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Wednesday, July 21, 2004
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| | I've been briefed (and involved) in this, as an advisory board member (Steve's one too). |
| | While this is necessarily about CNN and Technorati, it's also about the unavoidable coming together of blogs and media to cover a Major Event in symbiosis rather than competition. That's the Big Story here. |
| | ...According to Wolfe, it is the element of the factual in the New Journalism that removes all "screens" between literature and its audience and puts "the writer one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of and never achieved... (the links are mine) |
| | Just as the Net re-ignites The Enlightenment, blogging renews The New Journalism. Like it or not, the bloggers are in the house. Not only on the page, but on the tube as well. |
| | See that mike? See that camera? You're on. |
Should have something to talk about.
| | Remember, the DOC runs the Patent and Trademark Office, the Technology Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and other bureaus of high relevance to The Industry. Links to all them are here. |
| | Thanks to Marc for the linc. |
Stinking to one's convictions
| | First, some context: Tony Hendra may be the funniest guy you never knew. Take, for example, his Deteriorata, which is best experienced by first aquainting yourself with the Desiderata, then placing your mind in 1974, which is when Henrda wrote the former as a parody of the latter. |
| | In addition to writing, performing, directing and producing in an endless variety of venues — magazines, movies, TV shows — he was one of the funniest founders of National Lampoon when that magazine was still new and about as funny as funny gets. Later he was Editor-in-Chief of Spy, when that magazine was about as clever and snarky as a magazine gets. |
| | Only recently, however, has Hendra appeared on celebrity radar, as the author of Father Joe, a bestselling book I've been meaning to buy ever since I heard Terry Gross interview him on Fresh Air last month. Reviews, until recently, averaged five stars and up. |
| | But it's not just Hendra's head and heart that are on the radar. His whole naked ass is out there now, splattered with shit. |
| | Father Joe is confessional, but not enough for Hendra's daughter Jessica, who accuses her old man of molesting her, repeatedly, when she was a child. Her instrument of revelation is the New York Times (here's the story). Hendra denies the accusations categorically. |
| | Only two people really know what happened - and their memories may be clouded by trauma or intoxication or denial or mental instability. |
| | It seems to me that in those cases, people outside the family really do not need to know. There are many parts of our lives that contain elements of shame, embarrassment, humiliation, even evil. No human being could live sanely if every aspect of that were constantly available for public scrutiny. And yet that is now the standard for anyone who achieves even a modicum of fame or success or public exposure. How many people are now withdrawing from public life altogether because of this potential human toll? By erasing the distinction between what is public and private, the media is slowly making our democracy a place where no flawed human being can safely or sanely operate. The cost is often invisible. But it is destroying our public life as surely as it is ruining many private ones. |
| | The media are all genies. Rub the lamp and voice your wishes. Whatever Jessica Hendra's wishes were (completing the record, revenge, justice...), she got what she wanted. She got back at the old man. Whether his sins were real or imagined, he's paying for them. |
| | The scales of justice are an accounting system. We "pay" for our crimes. We "owe" a "debt" to society. Where the wheels of official justice grind slowly, deliberately (or deliberatively), we need a different metaphor for the justice delivered by media. Instead of a sentence or a fine, we have a shit-gun blast. And a big one. As Cohen puts it, |
| | In Hendra's case the Times proffered a balance -- an accusation, a denial. But the accusation was so graphic -- descriptions and characterizations of at least two sexual episodes -- that no denial was really plausible. Once the mind's eye saw them, nothing Hendra could say afterward could erase them. |
| | This is a cinematic power rarely bestowed on newspapers. Once something is seen -- whether on the screen or in the mind's eye -- it is experienced. This is why some newspapers and magazines -- Newsweek in particular -- initially shied away from revealing that Ken Starr was in effect investigating Bill Clinton's sex life. Once the details were known, it would no longer matter that they were allegations. Think about it: No one talks about Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich anymore. But bring up Monica Lewinsky and we're off once more to the races. |
| | Newspapers have to be careful when dealing with sexually graphic material. It is naive to insist that fairness has been achieved simply because both sides have been heard from. To achieve that sort of balance, the Times would have had to forgo all of the sexual detail. But the Times, in an effort to be candid, with-it and determinedly not the New York Times of old, included stuff that I cannot quite get out of my head. It was, I suppose, news. But it was not fit to print. |
| | (Which, by the way, is also why I also refuse to look at the beheading photos and videos on the Net.) |
| | Even after we discount the undiscountable, we can only ask, Whose shit is it? Is Jessica simply shooting Tony with his own shit? Or is she making her own ammo? Can we ever tell? |
| | Only by getting to know the parties better, perhaps. |
| | That's where the genie comes in. |
| | The genie (and the genius) of the blog is its literal authority: it expresses the author's voice, directly. No intermediaries. No editorial filtration. No cutting for length or compliance with publishing imperatives. |
| | Technically, Tony has a blog. It's been "under construction" since he started it. Maybe now, after his whuffie has dropped to zilch, he can start writing it. |
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