(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 43, one of my regular pod casts for The Student Operated Press)

There’s a crucial difference between balanced reporting and insightful reporting. You can listen to this difference by tuning into the Yes Network and listening to color commentator David Cone, the famously versatile former pitcher who once considered a career in journalism.

You can describe the game and gin up excitement with personal mannerisms the way television anchors increasingly do, or you can quietly shed light on the science of the game the way Cone (inset) does. He represents the difference between reporting as theater and reporting as insight.

When Cone tells you wrist and elbow action is as important as finger location in throwing strikes, you know a lot more than when another reporter tells you that you’ve just seen a changeup, which the camera has probably already told you. (more…)

(This is the latest transcript of Hot Copy my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press)

One of the reasons I cherish The New York Times is its institutional eye for the easy-to-overlook and profound. The March 27th front page features a story by Brian Stelter called Finding Political News Online, Young Viewers Pass It Along. It may prove to be the most significant story of the first fifty years of the century, and to its credit The Times put it on the front page.

The story is about the socialization of news and imagery, not in the political sense, but in the sense that sharing news and imagery has become part of the way we socialize with each other. We like a blog post, a news story, an essay, an image, a poem, a quotation, and next thing you know it’s whizzing around the world to friends and family. What we’re accustomed to calling news is becoming as personal and intimate as a jewel box or a pack of baseball cards. (more…)

With Hillary Clinton having recently made like a schoolyard bully, maybe this isn’t the right moment to bring up the issue of misogyny. Or maybe it is.

Anybody who thinks this is a dead-letter issue should take a look at those e-mailed erectile dysfunction advertisements bubbling up from the cesspools of humanity. Their revolting language is full of references to the male member as a weapon. They talk of overpowering, exploding and nailing women. They assure men “their” women will be delighted by this weaponization of sexuality. (more…)

What happens to e-mail happens to us. We delete each other. We bounce, trash, junk and leave each other unread or misfiled. It’s not surprising. Human minds created the computer and the Internet, so of course they would go on doing what they had always done, but with more dispatch.

We can train an e-mail program to identify junk mail, but if we want to express our particular displeasure we bounce e-mail. This is much the same way we filter people. There are certain “kinds” of people we categorize and screen out, but once in a while we feel compelled to snub someone.

We complain of torrents of e-mail: phishing expeditions, spam, erectile dysfunction remedies, fake Rolexes, lotteries we never entered, Dickensian Nigerian scams, but what is different is that now we have a computer model for what has always happened.

Somebody has always been rolling up his sleeve to show us fake watches. We have always been phished and scammed, often from the pulpit and the bandstand. Now we just train a program to filter it or hit a button, smile and move on. There is no danger the person we have rebuffed will drop his coffee on us, and if he bad-mouths us we won’t see or hear it.

What is missing is the vibe. We can readily see that the ED hucksters are not native speakers, so that provides a certain distance from them. We don’t get much of a vibe from the Internet, the way we do when eyes meet at a party or a rally or in the street. E-mail is a metaphor without the vibe. Good writing, of course, puts the vibe back in words, but there isn’t much good writing in our daily dose of e-mail, is there?

And yet there is no reason there shouldn’t be. Just because the quill gives way to the pen, and calligraphy to movable type, and typewriter to computer doesn’t mean we can’t write well. All we have to do is want to write well. So, perhaps when we get over the novelty, we’ll do just that. After all, there never was a time when a great deal of phish and spam wasn’t written.—DM

I’m one of those (rare?) bibliophiles who loves the Internet. I don’t see why the paper and ink book cannot live peaceably with the e-book, serving different purposes. But I admit I’m sometimes unsettled by the amount of trivia people spend their precious time sending each other. My positive take on the phenomenon is that anything in the name of communication is good. But I’m not a cockeyed optimist, just a bit cockeyed in the best of circumstances.

It may be my paranoid imagination as a man of the middle who tends to veer leftward more than rightward but has been known to vote for conservatives that the torrent of right-wing buzz I see on the web shares a common loathing of pesky facts. The left-wing material I see is often far too cavalier and dismissive of conservative ideas. Propagandists of the left often strike me as self-righteous and contemptuous of reality. Propagandists of the right strike me as fearful of discourse and inclined to a Machiavellian use of rumor. (more…)

This is the transcript of another of my weekly Hot Copy podcasts for The Student Operated Press. You can also listen to earlier podcasts.

Whenever you read the lead or off-lead story in a newspaper, whenever a TV anchor interrupts a newscast to bring you breaking news, you can be pretty sure the real story is living its secret life unnoticed.

Now that’s not a bad a lead for a story, is it? Your professor might approve of it. But, like most leads, it’s only a whiff of the story—and a bit misleading to boot. (Leads are almost always a bit misleading, but that’s another matter.) I said the real story is unraveling unnoticed. I meant it’s probably unnoticed by you, but it’s not unnoticed by the people to whom it means most, and it’s probably not unnoticed by news editors either. It’s like selective hearing; they’ve just chosen to ignore it. And the chances are it’s about money, about somebody making money in ways that are not good for society. But the media don’t serve society, much as they might like you to think they do, they serve corporate masters, CEOs who answer to shareholders.

I’m not going to argue that the media are at fault for giving you a day of burning buildings and forest fires while many of our cherished liberties are burning to the ground around us, but while we’re hearing all about the latest polls in Iowa and the obscene amounts of money people are paying to get elected one of the most momentous struggles of our time, a struggle that will determine just how free we’re going to be, is going on under the media’s’ noses and it’s hardly being covered at all. There’s a good reason it’s not being covered. It’s because the media are themselves vitally concerned and hopelessly burdened by the agendas of their Big Business bosses.

What I’m talking about is control of the Internet. The subject has been dubbed net neutrality, but that’s an entirely too bland term for what is going on. What is at stake is whether you and I can have the same kind of high-speed, equal-service access to the Internet that Big Business has, or whether giant telecommunications companies like Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon will get away with creating a tiered, or multilevel system of Internet speeds so that certain providers can buy a fast lane ahead of you and me. It would be like a rich guy having a lane all to himself on a six-lane highway because he paid for it. You would get the lane you could afford. Net neutrality, on the other hand, would mean no special privileges for Big Money. It would mean equal access and equal service. It would reflect the democratic principles expressed in our Bill of Rights. A tiered system would give the corporations exactly what Thomas Jefferson feared they would acquire, power to corrupt democracy. There would be the corporations’ democracy, and then there would be yours. Yours would consist largely of the right to be hornswoggled. Controlling access to higher speeds and better service would be a form of censorship, just as our voting power is now being censored by Big Money. We don’t have the best candidates, we have the candidates who are best at selling themselves to monied interests. The best people in every community can’t afford to run for office, and so, rather than having the best government we can give ourselves, we have the worst government money can buy. (more…)

I’m crazy about a lot of things, even a few people. My most precious craziness is reserved for reference books, even the most arcane. One of my favorites is The Oxford Book of Letters. I happened to glance at it recently. I soon found myself wondering how the demise of the posted letter in favor of e-mail will affect us.

Will we still collect the letters of great men and women, the letters that have shed so much light on their thinking and their private lives? How will we collect them, knowing e-mail files are often lost when hard drives give up the ghost and haven’t been copied?

And if we fashion ways to preserve and publish e-mail, will they inevitably represent a degradation of language and even thought? Will their content be as broken as a text message, as cryptic? Will they be coded in ways that make them less accessible?

I think it’s all too easy and inviting, especially for someone like me who has lived through the eras of radio and television, to lament the passing of a splendid literary form, the kind so well represented in the Oxford letters. But because I’m a poet and have studied the change of poetic form, particularly in the 20th Century, I’m going to reserve judgment.

I see no reason why the epistolary novel should not give way to the e-mail novel. In fact, I see some decided advantages in terms of moving plot and developing characters. After all, the well considered postal message was always crafted to conceal as much as it revealed. E-mail is much more revealing, and the more dangerous for it, which is good for literature, since all good literature is dangerous and subversive.

I think e-mail and text massaging may well become elegant literary forms. In their spontaneity and immediacy they may well reveal more than the considered letters found in the Oxford. Certain poets whom we now regard as important were once seen as barbarians. Arthur Rimbaud comes to mind. Then there were Hart Crane’s hopelessly impenetrable lines. The complaints about those lines have now generally given way to admiration, even from those who still can’t decipher him.

As I wrote poems I was often writing headlines, so I’m accustomed to compression and its uses. I think the compression inherent in text massaging and e-mail will offer up a kind of poetic form, and I don’t see any reason why e-mail should be any more barbaric than the post letter. It depends on who is writing it, just as style and merit depended on the writer back in the heyday of the letter sealed with wax and delivered by hand. There were poor writers then as now.

I think e-mail is in the same stage as the Internet itself, an early stage given to exploration and the development of models and protocols. So I see no reason to despair, and I don’t glance either nostalgically or morosely at my beloved Oxford Book of Letters.

—DM

Photo by calligrapher Kathleen McCann Scribner of escort cards she made for a wedding at Central Park Boathouse, New York City

I suppose some diehards are carrying on literary correspondences that arrive with postal stamps on them. I suppose a subspecies of diehard might even be handwriting their literary correspondences. I write almost everything longhand and then turn to the computer for refiner’s fire. I don’t deplore the passing of a noble tradition. I suspect Pharoah’s scribes would have loved computers. I’ll ask the little plaster scribe who sits on my library bookshelf.

Just as moveable type influenced the way writers write, so must the computer and Internet. We can now exchange our thoughts so speedily that it has become a little dicey to hit the send button without some forethought, to say nothing of the dangers of sending our thoughts to the wrong person by some address-line misadventure. And all those multiple addresses with their blind copies are bound to lead some fine miscarriages of propriety, to say nothing of law suits.

There is now an excitement and spontaneity in our correspondence that has replaced a more formal and considered manner of communicating. Some would say e-mail carries a plague of semi-literacy. I myself think it simply carries the thought and effort we put into it.

That said, I suspect, while confessing I know little about neuroscience, that our brains are being rewired. In short, it seems to me likely the computer, which so often mimicks the human brain that created it, is changing the way we think. Surgeons, following the example of the pilots who flew in the Gulf War, are performing virtual surgeries before entering the operating theater. By the time they actually enter the brain they have rehearsed the scheduled operation several times.

I remember newsrooms stacked with piles of newspapers, spikes piled high with stories, notes and phone messages, and floors awash with yards and yards of teletype copy. There was a separation between the words that in their birth throes killed so many trees and the brain that created them, but that separation is now being transgressed by computers which so much resemble the brain. There is a new and exciting intimacy between the human mind and the words it employs to express itself. Watching the computer screen begins to resemble the synaptic circuitry of the brain itself, and this is bound to change the nature of writing.

I think e-mail is more disposed to reveal the “tell” in the sender’s demeanor than longhand or typewriter correspondence, to use a poker term. It has its own broad array of tics and micro-expressions. It’s more vulnerable, sometimes even naked. Its own facility can betray it. This is not to say it’s inherently more honest. It is, after all, as honest or dishonest as its sender. But just as handwriting reveals the writer, so e-mail has a way of revealing him, too. It’s a bit like handling quicksilver. What I mean is that I think we’ve all by now had the experience of sending an e-mail and then sitting there muttering, Oh God, did I do that?

—DM