I realized today that I may have been subconsciously avoiding watching the recent Frontline program on Wikileaks partly because I just didn’t want to be bummed out, wasn’t in the mood for a somber lecture with emotional audio prompts. Part of Frontline’s formula in explicating a big troubling issue is to dramatically recount all of the warning signs, and they use portentous music and a great grave voiceover announcer to heighten your concern about the topic. I find I don’t care for being manipulated like that anymore.
I started thinking differently about music in film and TV after hearing David Simon talk about why he prefers not to use music to make viewers feel a certain way. I’d never really thought about it before, but once I did I started to resent that type of persuasion—in newly made media anyway. I’m happy to grant exceptions to classics and allow myself to be emotionally led by the score in North By Northwest.
Later: My friend Hil points out that a program in Australia does this too, and that ominous lighting is a part of the effects package.
@Amyloo I also dislike tendency for ominous lighting, like almost interrogation style interview, black shadowy bgd & lighting only on face.
@Amyloo I think it is. Our equivalent #4corners changed to this style & it undermines my respect for them. The info itself usually enough
When Betaworks’ John Borthwick mentioned on the latest Gillmor Gang an analysis of the speculation surrounding Obama’s Bin Laden takeout announcement before the late night speech last Sunday, I had to look it up.
Check it out. There’s an underlying pitch in it for SocialFlow, a Betaworks company, but that is OK with me since it is a subtle pitch and it tells a tale you won’t hear elsewhere about social media reputation and how news takes shape online. It swirls around in little eddies that gather force and sometimes whoosh into the Main Stream.
Crazy how important Twitter has become in the news system, isn’t it?
It is becoming important for everything, not just news, though some voices are still absent. Funny, I will rail all day against curmudgeons who diss Twitter, but I’ll make a confession: I am glad I don’t see David Simon pimping each episode of his show in my stream. But maybe he would not use Twitter in that way; I’d like to think so.
What does my pleasure in Simon’s abstinence say about Twitter? Maybe that even people like me, a four-year user of the service, still find it vaguely trivial on the whole, increasingly promotional, self-centered. Yeah, it’s pretty much a mirror of the culture, and I suppose that is its value.
As a huge fan of several HBO original series, which are eminently rewatchable, I like having access to the complete archives of favorite shows. Comcast’s OnDemand chooses for me—only letting me at selected episodes of selected series, while HBO Go allows me to dip into whichever season of The Wire I might be in the mood for.
I’ve so fully embraced the whole streaming thing that I rarely watch DVDs anymore, and recently switched to the streaming-only plan on Netflix. I’ll choose to watch something that can be seen instantly and without the physical encumbrance of a DVD. In fact, I’ve developed an active avoidance of DVDs. I can’t quite account for this odd behavior when it means I miss watching things I know I would like, but DVDs have become almost distasteful to me.
There’s one thing I miss: listening to audio commentary tracks, and the studios will have to do something about that. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to provide a commentary version of selected online videos, and while they’re at it, I’ll take an MP3 of the audio for my commute, please. (I might even pay, a little.) With well-loved movies and shows, I already know what’s on the screen. I can see it in my head. And so often the commentary doesn’t necessarily map to the action anyway.
iTunes helped kill innovation in podcasting
In the early days of podcasting we saw some experimentation with amateur commentaries to videos, and I think Battlestar Gallactica even produced an official audio commentary podcast. But podcasting has settled into a rut just generally. There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in recent years. I blame iTunes’ dominance as a podcatcher, which meant iTunes became podcasting’s Billboard top 100 ranking and a main discovery method, which led to elevating the MSM podcasts, and possibly caused amateur efforts to ape old media style and production conventions.
With the rapid convergence of TV and the web there are opportunities to get creative—with show formats, not just technology. Alternate sound tracks wouldn’t just have to be recorded, either; they could be live. I’ve always thought, for example, that sports fans (guys mostly) might like to hear opinionated, partisan play-by-play sprinkled with obscenities. You know, the way guys talk when they’re watching games together. Especially when they are angry at a coach. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Also, there are a ton of podcasts about TV shows. They could mix it up a little, break from their predictable formats and offer commentary tracks, maybe just on occasion, like for season finales.
This cracks me up: the German press is having it out with the government’s press office because a spokesperson announced Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to the U.S. on Twitter before it was announced to the press in a traditional news conference.
It’s a little hard to tell from the translation but some members of the media seem pretty pissy about it. The communications guy holding the press conference isn’t having any of it. I wonder if there’s video. I’d like to hear the tone and see the body language in that exchange.
I heard about it in a retweet of Jay Rosen by Dave Winer so I’m hoping they will talk about it on today’s Rebooting the News podcast.
Dave did a solo podcast a few weeks ago and it struck me that he mentioned a reformation of the news media. I thought at the time that it is something like the Protestant Reformation in the sense that both are partly about disintermediation. Providing the Bible and holding services in the language of the people was meant to put them in more direct contact with their religion by cutting out middleman priests and the Latin scripture and liturgy which was understood only by the educated classes.
It all came full circle in little neural connections this morning when seeing Dave’s twitter handle fired off a reminder of the podcast, and the circle was cemented by the irony that that other reformation began in Germany.
Is it a trend to work through politics in fiction? Take Andy Borowitz, whose fake essays amplify news events in the same way SNL skits reduce the real to the ridiculous. Willie Geist’s new book, American Freak Show, takes off on “what ifs.”
Then we have Nicolle Wallace processing some of her frustrations through fiction. (I started Eighteen Acres yesterday. She’s quite a smooth writer, and the story sounds like it will be interesting. I have a problem with her cliches, i.e. “She loved him to the very fibre of her being.”)
If you include non-print writing you might even throw David Simon’s The Wire and Treme into the category of working out political angst in fiction.
I think short print fiction could make a comeback and serve as useful propaganda at the same time. It might even help magazine finances to embrace it again, if they were bold enough to try something that conventional market wisdom says is passe. Think Dickens—whose novels were serialized in magazines—and the crowds at the New York harbor panting to learn from British passengers what became of Little Nell.
Plus, we may even need a bigger helping of fiction to make sense of the craziness out there. Why couldn’t Huffington Post host Sarah Palin fan fiction? Why couldn’t The Nation publish a short story today that “what ifs” the proceedings of an inevitable committee hearing to investigate the president’s birth—because a few of those extreme right-wingers could get committee chair appointments.
It’s already stranger than fiction out there, so why not?
I don’t hold out any hope for wish fulfillment, but a girl can dream. I dream of a mainstream interviewer who goes like a riled-up terrier, or like Tim Russert, after a simple answer to a narrow question, brooking no generalizing or subject changing.
For today the question is about the campaign contributions maneuver which has been enabled by the Citizens United case. I would love for interviewers—who are supposed to ferret out answers to the questions citizens have on their minds—to drill down to one important question, and demand a straight answer. I want Christiane Amanpour and David Gregory and the other Sunday talk hosts to ask GOP candidates and strategists: ”Is it OK for groups to anonymously fund elections?”
Here are the answers the hosts should view as a dodge and a signal to ask again, even if it eats into the time they have allotted for the next question:
- “The Disclose Act isn’t as simple as just requiring disclosure.” Host, you interrupt and say, “I didn’t ask about the Disclose Act; I just want to know if you think secret funding is alright.”
- “Look, the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t support foreign governments, that’s ridiculous.” Host, you interrupt and say, “We are not talking about foreign sources or the Chamber right now. All I want to know is do you think secret funding is alright.”
- “Karl Rove is being vilified by desperate Democrats trying to change the subject.” Host, you say, “Sounds like you are changing the subject. The question was, ‘Do you think it’s alright for campaign contributions to be secret?‘“
Were you watching Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president, and Todd McCracken, National Small Business Association president, on CNN’s State of the Union this morning? Katrina and I were keeping an eye on Candy Crowley.
The Nation’s Katrina vandenHeuveltweeted, “AFL’s Richard Trumka a strong & welcome voice on CNN this am. Candy Crowley sure seemed skittish w/some of what he said.”
I paid most attention to the last question in the segment. Crowley may have been rushed, but I think she rushed to misjudge the very issue she was trying to straighten out.
She played a clip of Joe Biden countering the Republican argument that raising taxes on the richest 2 percent of Americans would hurt small business. “Not 3 percent of the small businesses in America would benefit one single, solitary penny of extending that top 2 percent tax cut,” Biden said.
Then she said to the small biz association guy, “Mr. McCracken, clear this up for us, because every time we start on this—start down this tax cut thing and the $250,000 mark, what we hear is this is going to hurt small businesses.”
And he gave an answer conceding that only a fraction of small businesses would be affected (pundits on the Right will be ignoring that bit). ”...this is the wrong time to increase taxes on anybody, because the companies that do pay this tax—and it is a minority of small companies, for sure—but the ones that do are the more successful ones who are most likely to be growing jobs and the ones that we want to continue to be successful and we don’t want to put disincentives in place for them to do it. But the vice president is correct that it is only a fraction of small companies that pay taxes at…”
And Candy interrupted, insisting “But those companies that tend to create most of the jobs?”
Trumka, the union guy, inserts “It’s not fair to—it’s not fair to say most of the jobs. They create some of the jobs, not most of the jobs.
And Candy again seeks to support the myth. “Well, most of the jobs within the small-business industry.”
Trumka can’t let it stand, because it’s not true. “Not most of the jobs within the small businesses. They’re not created by the 3 percent. They’re created—the vast majority are created by the other 97 percent. So it’s not fair to say most jobs are created by that top 3 percent, because they are—are not.”
Candy lets the small biz association guy have the last word.
Is she taking a side on this, or doesn’t she understand? Either way it didn’t work out so well (unless this was an audition for Fox News). Sure sounded to me as though she was advancing the conservative (and erroneous) side of the argument, even to the point of helping out the association spokesperson when he was conceding too much ground.
I would like to see Trumka on TV even more. He’s sharp, knows policy—and he looks like your plumber. Can’t hang an elitist label on that guy.
I will embed the video when or if it becomes available. This part of the interview was not included in the clips featured on the CNN site, but once the video podcast has been pushed out maybe you can see it in the whole-show video. Maybe not. They might just excerpt it; it’s a long show. Somebody must capture all of every show. Media Matters? Are you interested in this?
CROWLEY: Let me ask you about one—one final policy, and that is about the Bush tax cuts. As you know, they are scheduled to be—to expire in January. This president wants to keep them for anyone who makes $250,000 per household or under. I want you to listen to Joe Biden a little bit ago on this subject.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: The only argument that our colleagues, our Republican colleagues make is, well, this is really going to hurt small business if you don’t extent the entire Bush tax cuts. Here are the facts: 3, not 3 percent of the small businesses in America would benefit one single, solitary penny of extending that top 2 percent tax cut. So this is just a bunch of malarkey. (END VIDEO CLIP)
CROWLEY: Mr. McCracken, clear this up for us, because every time we start on this—start down this tax cut thing and the $250,000 mark, what we hear is this is going to hurt small businesses. Is this overall a drain on small businesses? Should the tax rates expire on those making $250,000 and up?
MCCRACKEN: We think this is the wrong time to have taxes go up for—for small companies, because they do pay taxes at this rate, so we think Congress should at least temporarily extend…
(CROSSTALK)
CROWLEY: For everyone?
MCCRACKEN: Yes, these taxes, because this is the wrong time to increase taxes on anybody, because the companies that do pay this tax—and it is a minority of small companies, for sure—but the ones that do are the more successful ones who are most likely to be growing jobs and the ones that we want to continue to be successful and we don’t want to put disincentives in place for them to do it.
But the vice president is correct that it is only a fraction of small companies that pay taxes at…
(CROSSTALK)
CROWLEY: But those companies that tend to create most of the jobs?
MCCRACKEN: Exactly. The jobs aren’t spread across evenly across all small companies.
CROWLEY: OK. All right. And you’ve got the last…
TRUMKA: It’s not fair to—it’s not fair to say most of the jobs. They create some of the jobs, not most of the jobs.
CROWLEY: Well, most of the jobs within the small-business industry.
TRUMKA: Not most of the jobs within the small businesses. They’re not created by the 3 percent. They’re created—the vast majority are created by the other 97 percent. So it’s not fair to say most jobs are created by that top 3 percent, because they are—are not.
CROWLEY: I’ll give you the last word.
(CROSSTALK)
MCCRACKEN: Well, there’s the question of job creation versus jobs—jobs that exist. Most small businesses—most jobs exist in—in the other businesses, but I think the more successful, growing companies that pay the higher rates are creating most of the new jobs, so it depends on how you look at it.
CROWLEY: Todd McCracken, it always comes out (inaudible) Todd McCracken, Richard Trumka, thank you so much for joining us. Happy Labor Day to you both. TRUMKA: Happy Labor Day to you.
CROWLEY: Up next, what the numbers say about President Obama’s handling of the economy and why that could erase his Democratic majority in Congress.
I think I’ve finally exhausted myself with obsessing over outrages by the right wing. So much resentment poisons you, makes you bitter about everything. I still disagree with Republicans and especially its Tea Party wing, but I’m going to try not to let it run my life, try not to spend my mornings before leaving for work searching for something to be peeved about, try to avoid media outlets that make the divide their guiding principle. It might be a good pledge for a lot of us to take.
Fox and MSNBC shows: you might think about swearing off basing your story lineups on “Can you believe what they tried to pull off today?” Yes, even Rachel Maddow, who I think is great and with whom I almost always agree, aren’t you getting to be a more thoughtful flip side of Sarah Palin? Smiling through the jibes, cheerfully sniping, looking for outrages—hoping for them, even?
Newspaper columnists and bloggers: try talking as much about your own agendas as you do about the other team’s positions. I’d like to hear more about what the camps really stand for, less about what they’re against. Crazy when you have to learn about party positions by reading the other side.
I might not succeed. I’m going to find another channel; I’m outlining some fiction about a small-town conservative politician who has some redeeming qualities. The obsession started during the presidential campaign and it’s hard to break free. Probably a good thing, though, if we could…
Leo Laporte’s talk about his mainstream-to-internet media story at the Online News Association conference is well worth your 40 minutes.
So many of the ideas he talks about—and has proven to be true—seem so basic that it’s hard to conceive of any opposing viewpoint. You just have to think that the newspaper and TV folks who make counterarguments are blinded by something other than reason—pining for the fjords, clinging to the past, incapable of seeing the world from more than one perspective.
Here is the silly Dev Null character he talks about playing on MSNBC’s The Site program 12 years ago.
Count on the blogosphere to remark on interesting errors. Here’s the blog reaction to the MSBNC host or producer whose mic was open as Bobby Jindal was strolling into the shot for the Republican response to the president’s address to Congress last night. It is output from a Google blog search feed.
Later: The next day it came out it was Chris Matthews. Gotta say he voiced my own thought on the staging.
I do occasional maintenance on this widget because it has a couple hundred installs, so I should. Its value decreases when it doesn’t include enough timely searches.
(Click on “Search this” to refresh the widget and try another search.)
The rotating content leans heavily to Twitter Search because I think it’s such a fascinating way to get something of a handle on the pulse of opinion. To update it I add searches, and I also check the current searches to see if the results still show recent activity. (See the archive of currently rotating searches as well as retired searches. Note to Expression Engine heads: that archive page shows open entries for the active searches and closed entries for the retired ones—so easy.)
I’m getting to it now; thank you for your patience, just had to set it up. I’ve been surprised that interest in certain search terms has not waned as much as I would have expected. For example, “auto industry” and “iphone+storm” are not in the news as much as they were a few weeks ago when I added them, but they persist in racking up a lot of current results.
A slightly different sort of custom tool that tracks persistence of interest could be useful for research conducted by media outlets, and maybe other types of businesses, but I’m more tuned in to media and think of it first. Examples:
- Mainstream media, like monthly print magazines, having longer lead times, to see what people are still interested in.
- Even for more instant media, like TV or blogs, it could be handy for planning more-produced, better-researched features. If there’s no longevity to public interest in a given topic, it might not be worth the investment.
Of course this assumes there is a spot of value in the idea of enduring interest, and not just in the latest thing. Sometimes I despair of our “newest is all there is” way of looking at news and everything else.
If you wanted to go all radical, you might even say that sustained public interest in a topic maps to its importance and consequence. Nah…
With the rapid convergence of TV and the web there are opportunities to get creative—with show formats, not just technology. Alternate sound tracks wouldn’t just have to be recorded, either; they could be live. I’ve always thought, for example, that sports fans (guys mostly) might like to hear opinionated, partisan play-by-play sprinkled with obscenities. You know, the way guys talk when they’re watching games together. Especially when they are angry at a coach. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Dave did a solo podcast a few weeks ago and it struck me that he mentioned a reformation of the news media. I thought at the time that it is something like the Protestant Reformation in the sense that both are partly about disintermediation. Providing the Bible and holding services in the language of the people was meant to put them in more direct contact with their religion by cutting out middleman priests and the Latin scripture and liturgy which was understood only by the educated classes.
I don’t hold out any hope for wish fulfillment, but a girl can dream. I dream of a mainstream interviewer who goes like a riled-up terrier, or like Tim Russert, after a simple answer to a narrow question, brooking no generalizing or subject changing. 