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…)

Greg Palast, the outré investigative reporter, claims the Iraq war and the subsequent surge are a global swindle— read about it here— a conspiracy of government and industry to pick our pockets and to hell with the future.

How much truth there is in this, if any, remains to be seen. But considering the sheer amount of inconsequential BS fed to us by the media—Barack Obama’s elitism, Hillary Clinton’s abrasiveness, etc—isn’t it a wee bit strange that nobody in the mainstream media even pretends to examine Palast’s contention? Reminds you of how they sat on their hands while the White House lied us into a catastrophic war, doesn’t it?

After all, media gasbags are perfectly willing to waste their time and ours entertaining stupid notions like the McCain-Clinton gas tax holiday or some ditzy celeb’s boringly bad behavior, so what’s their problem giving Palast’s theory a toss? Oh, that would be irresponsible journalism, right? Like yakking about John Edwards’ hair?

And why hasn’t Congress asked him to testify. After all, he was once a congressional investigator.

I don’t always know what to make of Palast. His hopped-up language worries his most serious reports. But we know Enron manipulated California’s power supply, so why is Palast’s notion so unworthy of inquiry? Is it unimaginable that Big Oil would con us? Or is it because the Big Media yakkers, while telling us what a great job they are doing, are doing a job on us? —DM

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…)

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

Acting in its usual role as the national mind the press has decided that the rising fuel price is bad news, end of story. But it may be just the beginning of a much more important story.

Since the end of World War II we have built a society predicated on cheap gasoline. The suburbs sprawled inexorably into the countryside. Highways sliced and diced communities and farmland. Immense malls rose in remote spots, sucking the blood out of established commercial centers. Schools were consolidated into education factories, giving rise to huge bus fleets and loss of community control. A long-distance tourist industry developed. Small farms fell to developers and agribusiness combines. Agribusiness depends on huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas, and on diesel-guzzling farm equipment and long-haul trucks to take farm products to market. (more…)

Once you’ve been nuts in New York City you wouldn’t want to do it anywhere else. I know this because I occasionally write and edit in Manhattan’s streets and attract no more attention than the millions of look-at-me’s who gab on their hands-free cell phones. I could be having phone sex or translating Proust, it wouldn’t make any difference to anybody. (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…)