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Tuesday, March 8, 2005
Interesting anachronisms, cont'd 
| | WBT remains one of the country's big-ass AM stations, and probably covers the whole East Coast, from Maine to Florida, better than any other station, owing to the kidney-shaped pattern produced by those three towers. |
| | Here are pictures of the towers, after Hurricane Hugo broke two of them. As I said yesterday, the owner (Jefferson-Pilot, which has never sold out to any of the radio conglomerates) deserves credit for rebuilding the towers exactly as they were. |
| | When I was growing up, not far from the Meadowlands in New Jersey (the were still just The Swamps, then), WADO's big Blau-Knox diamond was a landmark along Route 17 in Carlsdadt (or East Rutherford, whatever it was), at the intersection of Paterson Plank Road. In those days the transmitter house had lots of glass block and sported the call letters WOV, even though WNEW once occupied the site. WNEW (now WBBR) put out a great signal from its next site, across the Turnpike from WMCA, which is still there, along with WNYC-AM, which co-radiates from WMCA's towers. |
Nightfun
Welcome to Hollywood
| | In July, 2002 Morgen and I wrote this treatement for a movie called Disaster! which was a spoof of disaster movies including a giant comet. Today, Morgen sent me this IMDB listing for a movie in production called Disaster! described as "A spoof of disaster films, an asteroid is coming towards earth and Harry Bottoms is in charge of saving us all...again..." |
| | Um... Anyone?? Some suggestions here? |
| | I don't have any, but I'm glad to pass along the request. |
Promocasting
On second thought, keep your dead
Guess we'd better regulate it
| | Eighteen percent of survey respondents said the Internet was one of their primary sources of campaign news, up from 11 percent in 2000. At the same time, the proportion of voters who cited newspapers as one of their main sources dropped from 60 percent in 1996 to 39 percent in 2000 and 2004; only 4 percent of voters deemed magazines among their most important news sources--down from 3 percent in 2000 and 4 percent in 1996. Radio held relatively steady, with 17 percent stating it was a primary source of campaign news--up from 15 percent in 2000, but down from 19 percent in 1996. |
| | More than one out of three (36 percent) of respondents said network television was one of their main sources of election-related news--up from 22 percent in 2000, but still down from 55 percent in 1992. |
| | Nearly half of all Internet users--and 56 percent of those who get their political news online--said "the Internet has raised the overall quality of public debate" during the campaign, while just 5 percent said it lowered the overall quality. |
Suspecting out loud
| | Am I the first to suspect that, if bloggers are recognized as journalists, and therefore deserving of shield law protection, the end result will be the repeal of shield laws? |
Skin spam
| | Tattoo advertising is just one part of a growing trend of placing ads everywhere, including the sanitation disk holders in urinals and the bottom of a hole on a golf course, said Jim Ellis, a dean at USC's Marshall School of Business. "It's kind of the ultimate ad — the human body," he said. |
| | They (meaning, Frank Rich) say bloggers don't do "real" reporting. But I'm here to report that the mainstreamers get it wrong when they fail to credit an actual blogger with launching this trend. That would be Chris Pirillo, who has been renting his chest for more than two years. In fact, I ran this augmented excerpt... |
What's the infrequency?
| | I almost wanted to see Dan Rather pull up his anchor on the news last night, but the kid and I were busy watching the International Space Station fly overhead, followed by an Iridium Flare. Much better entertainment on a dark and starry night. Also much better information for an 8 year old and his old man than most of what's on what used to be The News. |
| | And let's face it: Dan's been strange for the duration. Nothing new there. Has anybody ever looked less comfortable staring at the camera after he's finished talking to it? |
| | Oh, I just found out his last day is tomorrow. I'll have to put off missing it, then. |
| | Anyway, this all comes to mind after reading Frank Rich's latest column (ran Sunday in the New York Times and at other times elsewhere). Some good stuff there: |
| | What's missing from News in the United States is the news. On ABC, Peter Jennings devotes two hours of prime time to playing peek-a-boo with UFO fanatics, a whorish stunt crafted to deliver ratings, not information. On NBC, Brian Williams is busy as all get-out, as every promo reminds us, "Reporting America's Story." That story just happens to be the relentless branding of Brian Williams as America's anchorman - a guy just too in love with Folks Like Us to waste his time looking closely at, say, anything happening in Washington. |
| | Hunter Thompson did not do investigative reporting, but he would have had a savage take on our news-free world - not least because it resembles his own during the Nixon era, before he had calcified into the self-parodistic pop culture cartoon immortalized by Garry Trudeau, Bill Murray, Johnny Depp and most of his eulogists. Read "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" - the chronicle of his Rolling Stone election coverage - and you find that his diagnosis of journalistic dysfunction hasn't aged a day: "The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists." He cites as a classic example the breathless but belated revelations of the mental history of George McGovern's putative running mate, the Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton - a story that had long been known by "half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps." This same clubby pack would be even tardier on Watergate, a distasteful assignment left to a pair of lowly police-beat hacks at The Washington Post. |
| | I'm thinking right on. Then there's this: |
| | Thompson was out to break the mainstream media's rules. His unruly mix of fact, opinion and masturbatory self-regard may have made him a blogger before there was an Internet, but he was a blogger who had the zeal to leave home and report firsthand and who could write great sentences that made you want to savor what he found out rather than just scroll quickly through screen after screen of minutiae and rant. When almost all "the Wizards, Gurus and Gentlemen Journalists in Washington" were predicting an unimpeded victory march for Edmund Muskie to the Democratic presidential nomination, it was Thompson who sniffed out the Muskie campaign's "smell of death" and made it stick. The purported front-runner, he wrote, "talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year's crop." |
| | It gets worse. By the end of the piece, Rich slimes blogging with Jeff Gannon (who, regretably, blogs). Which is too bad, because otherwise it's a terrific piece. |
| | What's sad is that Rich's dismissal of blogs, as a class, is typical of exactly the kind of clubbiness HST mocked in "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail." It's clear that Rich really doesn't know blogs all that well, or he'd see the best of them working to fill the void left by the failures of news organizations like CBS's — and, beyond that, to extend the news gathering and distribution reach of the New York Times and other still-reputable mainstream media. |
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