all. |
| | The question is whether dumbing-down has a purpose more nefarious than profit. I can't watch commercial TV for more than a few minutes without sensing that I'm part of some satanic mind-laundering experiment. The commercials, so incessant only a mutant population could endure them, propagate a smug, infuriating venal consensus. And the most insidious thing about a show like "Survivor" isn't the sleaze or deceit but the monstrous values it espouses. |
| | They're predatory corporate values, celebrating and rewarding the most feral kind of dog-eat-dog behavior: the war of all against all, the Darwinian economics of double-dealing and betrayal. |
| | I don't agree with everything Hal writes. I've seen no evidence that he gets any of the good stuff that's happening on the Net, for example. (The bad he's got covered.) But he still commits red pill journalism, forcing readers to revisit real but neglected or forgotten values. |
| | Such as, it turns out, the freedom to read Hal Crowther. |
| | "The FBI is here," Mom tells me over the phone. Immediately I can see my mom with her back to a couple of Matrix-like figures in black suits and opaque sunglasses, her hand covering the mouthpiece like Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder. This must be a joke, I think. But it's not, because Mom isn't that funny. |
| | "Two FBI agents. They say you're not in trouble, they just want to talk. They want to come to the store." |
| | I work in a small, independent bookstore, and since it's a slow Tuesday afternoon, I figure, "Sure." ... |
| | "Were you at the Caribou Coffee on Powers Ferry?" asks Agent Trippi. That's where I get my coffee before work, and so I tell him yes, probably, just before remembering Saturday: Harry Potter day, opening early, in at 8:30. |
| | So I would have been at Caribou Coffee that Saturday, getting my small coffee, room for cream. This information seems to please the agents. |
| | "Did you notice anything unusual, anyone worth commenting on?" OK, I think. It's the unusual guy they want, not me. I think hard, wondering if it was Saturday I saw the guy in the really cool reclining wheelchair, the guy who struck me as a potential James Bondian supervillain, but no: That was Monday. |
| | Then they ask if I carried anything into the shop -- and we're back to me. |
| | My mind races. I think: a bomb? A knife? A balloon filled with narcotics? But no. I don't own any of those things. "Sunglasses," I say. "Maybe my cell phone?" |
| | Not the right answer. I'm nervous now, wondering how I must look: average, mid-20s, unassuming retail employee. What could I have possibly been carrying? |
| | Trippi's partner speaks up: "Any reading material? Papers?" I don't think so. Then Trippi decides to level with me: "I'll tell you what, Marc. Someone in the shop that day saw you reading something, and thought it looked suspicious enough to call us about. So that's why we're here, just checking it out. Like I said, there's no problem. We'd just like to get to the bottom of this. Now if we can't, then you may have a problem. And you don't want that." |
| | You don't want that? Have I just been threatened by the FBI? Confusion and a light dusting of panic conspire to keep me speechless. Was I reading something that morning? Something that would constitute a problem? |
| | The partner speaks up again: "Maybe a printout of some kind?" |
| | Then it occurs to me: I was reading. It was an article my dad had printed off the Web. I remember carrying it into Caribou with me, reading it in line, and then while stirring cream into my coffee. I remember bringing it with me to the store, finishing it before we opened. I can't remember what the article was about, but I'm sure it was some kind of left-wing editorial, the kind that never fails to incite me to anger and despair over the state of the country. |
| | I tell them all this, but they want specifics: the title of the article, the author, some kind of synopsis, but I can't help them -- I read so much of this stuff. |
| | "Do you still have the article?" Probably not, but I suggest we check behind the counter. When that doesn't pan out, I have the bright idea to call my dad at work, see if he can remember. Of course, he can't put together a coherent sentence after I tell him the FBI are at the store, questioning me. |
| | "The FBI?" he keeps asking. Eventually I get him off the phone, and suggest it may be in my car. They follow me out to the parking lot, where Trippi asks me if there's anything in the car he should know about. |
| | "Weapons, drugs? It's not a problem if you do, but if you don't tell me and then I find something, that's going to be a problem." I assure him there's nothing in my car, coming very close to quoting Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite : "There's nothin' in my trunk, man." |
| | The excitement of the questioning -- the interrogation -- has made me just a little bit giddy. I almost laugh out loud when they ask me to pop my trunk. |
| | There's nothing in my car, of course. I keep looking anyway, while telling them it was probably some kind of what-did-they-know-and-when-did-they-know-it article about the buildup to Gulf War II. Trippi nods, unsatisfied. I turn up some papers from the University of Georgia, where I'm about to begin as a grad student. He asks me what I'm going to study. |
| | "Journalism," I say. As I duck back into the car, I hear Agent Trippi informing his partner, "He's going to UGA for journalism" in a way that makes me wonder whether that counts against me. |
| | Back in the store, Trippi gives me his card and tells me to call him if I remember anything. After he's gone, I call my dad back to see if he has calmed down, maybe come up with a name. We retrace some steps together, figure out the article was Hal Crowther's "Weapons of Mass Stupidity" from the Weekly Planet , a free independent out of Tampa. It comes back to me then, this scathing screed focusing on the way corporate interests have poisoned the country's media, focusing mostly on Fox News and Rupert Murdoch -- really infuriating, deadly accurate stuff about American journalism post-9-11. So I call the number on the card, leave a message with the name, author and origin of the column, and ask him to call me if he has any more questions. |
| | To tell the truth, I'm kind of anxious to hear back from the FBI, if only for the chance to ask why anyone would find media criticism suspicious, or if maybe the sight of a dark, bearded man reading in public is itself enough to strike fear in the heart of a patriotic citizen. |
| | I've got more to say, but my email isn't working and I have to meet a friend at a coffee shop. Which, for the first time, seems like a scary prospect. |
| | Okay, I'm back. Here's some shrapnel from the BS-cutter bomb Hal dropped in Weapons of Mass Stupidity: |
| | But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll. Like no other substantial media outlet in American history, Fox serves — voluntarily — as the propaganda arm of a controversial, manipulative, image-obsessed government. To watch its war coverage for even a minute was to grind your teeth convulsively at each Orwellian repetition of the Newspeak mantra, "Operation Iraqi Freedom." I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News. |
| | Fox's truculent patriotism is misleading, of course. Rupert Murdoch is not exactly an American patriot, he's not even exactly an American. Though he became an American citizen in 1985 (solely to qualify, under US law, as the owner of a TV network), the Australian Murdoch was already 54 and his tabloid formula had already polluted the media mainstreams in Australia and Great Britain. Murdoch is an insatiable parasite, a vampirish lamprey who fastens himself to English-speaking nations and grows fat on their cultural lifeblood, leaving permanently degraded media cultures in his wake. Rabid patriotism is a product he sells, along with celebrity gossip, naked women and smirky bedroom humor, in every country he contaminates. And a little "white rage" racism has always gone into his mix for good measure. ("He tried so hard to use race to sell his newspapers that he became known as "Tar Baby' Murdoch," Jimmy Breslin once charged.) |
| | Murdoch's repulsive formula has proven irresistible from Melbourne to Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he's softening up Beijing. His great fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is stupid, bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it's hard to say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of the cultural leprosy that's consuming us. But the conspicuous success of Fox News, lamentable in the best of times, is devastating in a shell-shocked nation that sees itself at war. |
| | It is and has always been true, in Samuel Johnson's famous words, that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" — by which, of course, Dr. Johnson meant patriotism as a political and rhetorical weapon, not as a private emotion. Belittling other people's patriotism to achieve political leverage is the lowest road a public scoundrel can travel, the road where neo-conservative meets neo-fascist. In flag-frenzied Fox, an unscrupulous administration found a blunt object ready-made to hammer its critics. |
| | Until I read this, I simply accepted Fox News as a fact of life, like right wing talk radio. And I thought Rupert Murdoch was just the smart bastard who finally beat Ted Turner at the game of Understanding What Can Be Done with Satellite TV. I didn't see how broadcasters like Murdoch and Steve Friedman (quoted by Hal in that earlier piece, above) were somehow making a worse culture while wrecking a better one, how removing the line between news and entertainment gives us compelling yet untrustworthy forms of both |
| | I still think Hal's over the top, but I also know he's making me think and rethink what's happening in media culture. |
| | And about how so much of that stuff isn't happening here. Wherever this is. |
I was overheard to have said...
| | Early on I talk about blogging as "first draft writing." I should have added that talking, at least for me, is something that's far less finished even than blogging. Some people are blessed with the ability to speak in final draft. I'm not one of them. If I have one skill as a speaker, it's at coming up with quotable one-liners every once in awhile. But the rest of the time my speaking reminds me of what Garrison Keillor said about English, which he calls "the preacher's language," because "it allows you to talk until you think of what to say." |
| | One of my one-liners yesterday was, "A lot of what we do in blogging is more like prophesy about what is going to be, than commentary on what is right now — at least for some of us." I'm still discovering what I meant by that. Certainly it was not that any of us are prophets in the literal sense of the word. Rather it's that blogging is a terrific way for people with an interest in a changing subject — such as politics, governance, education and mass media — to grow a fresh understanding around it. This involves a locus of concern in the future rather than the present or the past. |
| | In his introduction, Chris says "Metablogger Doc Searls votes Liberal, bets Conservative." To clarify a bit, what I said was that I "tend to bet conservatively and root liberally ... and I don't mean that politically." To further fuzz the matter, I tend to vote Libertarian, sympathize with Liberal causes and bet on Conservatives in political races. As a registered independent, I have no party affiliation. And, as I also said in the interview, I tend to like underdogs. |
| | Speaking of which, it's hard to believe I also said, "Networked underdogs will beat isolated overdogs every time." Good that I qualified that with mumblage about "the long run" or something. |
| | I do stand my my prediction that Dean will beat Kerry. And everybody else on the Democratic side. I'm betting on the networking. |
| | Okay, I'm listening along here... |
| | Just heard another one-liner: Democracy is about participation, not just popularity. Not bad. Also not sure I fully agree with it, but I seem to have said it. Blabbing out loud is like that... |
| | Anyway, here are some links to people I mention: David Weinberger (credit where due: David — not I — was the author of "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy") Max Sawicky, Andrew Sullivan, Steven Den Beste, Glenn Reynolds, Dave Winer, David Sifry, Technorati, Howard (whom I dumbly called "John") Dean, Bernie DeKoven, the Commons, RSS, Jim Moore, Chris Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto, John Kerry, Ken Layne, L.A. Examiner, NEA... |
| | Some of those were from the first dry-run interview I did with Chris yesterday. But it doesn't hurt to list them anyway. |
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