Sometimes I think the all news all day formula is traumatizing society. The news—if you can call that weird concoction of anchor bonhomie and drivel news—is surpassingly negative, and in the interest of ratings the media rarely lose an opportunity to exaggerate the negative side of the news. News or what passes for it is about bad behavior, disaster, crime, nasty mouths, lies, spin, malfeasance—and a little upbeat story here and there as condiment. (more…)

(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…)

If you’d like to look at the changing face of news, consider your own Google home page. Savor its interactivity. You can organize your news, weather maps, solar systems, art exegesis, you name it, and the list of “gadgets” grows almost daily. You can design your own newspaper.

But it’s no longer a paper, it’s news from the ether, and it’s being updated and reedited around the clock. More than all the words about the demise of the newspaper, your home page can tell the story. You can do with your cursor what it costs a paper-and-ink newsroom big bucks to do. (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…)

Municipal web sites tend to be passive-aggressive. In the guise of presenting vital information their subliminal message seems to be, And don’t ever say we didn’t tell you anything.

Rather than contribute to government transparency they tend to forestall inquiry by purporting to tell you all you want to know about the government you happen to be paying for. This is a ruse to distract you from all they’re not telling you. (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

Columnists are like binoculars. They help you see something
differently. You may not like what you see, you may prefer your
old assumptions, but at least you’ve had a chance to see something from a different angle.

News is a heap of pieces until somebody puts the pieces together. But where a puzzle consists of a finite number of pieces cut from a predetermined picture, there are an undetermined number of pieces that comprise news, and they are often jammed together ham-handedly. (more…)

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 40, Del Marbrook’s regular podcasts for The Student Operated Press)

The most frustrating aspect of journalism is its daily failure to challenge society’s assumptions.

When television reporters say General Motors or Ford have decided to downsize, they say something like, “Heavily unionized General Motors announced a plan to downsize its North American operations this morning.” Notice the anti-union bias. It is assumed that part of GM’s trouble is its unions. There is never a story saying, “Badly managed General Motors…” or “Unimaginative General Motors…”

But that’s hardly the only problem with this kind of knee-jerk reporting. First, it’s not reporting at all, it’s putting a GM press release on the top of a huge stack of assumptions. There is rarely any reportage about huge salaries and bonuses paid to executives for managing their companies poorly or chopping them up and shipping them overseas. There is never any reportage about whether there should be any more obligation in American society to limit profit margins in order to share more with workers. It is presumed that whatever is good for shareholders is good for everyone. And sometimes it is simply assumed that whatever is good for executives is good for the rest of us. These undemocratic assumptions essentially take healthy discussion off the table—and that is their intent. (more…)

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 39, Del Marbrook’s podcasts for The Student Operated Press)

Sometimes it’s hard to say just when the heyday of a great institution was. I had the privilege of working briefly for The Baltimore Sun in the mid-1960s. It might not have been The Sun’s noblest moment, but it was certainly still shining brightly and Maryland was still revolving around it. I worked on The Sun’s copy desk under the best copy chief I ever encountered, John Plunkett. I say I worked there briefly, because I soon accepted an offer I couldn’t refuse, to become Sunday editor of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel.

When I was at The Sun I had already learned a great deal about makeup and layout at The Elmira Star-Gazette in New York’s southern tier. By the time I got to Winston-Salem I had a free hand to experiment, and I think I managed to produce some lively and engaging feature pages. But there were many things I couldn’t do, not because my superiors wouldn’t let me—they warmly encouraged innovation—but because what I wanted to do was simply too expensive and time-consuming. (more…)